A Diary Found at Lynchburg

 Bubba Valentino stars in "The Last Lascar of NASCAR"
— Postcards From Red Squirrel Trail

Sam! My daydream had come all too true! They were here because Sam’s body had been found! And with that thought the dream-like state became even deeper, and I suddenly couldn’t think at all. This is how it is, I thought, when you are on your deathbed: you are helpless, and you can’t think, and you just wait for the end to come, except you never see it coming, because you can't think, and so you just try to breathe one more time, without hope, without any future, and whatever is about to happen to you just happens. You have no control, no willpower to control: you are completely powerless.
— Leo Schulte, Dial Emma for Murder

A Diary Found at Lynchburg, Leo Schulte
Potocki Press, 2022

Originally published as three separate titles—Why Begins With W: A Lesson in Murder, Dial Emma for Murder: A Killer’s Hang Up and Hex High School: Our Courses Are Cursed. Notwithstanding the fact that I am, shall we say, well past the target age of this Young Adult trilogy, I have read the original three books multiple times, finding them both fresh and (by now) well familiar. At the start of Why Begins With W, we learn of an apparent murder-suicide. However, the narrator (whose name and gender remain unknown throughout) comes to have doubts, and whether those doubts have any basis in the slippery facts is the question running through the three books. The narrator is befriended by two fellow students who, if they are reliable, appear to give reason to doubt the official police assessment of the case. The narrator is smart, though sufficiently self-aware to wonder if they’re as smart as they think. Both the first and second instalments end with cliff-hangers, and indeed my repeated experience has been that, having reached the end of Why Begins With W, I pretty much burn through the second and third books. The writing is witty and stylish, with coy, moderately hip references to pop culture. Also, like Sherlock Holmes (among others) our narrator finds classical music an aid to marshalling one’s thoughts. The narrator finds themself at repeated risk from delinquent schoolmates, is disappointed when making the attempt to interest crime professionals in an alternative view of the crimes (which proliferate over the course of the story.) At some point I shall read it again, so I certainly commend it to others’ reading.