A Schooling In Murder
From the author of The Ashes of London, comes a new historical mystery set in the last days of WWII England, May 1945.
The isolated Monkshill Park boarding school seems a world away from the violence that has engulfed Europe. Yet its eerie ground have witnessed a murder.
Annabel Warnock, a teacher with a checkered past, disappeared during the holidays. The teachers and girls assume she has left the school, but the truth is quite different. Her body is lying at the bottom of the Maiden’s Leap, along the dangerous and overgrown Gothic Walk.
Annabel’s ghost is trapped at Monkshill, unable to move on whilst the mystery of hear death remains unsolved. Haunting the grounds and school, she discovers a hidden world – both students and staff are riven with deadly rivalries and dangerous tensions.
Among them is her killer.
Reviews
Andrew Taylor is unparalleled in the world of historical crime fiction, and A SCHOOLING IN MURDER is written by an author at the height of his powers. The depth and many-layered textures of time, place and people are a wonder of this wordsmith’s craft: nobody else writes the twists with such elegance, so many finely tuned layers, or such nail-crushing heart-ache.
A SCHOOLING IN MURDER is an engrossing, eerie and erudite page turner which maintains the suspense until the very end. Andrew's classic murder mystery has it all: a dilapidated boarding school, its occupants fiercely protecting their own secrets, angst, viciousness, and personal fears. What more could a reader want? It has murder, an eavesdropping ghost, naive detectives, clues galore and twists and turns which beg the question, who can be trusted? It kept me guessing till the end. I defy anyone not to enjoy this captivating whodunnit!
This most unusual murder mystery – in which the reader is aligned with the murder victim after her death – is an absolute triumph. Andrew Taylor turns the conventions of mystery stories on their head to explore secrets hidden just beneath the surface within a closed community. A SCHOOLING IN MURDER is clever, tender and utterly haunting.
A SCHOOLING IN MURDER captures the period brilliantly and what a loveable main character– a total delight.
In A SCHOOLING IN MURDER, Andrew Taylor leads us by the hand into the crumbling world of the 1940s English girls' boarding school. With shades of Josephine Tey's MISS PYM DISPOSES and Dorothy L Sayers' GAUDY NIGHT, and with the assistance of a quite unique protagonist, Taylor re-invents the classic crime story with the dark aplomb of a modern master.
A SCHOOLING IN MURDER is a clever, distinctive, and beautifully written mystery from a crime writer who is top of the class.
A grand piece of work – a triumph and one of Taylor’s best.
A heady mix of murder, intrigue, and a supernatural interlocutor. Taylor’s prose is characteristically fluid, his ability to conjure empathy for his cast – both real and spectral – wonderfully perceptive, and the plot itself gripping in the very best traditions of mystery writing. A thorough delight from start to finish.
An ingenious and intriguing homage to the golden age of crime fiction – A SCHOOLING IN MURDER is both wryly beguiling and steeped in atmospheric tension. I could not put it down.
A wonderfully unique novel from the master of historical crime fiction. Beautiful, haunting, and quite brilliant
Crime fiction has a new superstar: Annabel Warnock is simply the best narrator I have read in a long time. Acerbic, inquisitive, irrepressible … It hardly matters that she's dead, although of course it matters very much in the plot. This is a splendidly lively and richly entertaining novel. I adored it.
Beguiling
Taylor evokes beautifully the tawdry atmosphere, the cast of misfits and the relationships and love affairs that must be hidden, with a lightness of touch that belies the deeper tragic elements of the story. This is a novel of immense charm
A wonderful, subtle novel, set in a strange, enclosed world. Beautiful writing and a gloriously satisfying ending
This ticked all the boxes for me. As good as I’d expect from a master of the craft.
The master of historical crime fiction is back and he's on top form. Taylor has reinvented the classic crime story to create a riveting WWII mystery set within a secretive school amid deadly rivalries. Brilliantly eery and suspenseful. A triumph.
Beautifully written, as one would expect, this is an atmospheric crime novel already jostling for my totally unofficial Best of the Year awards
An absolute masterpiece of rising tension
Utterly brilliant. Gripping, funny, stylish and suspenseful.
Clever and written with all Taylor’s familiar skills.
A SCHOOLING IN MURDER turns the country house mystery inside out with wit and wisdom. Ten out of ten.
Taylor’s position at the apex of historical crime writers is reinforced. This page-turner is set in a secluded school for girls away from the violence of the second world war. Teacher Annabel Warnock may have fatally fallen from a clifftop walk, but is spectrally pursuing her killer among students and staff.
Taylor’s ability to conjure time past is second to none and here he blends a school story for adults, a ghost story and a mystery for a sublime evocation of a closed world in which the adults are, in their way, as powerless as their young charges.
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