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Books like I Have Some Questions for You

Rebecca Makkai · 2023 · US · literary fiction · mystery
★ 3.58 Goodreads · 147,723 ratings

A film professor and podcaster returns to the New Hampshire boarding school she attended to teach a short course, and her students' project reopens the 1995 murder of her former roommate.

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12 books for readers of I Have Some Questions for You

Truly Devious

Maureen Johnson · 2018 · US 96% match ★ 3.91 Hardcover · 344 ratings
Book 1 of 3 in Truly Devious
shares: true crime, boarding school, New England, mystery · easy read, intimate

Stevie Bell, a true-crime obsessive, wins a place at Ellingham Academy in the Vermont mountains, where in 1936 the founder's wife and daughter were kidnapped, and arrives meaning to solve the case.

The Secret History

Donna Tartt · 1992 · US 96% match ★ 4.14 Goodreads · 1,137,632 ratings
shares: dark academia, New England, murder, school · intimate, interior

A scholarship student from California joins an insular circle of classics students at a Vermont college, and their experiments with Dionysian ritual end in a death they cover up with a murder.

A Separate Peace

John Knowles · 1959 · US 94% match ★ 3.28 Hardcover · 285 ratings
shares: boarding school, New England, school · intimate, easy read

A New England boys' school in the last summer of the Second World War, and a narrator who lives the rest of his life trying to understand what he did on a tree branch to the boy he loved.

If We Were Villains

M. L. Rio · 2017 · US 94% match ★ 4.07 Goodreads · 448,693 ratings
shares: dark academia, murder, school · intimate, easy read

Ten years after a death at an elite arts conservatory, Oliver Marks walks out of prison and finally tells the detective who put him there what happened among seven fourth-year acting students who lived and breathed Shakespeare.

Intruder in the Dust

William Faulkner · 1948 · US 94% match ★ 3.73 Goodreads · 6,550 ratings
shares: murder, suspenseful, racial, mystery · interior, intimate

A Black man accused of murdering a white man in Yoknapatawpha County gets help proving his innocence from a teenage boy and an elderly aunt.

True Biz

Sara Nović · 2022 · US 94% match ★ 4.05 Goodreads · 85,130 ratings
shares: boarding school, school · easy read, intimate

At the River Valley School for the Deaf, Charlie, a teenager whose cochlear implant has never worked well, arrives late in her schooling, February, the hearing headmistress, fights to keep the school open, and Austin, a student from a deaf family, faces change at home.

Penance

Eliza Clark · 2023 · UK 94% match ★ 3.86 Goodreads · 56,108 ratings
shares: true crime, murder · easy read, intimate

A discredited journalist reconstructs the 2016 murder of a schoolgirl in a failing Yorkshire seaside town by three of her classmates, and the reconstruction is part of what is wrong with the book.

Ace of Spades

Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé · 2021 · UK 94% match ★ 4.12 Goodreads · 104,798 ratings
shares: dark academia, suspenseful, racial, school · easy read, intimate

At Niveus Academy, an elite private school, the only two Black students, Devon, a quiet musician, and Chiamaka, the ambitious head girl, are targeted by an anonymous texter called Aces who begins exposing their secrets to the whole school.

While I Was Gone

Sue Miller · 1999 · US 94% match ★ 3.68 Goodreads · 61,297 ratings
shares: New England, murder · interior, easy read

Jo Becker, a veterinarian in a small Massachusetts town married to a minister, is unsettled when Eli Mayhew, who shared a Cambridge house with her in the 1960s, turns up at her practice, bringing back the housemate who was murdered there.

The Secret Place

Tana French · 2014 · Ireland 94% match ★ 3.85 Goodreads · 98,005 ratings
Book 5 of 6 in Dublin Murder Squad
shares: dark academia, boarding school, murder, school · intimate, easy read

A detective investigates a murder at a girls' school and finds the case tangled in the politics of adolescence, loyalty, and the secrets teenagers keep.

Plain Bad Heroines

Emily M. Danforth · 2020 · US 93% match ★ 3.63 Goodreads · 30,065 ratings
shares: dark academia, boarding school, school · easy read, intimate

In 1902 the girls of a Rhode Island boarding school become obsessed with a scandalous memoir and start dying, and a century later a Hollywood production about the curse moves onto the grounds.

The Executioner's Song

Norman Mailer · 1979 · US 93% match ★ 4.04 Goodreads · 24,442 ratings
shares: true crime, media, murder · easy read, familiar

The last nine months in the life of Gary Gilmore, paroled in Utah in 1976, who killed two men and then demanded to be executed.