Speculative Mysteries to Get Excited About

As I’ve mentioned before, I love speculative mysteries! In the next few months, we can look forward to murders among scholars on far-future Jupiter, at a magical boarding school in England, and revolving around a small town high school rivalry in the U.S.A., all being published by Tor. If “dark academia” is the zeitgeist, these books are well timed.

First up, we have The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh, coming out on May 13th. I’ve loved all of Emily Tesh’s books so far, but beyond the assumption of some speculative element and some England-ness, I didn’t really know what the expect from The Incandescent. The first books I read by Tesh were a novella duology about the power of the forest, and then I read her novel, which is mindbending military space opera. I’ve learned that Tesh likes to experiment with genre and that I am happy to be along for the ride!

In The Incandescent, the setting is a boarding school, but the focus is largely on the adults there, with a lot of administrative work that has to get done. The teens are firmly referred to as “children.” The teaching parts are written very realistically. As a reader who has spent decades teaching, I appreciate the care main character Saffy Walden puts into instructing her students and marking their work as well as looking out for their welfare.

The Incandescent has Facebook, Instagram, and Teslas. Unlike our world, however, there’s also well established, public magic. Walden runs the magic program and notices that her colleague Laura (a Marshal, which seems to be a kind of magical security officer) is both competent and hot. This sets up a premise that could easily take an entire book to explore. However, what I had expected to be the plot of this book was handled in the first 35 percent or so? And then a whole lot of other things happen? In that way it was like Tesh’s previous novel, Some Desperate Glory, though not in any other ways, really!

As this book takes a lot of plot turns, I don’t think it’s a major spoiler to say the “solving” of the murder mystery is not the most important reveal, or the most important scene in the book. I highly recommend The Incandescent as a really enjoyable book set at a magic school, but I might not be recommending it to my murder mystery book club specifically.

About a month later, the next Mossa and Pleiti book by Malka Older will  come out on June 10th! I love this series, so I was really excited to see that there would be a third installment, and that apparently the series will keep going indefinitely, Holmes and Watson-style (I hope).

In the third book, The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, we are back on Giant, a populated far-future Jupiter, where Investigator Mossa and Scholar Pleiti are now in a pretty established relationship. Things are not perfect for them, however, as Mossa’s mental and emotional distress are affecting the relationship.

They are approached by an old school friend of Pleiti’s, whose cousin at a different university seems to be the target of some malefactor. This premise means we get to explore more of the planet Mossa and Pleiti live on, and get a wider view of the thoughtful world and society building Older puts into this series.

Personally, I teach at a college and thus tend to avoid “the college novel,” but the backstabbing machinations of these far-future scholars feel far enough removed from present-day university problems that the book is still enjoyably escapist, even though it of course has resonance with issues we are currently facing. This series I do indeed frequently recommend to my murder mystery book club!

Then, rounding out our summer of dark academia speculative mysteries, The Executioners Three by Susan Dennard will come out on August 26th! This is the first thing I’ve read by Dennard, and I’m excited to see she’s prolific, because I really enjoyed it. In The Executioners Three, our main character Freddie is a smart high school student in the late 1990s, who knows everyone in her small town, but mostly hangs out with her one best friend. A quirk of fate endears them to the “popular” kids at their high school, and plunges them into a prank war with the local rich kids’ boarding school.

This prank war is shockingly interrupted by both terrible and mysterious murders that happen in the woods, and by a budding romance between Freddie and a guy who goes to the rival school. Scandal!

In tone The Executioners Three reminds me of Maureen Johnson’s young adult mysteries, with its snappy plot, and its engaging heroine who indulges in reasonable levels of feeling sorry for herself but generally displays clearheaded competence. I also find it refreshing that Freddie gets along with many of the adults in the town, including her mom and stepdad.

While not all high school mysteries would qualify as dark academia, I think this one does, both for the particular qualities of the murders, and for the sheer number of scenes that take place in libraries and archives. I believe this would be a fun book for current teens, but as someone who was actually a teen during the late 1990s when this book takes place, I also felt like I was the target audience.