Back to School with 2023’s New Campus Fiction and Dark Academia Novels

For fans of procedurals, crime scene photographers, and past and present chapters.

In the present, Rita Todacheene is a crime scene photographer who is beyond overworked and also sees ghosts, helping her learn sometimes what really happened to the victims. Seeing the dead isn’t something she necessarily sees as a gift, especially since her whole life she’s been warned about the dangers the dead come with. That’s a lesson she learns firsthand when a recent victim decides she’s going to make Rita’s life hell until Rita helps her get revenge for her murder…

In the past, we watch Rita living with her grandmother on the Navajo reservation, finding her love of photography, and grappling with the realization that she sees ghosts.

(TW I’m just going with everything — not because of dark material, although it does graphically describe two crime scenes, but because so many cases and things are discussed that at some point it hits everything and this would have been a paragraph of notes.)

For fans of vigilantes and amateur sleuths!

Virgil Wounded Horse lives in South Dakota on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. He makes money as a vigilante of sorts because of the amount of criminals that go unpunished by the local police, who can’t touch the cases, and the FBI doesn’t want to take the cases. But he’s raising his nephew and that pushes him to accept a job he’d otherwise never touch: finding the person bringing drugs into the reservation. Soon things go sideways and he’s paired up with his ex-girlfriend and the FBI…

(TW addiction/ mentions suicides, one with detail/ past rapes including children mentioned, not graphic/ child death/ pedophile, crimes off page/ fat shaming)