5 Campus Mystery Novels

At an elite private school, a Gossip Girl-like scandal causes students’ lives to spin out of control. Chiamaka and Devon are the targets of an anonymous texter who sends their private material to the whole school. It’s hard enough being Black in an elite white space, but now they have to figure out who is ruining their lives and restore their reputations. It’s twisty and the main two are compellingly real as driven teenagers.

Instead of a current student, this novel follows a woman returning to the Princeton University campus for a reunion. But when she arrives, she finds her younger sister, Naomi, has died, and no one is giving her a straight answer about what happened. Maya takes it upon herself to solve the mystery, and uncovers more about a secret society, double-crossing, and secrets long buried.

I read this book back during the doldrums of 2020, and it broke my anxiety-induced reading slump, so I still highly recommend it. A secretive institution called Catherine House only takes and produces the best of the best. When Ines arrives, she expects rigorous academia, but gets a much more exploratory, experimental, hippie-ish education. The longer Indes spends there, the darker the school becomes.

Marske’s latest genre-mixing, extremely detailed magical world takes place at a magical medical school. Healing isn’t just a job: it’s a higher calling from Mathé, so revered that even the death of an almost graduate, Ysabel Caudotte, sends the whole university into chaos. On the morning of their group final exam, five scholars find Ysabel’s body next to where they’re supposed to treat their patient.