A Schooling in Murder Andrew Taylor 9780008494285

'Ten out of ten' The Times

'A grand piece of work - a triumph and one of Taylor's best' MICK HERRON

'A wonderfully unique novel from the master of historical crime fiction. Beautiful, haunting, and quite brilliant' LAURA SHEPHERD-ROBINSON

'As good as I'd expect from a master of the craft' VAL MCDERMID

'A wonderful, subtle novel, set in a strange, enclosed world. Beautiful writing and a gloriously satisfying ending' ANN CLEEVES

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England, May 1945

In the last days of World War II, Monkshill Park School for Girls stands far apart from the violence in Europe. Yet a woman has been murdered in its grounds.

Annabel Warnock, a teacher with a secretive past, has disappeared. The teachers and girls whisper that she's run away, but in fact she has met a violent end.

Replacement tutor and amateur crime writer Alec Shaw arrives to find a school riven with bitter rivalries and dangerous tensions. He begins to suspect there is a real-life mystery waiting to be solved... and these echoing halls hide a killer.

Andrew Taylor is the author of a number of crime novels, including the ground-breaking Roth Trilogy, which was adapted into the acclaimed drama Fallen Angel, and the historical crime novels The Ashes of London, The Silent Boy, and The American Boy, a No.1 Sunday Times bestseller and a 2005 Richard & Judy Book Club Choice.

He has won many awards, including the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award (the only author to win it three times) and the CWA's prestigious Diamond Dagger.

A wonderfully unique novel from the master of historical crime fiction. Beautiful, haunting, and quite brilliant

A grand piece of work - a triumph and one of Taylor's best

This ticked all the boxes for me. As good as I'd expect from a master of the craft

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 engrossing, eerie and erudite page turner which maintains the suspense until the very end ... I defy anyone not to enjoy this captivating whodunnit!

A Schooling in Murder captures the period brilliantly and what a loveable main character- a total delight

Beguiling

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.

Andrew 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

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

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

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

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

An absolute masterpiece of rising tension

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

Taylor's ability to conjure time past is second to none ... a sublime evocation of a closed world in which the adults are, in their way, as powerless as their young charges

Utterly brilliant ... It's gripping, funny, stylish and suspenseful with several twists that surprised me

A new departure for this gifted thriller writer... a novel told by a ghost... the veteran Taylor pulls [this] off with considerable aplomb and with the narrative skill his readers have come to expect