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Summary
Summary
Mark DeAvecca is a brilliant fifteen-year-old in his first year at the exclusive private academy, Windsor School. Mark, the son of noted commentator Liz Tolliver, grew up in very different circumstances and could not fit in less well. With its hundred-year-old history, Windsor is rife with tradition, nasty rumors, petty jealousies and long buried resentments. The most savage of those unpleasant undercurrents swirl around the headmaster's wife - currently rumored, with good reason, to be having an affair with Mark's roommate, a street-tough scholarship student. Mark, however, has his own problems - he feels himself slowly losing his grip on reality and the staff widely believes him to be just another prep school burnout headed for an unpleasant end. So when Mark returns from a late-winter ramble about the campus to find his roommate dead, hanging from the ceiling of their room, he's reached the end of his own metaphorical rope.
Even though he's no longer sure about the line between fantasy and reality, Mark is fairly certain that something is going on at the school and there's more to the death than the official declaration of suicide. With nowhere else to turn, Mark calls retired FBI agent Gregor Demarkian to ask for help. Sensing the crisis in Mark's dulled voice, Demarkian arrives to find Mark in dire physical and mental state, and a school only too eager to sweep his roommate's death under the rug. In what quickly becomes one of the most complex and challenging cases in his career, Demarkian must untangle truth from fiction, fantasy from reality, before another life is lost.
Author Notes
Jane Haddam is the author of twenty novels featuring Gregor Demarkian, as well as a few suspense novels written under her given name of Orania Papazoglou. A finalist for the Anthony and the Edgar Awards, she lives with her sons in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Campus politics and intrigue intermingle with sex, suicide and possibly murder in Haddam's searing 20th Gregor Demarkian mystery, set at "progressive" Windsor Academy, a suburban Boston boarding school. Alice Makepeace, the ineffectual headmaster's strong-willed wife, has been having affairs with students for years until her most recent conquest, 16-year-old Michael Feyre, is found hanging in his dorm room by his well-connected roommate, Mark DeAvecca. Drugs abound, dress codes are pass? and students call teachers by their first names at the troubled school, which is engulfed in media chaos after Mark nearly dies from arsenic poisoning and a caffeine overdose. Familiar character types on the faculty, including hardcore feminists, closet gays and liberal preppies, hide in their dormitory apartments while Mark's mother, CNN "talking head" Liz Toliver, leads an expos? of Windsor's endemic corruption and hypocrisy. Ex-FBI man Demarkian conducts a low-key investigation even while distracted by problems in his romantic life back in Philadelphia. He develops an appealingly close, trusting relationship with Mark that transcends the normal problems of adolescence in this compelling portrait of a closed society rife with sleaze under its veneer of respectability and prestige. (Apr. 18) FYI: Haddam has been a finalist for both Edgar and Anthony awards. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
After years of investigations, Gregor Demarkian has run out of steam. The retired FBI agent just isn't interested anymore in murders, dead bodies, victims, and perpetrators. But all that changes after he gets a call from the 15-year-old son of a friend. Young Mark DeAvecca is a student at a private school; his roommate has just hung himself in their dorm room, and Mark found the body. But that's only the beginning: Mark has been having problems recently, drifting in and out of reality, either from excessive drug use or from an undiagnosed disorder, and the apparent suicide is a notorious drug dealer who has been having a not-so-secret affair with the wife of the school's headmaster. As he weaves his way through the elaborate web of deceit and confusion, Gregor rediscovers his own passion for investigation. After so many adventures (this is the twentieth Demarkian novel), it's an appropriate time for Haddam to address the subject of burnout, and she handles it very well, indeed. Gregor, like the series itself, shows no signs of stopping. --David Pitt Copyright 2005 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Dear old bloody school days. Smugly egalitarian Windsor, a Massachusetts boarding school where every rich boy is equal to every other rich boy and there is a precisely calibrated ratio of minorities, accepts Mark DeAvecca, perhaps hoping for an endowment from his superwealthy mom, writer/media nabob Liz Toliver, and stepdad, rock idol Jimmy Card. Mark, however, is soon blacking out, spacing out and acting like a world-class druggie. He's so addled he can't tell what's real and what's not, and when he finds his roommate Michael Feyre hanging from the sprinkler pipes, most of the faculty think he caused the death and should be expelled. Unable to defend himself, feeling sicker by the minute, Mark calls on family friend Gregor Demarkian (Conspiracy Theory, 2003, etc.), who arrives just in time to have Mark sent to the hospital, where caffeine and arsenic poisoning are diagnosed. Headmaster Peter Makepeace tries to keep a lid on the scandals, but more follow quickly. Makepeace's flamboyant wife Alice has picked out a different boy each year to have sex with. One teacher is a closeted gay, another has easy access to student allowances, another has a secret identity and another ingests cyanide and falls from the library catwalk. An in-depth study of educational elitism, emotion versus intellect, and the question of what women really want. In a contest against Elizabeth George for Most Long-Winded, Haddam would win on style points. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Suspicion falls on an unstable prep school student who finds his roommate (rumored to have been having an affair with the headmaster's wife) hanged in their room. The suspect's famous mom hires retired FBI agent Demarkian (Conspiracy Theory) to look into the matter. The latest in a solid series. Haddam lives in Connecticut. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
