Killing November
Adriana Mather's Killing November opens her Academy Absconditi duology and is essentially Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None reset inside a Hogwarts for assassins. November Adley is a Pacific Northwest teen whose father has spent her entire life shielding her from her own heritage. Without warning he ships her off to a strange private school in a remote European castle, where she discovers that her classmates are the heirs of the world's most powerful spy, mafia, and assassin families, and that classes include forgery, hand to hand combat, and how to identify a poison by taste. The school has no electricity, no surveillance, and no tolerance for outsiders, and on her first night a fellow student is found murdered. With suspicion falling on her, November teams up with a charming, politically untouchable boy named Ash to figure out who is killing students and why her father sent her into a snake pit she had never been trained to survive. Mather writes a fast, clever, twist heavy YA thriller.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Killing November
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Pulled out of her quiet life and dropped at a school that trains the children of crime families and spies, November Adley realizes she is in over her head. Especially once classmates start dying.
Yes. Killing November is YA mystery, suitable for readers 13 and up. There is no explicit content. The premise of a secret-society boarding school where students train as assassins is intentionally Dark Academia-adjacent.
Yes. Adriana Mather wrote a sequel, Hunting November, completing a duology. The two books form a continuous arc.
Killing November was written by Adriana Mather, published in 2019 by Random House Children's Books.
Killing November is 416 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Killing November takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
Killing November is a standalone novel by Adriana Mather, not part of a series.
Killing November is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.