The gripping new WWII historical mystery from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Ashes of London

*A Times Best Book of the Year* From the author of The Ashes of London, comes a new historical mystery set in the last days of WWII

'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.

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An absolute masterpiece of rising tension

" - Mirror

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A Schooling in Murder turns the country house mystery inside out with wit and wisdom. Ten out of ten.

" - The Times

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Taylor's position at the apex of historical crime writers is reinforced

" - Financial Times

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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

" - Guardian

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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

" - Spectator