When I began my mystery-writing career, I started with young adult novels, which felt natural since I’d grown up loving stories about teens clever and brave enough to uncover dark secrets and solve crimes when the adults in their lives came up short. Creating teenage investigators of my own was deeply satisfying. So much so that when I decided to take a crack at writing for a broader audience, I found the trope hard to leave behind.
One of the three main characters in my adult mystery debut, The Treasure Hunters Club, included a teen detective hot on the trail of both a legendary missing treasure and the truth behind several unexplained deaths. Considering my track record, it feels almost inevitable that I eventually came around to the question behind my upcoming novel, We Had a Hunch: what happens to those young investigators when they grow up?
In We Had a Hunch, notorious and fearless teen detective twins Alice and Samantha Van Dyne, along with their schoolmate and sometime rival Joey O’Day, occupied a place of pride in their hometown of Edgar Mills in the late 1990s, until a dramatic final case and a deadly miscalculation left them broken and scattered. Now, a quarter century later, they’re drawn back to Edgar Mills and directly into a mystery that reopens old wounds.
While writing the book, I found myself thinking about other unforgettable stories of young people turned sleuths, each grappling with secrets, mysteries, and the dark truths that often lie just beneath the surface. Here are six of my favorite adult novels featuring young sleuths.
*
Donna Tartt, The Little Friend
Tartt’s Southern Gothic is less recognized, and arguably less respected than the two novels that bookend it—the once-in-a-generation smash debut The Secret History and the Pulitzer Prize winning The Goldfinch—but to me, The Little Friend is Tartt’s most gripping and personal novel.
During a long and unsettling summer, twelve-year-old Harriet (a nod to the eponymous spy?) becomes obsessed with her brother’s murder, an unsolved crime that happened when she was still a baby. Smart, stubborn, and heartbreakingly brave, she throws herself into the search for answers, only to discover that digging up the past is far more dangerous than she imagined.
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Part coming-of-age story, part twisty whodunnit, Special Topics follows Blue van Meer, a precocious teen who finds herself unraveling the mysterious death of a beloved teacher. It’s clever, funny, packed with literary Easter eggs, and impossible to put down, with an ending I didn’t see coming.
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
When Christopher Boone (who it is heavily implied is autistic) discovers a neighbor’s dog has been killed, he sets out to solve the case with the precision of Sherlock Holmes. What he uncovers, though, reshapes everything he thought he knew about his family. A tender, inventive mystery about truth, trust, and bravery.
Kris Bertin, Alexander Forbes, A Hobtown Mystery Stories, Vol. 1: The Case of the Missing Men
Think Hardy Boys meets Twin Peaks. This graphic novel, the first in an ongoing series, drops a ragtag group of teens into a small town where people are vanishing. The deeper they dig, the stranger (and creepier) things get. It’s eerie, funny, and unlike anything else out there. (It also happens to take place in my home province of Nova Scotia.)
Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
This is the coziest entry on the list, but its eleven-year-old heroine, Flavia de Luce, an amateur chemist with a wicked sense of humor and a love of poison, is anything but twee. When she discovers a body in her garden, she takes the case into her own hands.
Flavia is sharp, mischievous, and unforgettable, and Sweetness is the first in a series with many devoted fans.
Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Not a whodunnit, but an engaging mystery of a different sort. When eccentric architect Bernadette Fox disappears, her fifteen-year-old daughter Bee decides to piece together the truth.
Told through emails, documents, and Bee’s narration, it’s fast-paced, surprisingly heartfelt, and often outright hilarious. (One scene involving a mudslide had me literally crying with laughter).
***
