This is an intriguing and dark story that takes place on Cape Cod, set in the years 1926 and1927. There’s a modern-day quality of Edgar Allen Poe in this book. It’s one of 15 books by Cook and it is an Edgar Award winner. He’s had at least three other books nominated for the Edgar Award, so I’m planning to read more of him. Chatham School is a private boarding school for boys which is run by Arthur Griswald, the headmaster, and the story is narrated by his son, Henry, a student at the school. Elizabeth Channing is the new teacher for the school year, hired by Mr. Griswald on the recommendation of Miss Channing’s uncle, an old class mate the headmaster. She herself started out life with some difficulty, her mother having died when Elizabeth was just four years old. Then, her father, a travel writer, pulled her out of regular school and acted as her only teacher as he traveled the world. There were hints that there was a sexual relationship between father and daughter, but Cook was never explicit about that. When her father died, she was sent to live with her uncle in Africa, so this young and beautiful woman arrived at the Chatham School with a aura of exotic mystery. One of the charms of this book was the quality of the prose, so much better than many of the books we’ve reviewed in this blog. Another charm was the occasional reference to the classics. In the opening paragraph, in his speech to the students at the beginning of the new school year, Griswald quoted Milton: “Be careful what you do, for evil on itself doth back recoil.” Henry, who was writing this book as a memoir, many years later commented on his father’s use of that phrase: “In later years he could not have imagined how wrong he was, nor how profoundly I knew him to be so.” Elizabeth’s father, the travel writer, had written many articles for magazines, but he only wrote one book, and that was about the travels he had with his daughter. Cook quoted from the book regarding a time that Channing’s father had taken her to Capri: “I sat with her in full view of the infamous Salto di Tiberio and spoke to her of what life should be, the heights it should reach, the passions it should embrace, all this said and done in the hope that she might come to live it as a bird on the wing. For life is best lived at the edge of folly.” In the course of spinning his story, Cook also quoted William Blake, Tacitus, and Shakespeare. In response to the dialogue between Henry and Sarah Doyle, the vibrant servant girl who worked at the home of the Griswalds, the author wrote about the struggle we humans sometimes feel between impulse and duty: “For we have never discovered why, given the brevity of life and the depth of our need and the force of our passions, we do not pursue our own individual happiness with an annihilating zeal, throwing all else to the wind. We know only that we don’t, and that all our goodness, our only claim to glory, resides in this inexplicable devotion to things other than ourselves.” Meanwhile, Cook is master at character development, and he skillfully flips back and forth from Henry’s reflections on the events of that year from the perspective of an old man, to what Henry was feeling in the midst of the events as they occurred when he was a young boy. Emotions were stretched to the breaking point, and murders were committed. A trial ensued and punishment was handed down. The effects on all of the characters, the school, and the small village of Chatham were profound and life-long. I am thrilled to have found a new author, and maybe I’ll next try one of his several titles that were Edgar Award nominees, Sacrificial Ground, Blood Innocents, and Blood Echoes.