any main character trying to understand things they shouldn't, not necessarily a mystery/crime book ----- Alex Stern trilogy, Truly Devious series, The Likeness, The Historian, The Maidens, The Alienist, Magic for Liars, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Professor Everywhere, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, The Cartographers, They Never Learn, The Starless Sea, Neverworld Wake, Confessions, The Society For Soulless Girls, The Cloisters, The Binding, If You Could See the Sun, Never Saw Me Coming, The Fixer duology, The Book of Mirrors, Anatomy duology, Over My Dead Body, Nocticadia, The Naturals series, The Seduction of Water, The Drowning Tree, This Book Kills, Lote, The Cruel Dark, Where Sleeping Girls Lie, Tender Beasts, People Like Us, They Wish They Were Us, The Mary Shelley Club, Lady Jayne Disappears.