What to read after “Truly Devious” by Maureen Johnson: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
Seven acting students at an elite Shakespeare conservatory are so close they share every role. When one of them is found dead during their final year, the friends must decide what story to tell the police. Ten years later, one of them finally explains what really happened.
Richard Papen leaves California for an elite Vermont college and is drawn into a tight circle of classics students taught by a charismatic professor. Accepted among them, he becomes part of a murder committed before the story begins, and of the slow unravelling that follows.
Children who have returned from magical worlds struggle to readjust, so Eleanor West's home gives them somewhere to belong. When Nancy arrives from the Halls of the Dead, she finds the school hiding its own dangers and a mystery that threatens her new friends.
The Scholomance is a magic school with no teachers, where students learn spells while monsters pick them off between lessons. Galadriel 'El' Higgins, feared for the dark power a prophecy says she will wield, has to survive to graduation and the hungry things waiting in the dark.
Victor and Eli are brilliant, lonely college roommates who turn a theory about near-death experiences into something real. Ten years later Victor leaves prison to hunt the friend who became his enemy, each armed with dangerous powers and neither willing to stop.
Miles Halter leaves his quiet Florida home for a boarding school in Alabama, drawn by the last words of famous people. There he joins a tight circle of friends, falls for the reckless Alaska Young, and is forced to reckon with loss and guilt.
Six talented magicians are invited to the Alexandrian Society, a secret fellowship that guards lost knowledge. Only five can be initiated at the end of the year, and the recruits must decide how far they will go to keep their places, and whom they are willing to betray.
Galaxy Stern, the lone survivor of a brutal murder, is offered a place at Yale by the secret societies that run the university's magic. Her task is to watch their rituals, but when a local girl dies, Alex must use the very power she fears to find the killer.
Anna is sent to a boarding school in Paris for her senior year, though she barely speaks French and misses home. There she falls in with a circle of friends and develops feelings for Étienne, a charming classmate who is already taken. Their closeness makes staying just friends harder every day.
For a school project, Pip reopens the closed case of Andie Bell, a local girl murdered five years ago, and her boyfriend Sal, who confessed and then died. As she records interviews with the people involved, the tidy story everyone accepted begins to come apart.
Quentin Coldwater is recruited to a hidden college of magic in upstate New York, where years of study leave him restless and still searching for meaning. When he and his friends find a way into Fillory, the enchanted land from his childhood books, its dangers turn out to be very real.
After a boy dies in a fire she cannot explain, Lucinda is sent to Sword & Cross, a bleak reform school in Savannah. There she is drawn to Daniel, a distant student she somehow knows. The shadows she has seen since childhood, and Daniel's secrets, point to a love older than her life.
Lilia arrives at the isolated Dracadia University searching for a cure for the illness that killed her mother. Her professor, the brilliant and feared Doctor Death, is drawn to her as she uncovers the island's buried secrets, and their forbidden relationship becomes another danger.
At Devon, a New England boys' boarding school, quiet Gene roommates with charismatic Finny during the summer before their senior year. Their friendship grows intense and competitive as the war outside presses closer, until one reckless afternoon changes both their lives.
On a summer outing in 1900, students and teachers from Appleyard College, a girls' boarding school in rural Australia, visit the ancient rock formation nearby. Three girls and a teacher go missing; one of the girls is later found, but the others are never explained, and the school is left to face the aftermath.
Every year two children are taken to the School for Good and Evil, one to train as a hero and one as a villain. Best friends Sophie and Agatha are sure they know which is which, but the school has its own plans for them.
Sara Crewe arrives at a London boarding school from India, rich and generous, and becomes the most popular girl there. When her father loses his fortune, the headmistress turns her into a servant. Sara keeps her dignity and imagination alive while a secret from next door slowly comes to light.
Avery Grambs, a sharp high-schooler sleeping in her car, learns that a billionaire she never met has left her almost his entire fortune. To claim it she must move into the family mansion, where four disinherited grandsons and a house full of puzzles await.
Sasha Samokhina fails her exams and is told to attend a remote institute instead. There the lessons are strange and punishing, and students are asked to do things that break the usual rules of the world. Obedience may unlock a terrifying kind of power.
Every summer Cadence joins her wealthy family on their private island, where she and three cousins form an unbreakable group. The summer she is fifteen something goes wrong, and Cadence returns two years later with gaps in her memory that she is desperate to fill.
Fifteen-year-old Christopher discovers the neighbour's dog stabbed to death and sets out to solve the mystery in the style of his favourite detective stories. His investigation uncovers hidden truths about his own family and forces him into a world he finds overwhelming.
Rose Hathaway is a dhampir, trained to guard her best friend Lissa, a Moroi vampire princess. After two years on the run, they are returned to St. Vladimir's Academy, where Rose falls for her instructor and the school's wards hide dangerous secrets.
Fourteen-year-old Sophronia is sent to Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy, where proper young ladies learn dance, dress and etiquette, and also lock-picking, information gathering and the quieter arts of espionage. A stolen prototype and a plot against a schoolmate pull Sophronia and her new friends into danger.
Charity spends her summer playing the final girl at a camp that stages scenes from a classic slasher film. On the last weekend of the season her co-workers vanish, a body turns up, and the game becomes a real fight to survive the night.
Start with “If We Were Villains”, “The Secret History”, “Every Heart a Doorway”: they are the closest to “Truly Devious” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Truly Devious” these are Boarding School, Missing Person, Dark Academia), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “If We Were Villains”, “Every Heart a Doorway”, “A Deadly Education”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
