Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson
Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson
Truly Devious
Maureen Johnson
  • Category:Mystery, Young Adult Fiction
  • Date Read:27 June 2025
  • Year Published:2018
  • Pages:416
  • 2 stars
Skelequin

This novel starts itself off with a sinister poem by the titular figure, Truly Devious. I’ll also start my review there. The poem reads as follows:

  • Look! A riddle!
  • Time for fun!
  • Should we use
  • a rope or gun?
  • Knives are sharp
  • And gleam so pretty
  • Poison’s slow,
  • Which is a pity
  • Fire is festive,
  • Drowning’s slow
  • Hanging’s a ropy
  • Way to go
  • A broken head,
  • A nasty fall
  • A car colliding
  • With a wall
  • Bombs make a
  • Very jolly noise
  • Such ways to
  • Punish naughty boys
  • What shall we use?
  • We can’t decide.
  • Just like you cannot
  • Run or hide.
  • Ha ha.
  • Truly,
  • Devious

I’m a huge fan of the poem/threat as the opener to the novel, especially because it’s reproduced on the page in the classic ransom-letter style, designed to look as if each character were cut out of magazines or newspapers. The “ha ha” at the end of the letter is pretty menacing. It perfectly sets the tone of the novel – a bit over-the-top for sure, but definitely fun and playful. For sure written by a lover of classic mysteries. Looking back, I think this poem also foreshadows the flaws that ultimately made this book a bit of a slog for me: it’s unnecessarily drawn out, a little bit shallow, full of interesting details that don’t actually go anywhere.

The book had a lot of fun elements, I just ultimately felt like it badly wasted my time. It was difficult for me to get myself to pick it up once I started it. For all the talk about murder, the novel was often very unexciting. Certainly, a book doesn’t need to be exciting to be effective, but this seemed to want to be fast-paced while weighing itself down with uninteresting high school drama and romance subplots. I know these are YA genre conventions, so it might just be that I shouldn’t have picked up a book I was always going to dislike, and that’s my own fault.

Truly Devious features two parallel timelines, one taking place in 1936 and the other taking place in the modern day, the modern timeline taking up most of the story’s runtime. I found the 1936 storyline by far the more interesting of the two. It is where the Truly Devious letter originates. It focuses on the kidnapping of the wife and daughter of one wealthy Albert Ellingham as well as the following investigation. The modern timeline focuses on our main protagonist, Stevie Bell, as she attempts to solve the Ellingham cold-case nearly a century after its events occurred. The dual timeline set-up is really fun, and the novel smoothly jumps between the two, drip-feeding the reader information about the kidnapping. Unfortunately, Stevie’s investigation takes up most of the book’s real estate, and it is usually more foolish high school drama than honest investigation.

The nail in the coffin for my enjoyment of this book was the unlikability of Stevie. Unlikable characters can be super fun, but this book was a slog when I couldn’t root for its detective. Stevie’s most prominent characteristic is an obsession with true-crime media, hence her interest in solving the Ellingham case. But she exhibits the same off-putting features of certain subsets of real true-crime fans. She’s deeply insensitive towards the dead and their loved ones. She treats victims like pieces of a story, effectively dehumanizing them, and doesn’t understand the distinction between fiction and real suffering. She feels entitled to pry into the personal lives of others for the sake of her own curiosity. On some level, I completely understand it. I think it’s human to be fascinated by what frightens and disgusts us. Certainly, it’s human to want answers when there’s a mystery, and I’m nothing but empathetic for morbid curiosity. There’s a reason true-crime is so popular. But there is no excuse for tossing out compassion when interacting with people affected by the crime. I wasn’t even rooting for Stevie to solve anything because she irritated me. And the problem is less her investigation of the Ellingham case from nearly a century ago. [Mild spoiler incoming] If Stevie was only interested in a historical murder/kidnapping, I could forgive her detachment. She crosses the line into utter unlikability for me when she shows the same disregard for empathy and tact while investigating a recent murder that happens partway through the book.

It would be super cool if the novel dove into the complicated ethics of true-crime and true-crime fandom, and I thought it was going to. It makes sort of a half-hearted gesture at it. There is talk by Stevie’s academic advisor of Stevie needing to humanize and more compassionately pay homage to the victims of the crimes she’s interested in, but it’s quickly dropped as Stevie’s investigation of the recent murder picks up speed. She does start to show empathy for the girl who was kidnapped nearly a century ago, but then she tends to be very unsympathetic towards her dead classmate. The dead boy was unlikeable as well, sure, but Stevie investigates his death with more of a hobbyist interest than a real sense of justice and is overtly cruel to some of his loved ones, probing them for information under false pretences. I found her self-indulgent investigation sort of gross for lack of a better term, especially since it made me think of real-life stories of true-crime podcasters and fans being nuisances to the families of victims. Her treatment of the recent murder set Stevie back from any vague sense of earlier character growth, and I rooted against her if anything, wanting her to be wrong so she might regret lying to and hurting the people around her.

To be honest, though, none of the characters were very likeable. Stevie’s two closest friends, Janelle and Nate, really grew on me by the end of the book, but they don’t get a ton of screentime, so to speak. One BIG caveat to this entire review is that I’m sure these issues are addressed in the next books in the series. If the author is really worth her salt, which I think she is, she’ll probably more deeply explore Stevie’s flaws and give Stevie the chance to grow as investigations continue. Janelle and Nate will probably get more room to breathe. Most importantly, the mysteries raised in this book will properly be solved. I’m discussing this book in a vacuum because I have no intention of continuing the series, and that isn’t exactly fair.

That said, the biggest crime, by far, of this book, was that it completely squandered its mystery. There’s a big reveal at the end regarding the Truly Devious letter, but it feels completely unearned, a photograph randomly stumbled upon by Stevie when she basically sits on it by accident. The motive and investigation of the person who killed Stevie’s classmate feels very half-baked. I was very underwhelmed by the entire ending. It was very, very clearly just meant to draw a reader into the next book, which I find frustrating in any series, in any genre. But in a mystery? It feels especially cheap. My expectation in reading a mystery novel, especially a 400 page one, is that the main questions raised will be answered at the end. But Truly Devious threw me a couple of cheap reveals and an advertisement for book two. Come on!

Overall, I lean towards not recommending this book, but if you’re looking for a pretty low-stakes mystery series, maybe you could try this one out. It’s a very easy and quick read. I’m not going to keep reading the series, but, like I said, I’m sure the next books address some of these issues. I think the author has a genuine love for mysteries and a solid writing style, so Maureen Johnson might be somebody to keep an eye on if you’re a mystery fan, even if this book missed the mark for me.

Maureen Johnson
Maureen Johnson
Maureen Johnson is an American author of Young Adult Fiction. She published her first novel, The Key to the Golden Firebird in May 2004. From the date of this review, Maureen Johnson has written 22 novels, not including other novels she has co-written with Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, Kelly Link and Robin Wasserman. She has also written short stories and essays.
Truly Devious is the first in a trilogy of novels featuring the character, Stevie Bell. The second novel, The Vanishing Stair, was published 2019 and the third and in the trilogy, The Hand on the Wall, was published 2020.[15] A standalone title in the series, The Box in the Woods was published 2021, and later a fifth standalone novel, Nine Liars was released in December 2022.
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