Campus Novels and School Mysteries

Yes, it’s that time of year again, when the summer wanes, temperatures slowly drop, and the leaves begin turning golden colors in anticipation of dropping into piles on lawns and sidewalks. It’s time to go back to school, and even those of us who have not picked out new notebooks and pens (or laptops, I suppose) in many years can feel the change in the air. Fall is really when the new year starts, despite what the calendar insists about January. In honor of the return to school days, here is some optional reading: mysteries set in schools or among school friends to put you in a nostalgic studious mood.

Beth Gutcheon, The Affliction

Gutcheon’s cozy is set at the troubled Rye Manor School for Girls, where the former headmaster of a prestigious New York City private school, Maggie Detwiler, is dispatched to assess the school’s problems and its future. While Detwiler is there, a teacher, Florence Meagher, disappears and is then found dead in the school’s swimming pool. Florence had an affliction: a funny (or not-so-funny) habit of constantly chattering. Having solved a mystery at a school before, in Gutcheon’s 2016 book Death at Breakfast. Maggie enlists her socialite friend Hope Babbin, who is all too willing to join the investigation because she doesn’t want to read Silas Marner for her book club.

Ruth Ware, The Lying Game

The Lying Game is Ware’s fourth novel and is one of her best. It begins with three former classmates—Fatima, Isa, and Thea— at a remote boarding school near the English Channel called Salten receiving a text from the fourth member of their clique, Kate, which simply says, “I need you.” Kate still lives near Salten in the house she grew up in: her father was the art teacher there for many years, and a formative influence on all of the women. As the friends reunite at Kate’s house and attend an alumnae dance at their alma mater, they also revisit old secrets connected to their shared pastime, the lying game, in which they purposely fibbed to both faculty and fellow students to see what they could get away with.

Tana French, The Secret Place

In the Secret Place French uses her keen eye for human behavior and knack for world-building in a story about a murder at an Irish high school. The school has a room called the secret place, where students can anonymously post their thoughts and feelings on a bulletin board. When someone posts a picture of a popular boy killed the year before with the caption “I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM,” the Dublin Murder squad gets involved in trying to solve the mystery of who wrote the note and close the case of the boy’s murder. This is the fifth book in French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, in which a different member of the Squad narrates each book, so they also work nicely as standalones (but read them all, you won’t be sorry).

Lexie Elliott, The French Girl

In Elliott’s clever and creepy novel, six former Oxford friends are thrust back to a vacation they spent together at a French villa which culminated in a huge fight on their last night there. Right after they returned to the UK their neighbor in France, Severine, went missing. They were questioned at the time of her disappearance but released. Fast forward a decade and a body is found. The police believe it is Severine, and a French detective pays a visit to each of the guests that weekend, which unsettles our narrator, Kate Channing, one of the group of friends who might be seeing Severine’s ghost. The police inquiry forces the friends to come clean to each other about what really happened at the house in France.

Elizabeth Klehfoth, All These Beautiful Strangers

Seventeen-year-old Charlie Calloway has every reason to thrive at her top-tier boarding school, Knollwood, set in the bucolic landscape of New England. She loves the school, which her father, Alistair Calloway, a powerful real estate mogul, also attended. But as much as Charlie wants to please her father she’s still damaged by her mother, Grace Fairchild, who vanished years ago from the family’s lake house. As much a coming-of-age story as a mystery, Strangers is about Charlie investigating the secrets of her family, in which Knollwood plays a large and sinister part.

Christopher Yates, Black Chalk

Yates’s Black Chalk is a slow burn of a thriller. We first meet one of the book’s narrators (I don’t want to spoil it so let’s leave him unnamed) living in New York City in a hermetic and just plain weird state. As the novel unfolds, we learn the narrator was part of a group of six friends at Oxford who challenged one another to do embarrassing or risky things. The revelations in Black Chalk are deliberately slow and menacing, which both ratchets up suspense and allows for some interesting character development.

Zoe Wittall, The Best Kind of People

Very good people go through a horrible trauma in Canadian Wittal’s emotionally astute novel. Sadie Woodall and her family live in the affluent town of Avalon Hills, Connecticut, where her father is a popular teacher at the local prep school which Sadie also attends. The family’s world falls apart when Sadie’s father, George Woodbury, is accused of sexual impropriety with students. People is less a crime novel than the story of what happens in the aftermath of a man’s world falling apart and the repercussions of his alleged crime on his family. Sadie, an overachieving and popular senior at the school, begins to question how to live her life in the light of what her father might have done.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Tartt’s book about a group of students at a small liberal arts college, Hamden, in Vermont, might be the forerunner for all of these books. Our protagonist, Richard Papen, a Californian, had never seen Hamden or even New England when he shows up as a freshman. He decides he wants to study Classics, which leads him into the lair of Julian Morrow. Morrow is a charismatic, enigmatic professor who also serves an advisor to his students. The group, which Richard quickly falls into, is an eccentric one: there’s Henry Winter, tall and bespectacled and decked out in a fine suit from London; Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, a blond boy with a “honking” voice; and the twins, Camilla and Charles Macaulay, who chain smoke and welcome Richard to their off-campus apartment and to their country house. The tightness of the group belies the fact that they think themselves above regular morality, leading to gruesome results.

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

Several of Abbott ‘s excellent books focus on high school girls but Dare Me is the most fascinating and powerful. Addy Hamlin, captain of the cheerleading squad, and her fellow cheerleader Beth Cassidy have been best friends for years. Now they are seniors and the leaders of the renowned squad. Dynamics change, however, when a new coach enters the picture: Collette French not only pushes the girls to their limit, she plays subtle mind games with them through praise and criticism which motivates them to do even more. When the coach and the squad are implicated in a suicide investigation, their bonds begin to shift and break.

Michele Campbell, It’s Always the Husband

Kate, Aubrey, and Jenny first met as roommates at Carlisle College and became the closest of friends despite their obvious differences: Kate is rich and wild; Jenny is a townie trying to move up in the world, and Aubrey is a poor girl from Las Vegas who worked and slaved for the chance to go to Carlisle. Now, 20 years later, one of them is about to jump off of a bridge, and someone is encouraging her to do it. With a flashback structure so we see the characters in college and in the present day, Husband plumbs the depth of female friendships and asks if our best friends can turn into our worst enemies.