The Headmaster's Wife
A Gregor Demarkian Novel
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. FYI:Haddam has been a finalist for both Edgar and Anthony awards.