The Velvet Knife is a complicated new chapter in a phenomenal YA murder mystery series. If you’ve not yet met Stevie Bell and had a chance to witness her brain in action, you need to correct that mistake immediately.
The Truly Devious series is one of my favourite YA mystery series of all time. It is constructed with such care, compelling characterisation and twists that devastate you. With The Velvet Knife, Stevie Bell is back with a vengeance.
Stevie is such a fantastic protagonist with brilliant observational skills and a deep, fierce love for those she loves. She is very much carrying the weight of her previous cases in this book though and grappling with an immense guilt for those who have died, for what she perceives as her fault. Also within this, she is dealing with the disintegration of her relationship and how this has completely knocked her worldview. Her love was all-consuming and now has nowhere to be channelled into. This is possibly one of the lowest points where we’ve met Stevie and that funk is palpable from the opening chapters. Through a series of events, she ends up in New York City and is confronted with yet another murder but she might be one of the only people who sees it that way. Throughout the story, she is trying to battle with her trauma and the way it has sharpened her instincts, dialling up paranoia and those existing feelings of abandonment and fear that have shaped her. Your heart just shatters for her, paying testament to how well Johnson has developed this character over the series.
In fact characterisation is such a strength of these books with a brilliant cast of supporting characters, both old and new faces gracing the pages. The inter-personal arcs in the series are a shining light and I enjoyed how they appeared in this book, getting developed further and encountering interesting beats for these characters we have come to know and love. Of course, Stevie and David’s relationship is a prominent focus as Stevie reels from the emotional explosion in her life. However, I did also like how Johnson explicitly confronts the way Stevie is treating both herself and those around her in the aftermath. Difficult conversations are had and she must face the consequences of her actions. Johnson also excels at deftly sketched characterisation through the historical timeline. That storyline is dark and draws you into its world quickly, grounding you in an immersive sense of time and place. You can see the net start to close in on some characters and it has a genuinely chilling atmosphere. The consequences of actions taken in that timeline are also still rippling through into the present. Johnson seems to be grappling with guilt and trauma as key themes, especially how we may choose to confront them, and asking if people truly have the capacity to make amends.
This is not a book that plays around. The opening chapter is instantly chilling and sends your heart to the pit of your stomach. As usual, Johnson has created a true puzzle-box of a book that rewards attention to detail and has such powerful parallels with real-life historical cases and the state of our current world. There is a palpable rage within these pages. It is a book very much preoccupied with the abuse of power and manipulation. The series has never shied away from these themes but this is a new angle on them and feels cognisant, especially in terms of controlling and twisting the narrative.
The Velvet Knife shows that Johnson will knock it out of the park every single time.
The Velvet Knife is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Waterstones, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
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Synopsis
Return to the world of Truly Devious as Stevie Bell and her friends travel to New York to solve a murder in the next standalone mystery from New York Times bestselling author Maureen Johnson.
Stevie might be the greatest teenage detective Ellingham Academy and the world has ever seen, but even she can’t figure out what happened with her boyfriend, David. What she needs is a distraction: a good old-fashioned murder. Stevie is much happier dealing with dead people. They’re a lot less confusing—they don’t send cryptic texts and make out with other girls in British pubs.
But then Stevie gets exactly what she wanted when a dead body turns up in the middle of a Manhattan apartment complex, and this one is . . . complicated. Caught in a web of messy alive-people feelings, Stevie finds herself questioning all human connection. Is magnetism only manipulation? Can you trust anyone? Does anyone realize that they’re joining a cult—before it’s too late? And are things with David really over?
