YA Whodunits You Can’t Put Down

Five years ago, Andie Bell went missing. After her boyfriend, Sal Singh, sent a text to his parents confessing to killing her and then dying by suicide, everyone assumed he was the culprit. But when teenage Pippa starts digging into the case for her senior project, it doesn’t seem so cut and dry after all. With no body, no physical evidence, and very little to go on, Pippa sets her mind to solving this case once and for all.

When young wanna-be detective Stevie Bell is accepted into Ellingham Academy, her one goal is to solve the 1930s kidnapping of the founder’s wife and daughter. Soon after she arrives, though, the crime becomes a lot less cold when a classmate of Stevie’s is killed, with evidence that seems to tie the cases together. Stevie’s determined to find out how the cases are connected and who is behind them both.

After a lifetime of homeschooling, Sade is daunted by the idea of entering her junior year at a prestigious boarding school. Due to the death of her father, she joins after the school year has already started, drawing even more attention to her. Then, on her first night there, her roommate, Elizabeth, disappears. The school says Elizabeth left, but Sade finds it too suspicious to believe. Then another student is found dead, and her concerns about boarding school move from social anxiety to a lurking murderer.

On the night of her coronation, the school’s first Black homecoming queen, Nova, is murdered. Her best friend, Duchess, thinks she knows who did it. Nova had beaten wealthy white girl Tinsley to the crown, after all, and everyone knows Tinsley won’t take no for an answer. There is even a video of her threatening to kill Nova. But as Duchess looks into her friend’s murder, she finds secrets lurking in Nova’s past that muddy the suspect pool.

Dawn’s the new girl at school, a transfer after financial hardship forced her family to move in with her aunt. When Dawn gets an invitation to the party of the school’s most popular girl, Ella, she thinks she’s finally fitting in. Then Ella is killed at the party, presumably by a poisoned cup, and eyes turn to Dawn since she was the last one to hand Ella a drink. To clear her name, Dawn needs to solve the crime herself. It won’t be easy, though, since everyone seems to have had a reason to take Ella down.

Soon after the unsolved murder of her favorite teacher, Brynn and her family move away. Not only is Brynn reeling from the murder, but she is also dealing with a sudden falling out with her best friend, who was one of the kids to discover the body. A few years later, her father’s job brings her back to town and to the school that still haunts her. Now, she’s starting an internship with a true-crime show, and she’s determined to find out what happened in the woods that day.