The Vanishing Stair

I've read a few of "boarding school" books close together and it is hard to keep them straight. They all involve "gifted" children who are plucked away from their home and do amazing things. In the Truly Devious series, the things involve solving mysteries. This novel eventually picks up where the other one left off. Our heroine is bored silly at home in Pittsburgh. Luckily, the right wing senator (and her parent's employer) comes to encourage her to go back to school. Her parents comply. Back there she gets to spend more time investigating the school deaths past and present. (The novel includes regular interludes of the 1930s to give us details of the past murder.) She gets to meet a professor who wrote "the" book on the murders and is working on new research. Alas, we do not get good vibes from her. Her security guard "friend" warns her not to go exploring. Alas, she does, and ends up finding the dead body of a missing classmate. The security guard eventually leaves. However, she contacts him after she "solves" the original murders. (As readers, we get the "full story" of the original murders as part of an interlude in the story.) Alas, the book seems to end right before the action wraps up. These books were written in cliffhanger fashion and do not stand alone well. A lot of loose threads from the previous book are wrapped up. However, there are many more things opened that we want resolved at the end. And, being a teen book, we also get some interesting interpersonal relationships going that are left in quite a messy state. Oh well. I guess that leaves us eagerly anticipating the next book in the Truly Devious series.