“Hey, wait a minute, it’s dark out there.”

78. The Box in the Woods – Maureen Johnson

A perfect little confection after the Truly Devious series. A very intelligent friend of mine who also writes books recommended the Truly Devious series to me because she said Stevie reminded her of me – and she could not have been more correct, although I am currently much older than Stevie (a Doomwitch, according to Chuck Wendig’s list I adore) and am fine with not being a young person, her spirit is very similar to mine. I am not surprised that librarians like Stevie at all, for instance. And I burst out laughing while reading The Box in the Woods because of this similarity when Carson, who owns the camp that is close to the location of the box in the woods murders, says, “We call them Think Jams,” and I looked away from the book in disgust and shuddered, and came back to the line: “She resisted the impulse to open the car door and jump.” So if phrasing like “Think Jams,” makes you want to flee, this book is for you.

And there’s not just Stevie, there’s also Nate, the dark sarcastic loner who is scared by “child fingers” (me too, Nate) and who does not want to finish his next book, but also does. Nate is a good example of how writers can be.

Really, the draw of this series is the characters and how fun they are to read when your main ones are great grounding influences. Mr. Think Jams and the townspeople and the short chapters that go back to 1978 are all quickly well drawn and I also, like Nate, like camp-based slasher movies (and I’ve been working on a book one for what feels like 200 years, but isn’t, I have a super perfect cover idea) so the murder investigation itself was fun. And with such good characters it’s not hard to shrug about the ending seeming a smidge abrupt, I would have liked to have a little more space for Stevie to sort things out and show her work more.

Also, as a ridiculously specific side note, I expected Nicole, the most rigid of camp directors, to turn out to be the terrifying camper Bridget from 1978’s camp season, using her middle name as a first name. Because a camper who is terrifyingly everywhere and in all the business would definitely have turned into the camp director later on. It’s like her turf.

Danger Crumples and Horace don’t want anything to do with being camp counselors or “think jams” (Ew), but they will solve mysteries.