A narrow door

The remains of a body are found on a building site at an elite boarding school in North Yorkshire. The body is probably the brother of the new headmaster of this school, St. Oswald's, a woman who confesses, at the start of the book, that she has committed two murders in her life, one of passion, one of convenience. Are the remains those of her brother who disappeared from a rival school decades ago? So begins the third in the St. Oswald's series. Harris fans may rejoice in another installment of this saga in which scandals, tragedies, and cover-ups abound, but new readers will probably be bewildered by the many obscure references to past goings-on, whether they are long-ago student pranks or sexually predatory teachers. The story moves between two time periods (1989 and 2006) and between the narratives of new headmaster Rebecca Buckfast and long-time-teacher Straitley. There's a great deal of information regarding protocols, old and new, but not much action. Still, fans of the series will be glad to catch up with the doings at St. Oswald's.

In 2006, Rebecca Buckfast, the protagonist of Harris's enthralling third thriller set at St. Oswald's (after 2016's Different Class), becomes the first female head in the Yorkshire school's 500-year history. Before her appointment, St. Oswald's was a bastion of male entitlement. Under Rebecca's reign, girls have been admitted and change is in the air. At the building site of the new sports hall, four of Latin master Roy Straitley's students see what might be a body, partially submerged in a muddy sinkhole. They tell Straitley, who takes the matter to Rebecca, but he senses that she already knows about the body. With Scheherazade-like skill, she tells Straitley her tale, teasing out the story over the coming weeks. Rebecca's account of the devastating effects that her older brother's disappearance had on her family, and events that subsequently took place in 1989 when she was a substitute teacher at his grammar school, alternate with excerpts from Straitley's 2006 diary. Harris keeps the suspense high all the way to the exhilarating ending. This spectacular feat of storytelling will seduce the reader from page one. Agent: Michael Carlisle, InkWell Management. (Jan.)