Raven's Hill School Books in Order

Sam Blake's Raven's Hill School books are YA mystery thrillers set at a private girls' day and boarding school in Kilmurray Point, beside the sea in South County Dublin. The school sits close to its boys' counterpart, Raven's Park College, and that mix of privilege, gossip, rivalry, and teenage pressure gives the series its social spark from the start. These are school stories, but they are also proper whodunnits.

At the center are girls who are smart in very different ways. Frankie O'Sullivan comes from the family that runs the local Berwick Castle Hotel. Her cousin Sorcha Bennett is a serious swimmer with a quick, questioning mind. Jess McKenna has just moved from London, wants to study law, and is less interested in fitting in than in working out what is true. Together they make a strong amateur sleuth team, practical, loyal, and not easily brushed aside when adults tell them to leave things alone.

They're much sharper than many adults around them.

The first book, Something Terrible Happened Last Night, starts after a seventeenth birthday party goes badly wrong. When the girls return to help clear up, they find a body in the living room. The mystery runs through school friendships, hidden grudges, family pressures, and the confession site called Rave-fess, which turns gossip, screenshots, and posts into part of the evidence trail. Blake understands that for modern teenagers, the online world is not separate from real life, it is part of the crime scene.

The second book, Something's About to Blow Up, widens the focus after an explosion in the chemistry lab injures several students. Some of the girls are trying to piece together what happened from hospital beds, while others are following leads back at school. The story keeps the series interest in secrets, social pressure, and technology, but adds a bigger sense of threat and a wider cast of students with their own motives, loyalties, and blind spots.

One of the nicest things about this series is that Blake does not pretend phones do not exist. Social media, confession pages, messages, and rumor are built into the plotting because they are built into school life. At the same time, the books are not just about apps and scandal. They are also about friendship, class, identity, ambition, and the ways teenagers protect one another when adults miss what is right in front of them.

These are page-turning school mysteries, but they stay grounded in real pressures, exams, sport, family expectations, and the feeling that one bad night can change everything. Each book has its own central case, yet the setting and returning characters reward reading in order, starting with Something Terrible Happened Last Night.