Weekend Picks for August 28th

Welcome to our final August Weekend Pick! 

If you are a YA mystery lover and someone who enjoys flashback storytelling - this one is for you. 

Erinn Bentley

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​Dr. Erinn Bentley is a professor of English education at Columbus State University, where she also serves as the Associate Director of the Center for Global Engagement. She enjoys mentoring pre-service secondary English teachers, graduate students, and her doctoral candidates. In addition to teaching YA literature and pedagogy courses, Erinn leads study abroad programs for education majors in Belize, Ecuador, England, and Japan.

​Our many thanks to professor Bentley for her contributions to the blog all this month! Best of luck to her as she travels with a group of students to Oxford this fall. 

Nine Liars by Maureen Johnson

​Calling all mystery lovers, this weekend pick is for you! 

I first fell in love with Maureen Johnson’s teen sleuth, Stevie Bell, when I read the first novel in this series (Truly Devious). Stevie is a quirky adolescent girl with an uncanny ability to solve cold cases. In the first three novels, Stevie gains fame for uncovering cryptic clues and solving the kidnapping and triple murder that occurred at her remote boarding school in the 1900s as well as surviving a recent crime spree on her campus.

​In Nine Liars, we find Stevie and her three best friends starting their senior year, but our crime-stopper is bored. Her boyfriend, David, is studying abroad in London, her friends are distracted with college applications, and Stevie is left feeling alone with no mystery in need of her attention. In a twist of fate, David arranges for his girlfriend and three besties to spend a week in London “studying” during Thanksgiving break. What begins as a packed itinerary of museum visits and Jack the Ripper tours quickly turns into Stevie’s next cold case. ​

David’s British classmate, Izzy, just happens to be a Stevie Bell fan, and she just happens to know of a decades-old double homicide involving The Nine: In 1995, nine Cambridge University friends spent a weekend partying in a country house. Two were murdered, and the remaining seven have fuzzy details of the event, with no one ever being convicted.

​With alternating storylines from Stevie’s present-day sleuthing to the Nine’s fateful experiences in the 90s, Johnson weaves a suspenseful mystery with plenty of plot twists, humor, and loveable characters. As someone who has led study abroad programs in England, I will admit that Johnson took some creative liberties in the “program” she developed for Stevie and her friends. I was happy, though, to suspend reality to enjoy another entertaining adventure.

Maureen Johnson