Murders Most Foul

Crime Coming-of-age novels aren’t my particular passion — unless there’s a murder in the story. There’s a doozy of a murder in Kate Weinberg’s hypnotic debut mystery, THE TRUANTS (Putnam, 311 pp. , $26), one that might have met with the approval of the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie. Dame Agatha happens to figure tangentially in this uncommonly clever whodunit, which makes plentiful references to her books, plot twists, settings and even the 11 days in 1926 when she inexplicably disappeared — all while coming across as madly original.

The story opens on the campus of an undistinguished college in Norfolk, where the narrator, Jessica Walker, is a student with a singular interest in Christie’s mysteries. Jess is especially keen on a Christie course, “Murdered by the Campus,” being taught by the charismatic Dr. Lorna Clay, a most unconventional thinker. Outside the classroom, Jess makes friends with the ditsy, but darling Georgie (“She was like a slot machine flashing all its lights in constant jackpot”), Alec, Georgie’s boyfriend, and her own designated steady, Nick.

Although it’s Lorna who becomes Jess’s obsession, Weinberg has created complex, unpredictable players, each with a fully drawn history, and all of them, in one way or another, deeply untrustworthy. (“How would you feel if I told you I’d killed someone? ” is a typical line of table talk. ) On one delicious note, they even lie about their own childhood traumas.

But as flashy as the characters are, they all exist to serve the plot, which keeps taking surprising, even startling twists and turns, ending up — in a switch that would please Christie — on a remote, almost deserted island. ♦ Charles Lenox, the gentleman sleuth in the smashing Victorian mysteries of Charles Finch, discovers he is London’s most eligible bachelor in THE LAST PASSENGER (Minotaur, 292 pp. , $27. 99), a series prequel set in 1855.

Despite having confounded his privileged peers by setting himself up as a private detective, Lenox is the son of a baronet and very rich, which makes him a prize indeed. Luckily, a murder at Paddington Station saves him from being suffocated in the social whirl. The victim of this “butchery of a murder” is discovered on a train from Manchester, his corpse stripped of all identification, including the labels on his clothing. Exercising his keen skills at observation and deduction, Lenox determines that the man is an American.