I love Andrew Taylor’s books and over the last few years I’ve been enjoying his Marwood and Lovett series, set in the 17th century in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London. His new novel, A Schooling in Murder, is not part of the series and leaves that setting behind entirely, taking us instead to the 1940s and a girls’ school near the border of England and Wales.
The novel has a very unusual narrator and when I sat down to write this review I wondered if it would be possible to avoid giving away too much about her. However, the publisher’s own blurb reveals her secret, as do most of the other reviews I’ve seen (and to be fair, she tells us herself in the first chapter anyway): Annabel Warnock is a ghost. In life, she was a teacher at Monkshill Park School for Girls, until being pushed into the river from the Maiden’s Leap, a clifftop viewing point on the Gothick Walk, part of the school grounds. Who pushed her? Annabel doesn’t know, but she’s determined to find out.
As a ghost, Annabel is able to move freely around Monkshill Park – although places she never visited while alive are inaccessible to her – but she can’t be seen or heard by anyone else. This naturally makes investigating her murder very difficult, especially as her colleagues don’t even know she’s dead since her body was never washed up. It seems that the only person who can help is Alec Shaw, Annabel’s replacement – referred to simply as a ‘Visiting Tutor’ to appease parents worried about the school employing a man to teach their girls. Although she can’t speak directly to Alec, Annabel finds a very imaginative way to communicate with him, which was one of my favourite aspects of the book!
As well as the mystery element of the book, we also learn a lot about life in a 1940s girls’ boarding school. Andrew Taylor does a good job of portraying the rivalries and complex relationships that form when groups of teenage girls – and groups of teachers – are living together in a close-knit community. There are occasional references to the war, which is in its closing stages as the book begins in May 1945, but Monkshill Park feels largely sheltered from the outside world, so although the war touches the lives of the characters in various ways it doesn’t form a big part of the story.
The descriptions of the school and its landscape are very detailed, so I was interested to read in Taylor’s author’s note that he based it on Piercefield, a now ruined house and estate near Chepstow in Wales, and that in its fictional guise of Monkshill Park it also formed the setting for his earlier novel, The American Boy. I should have remembered that as The American Boy is my favourite of all the Andrew Taylor books I’ve read!
Although it was interesting to watch a victim trying to solve their own murder, I felt that there was a distance between the characters and the reader, which I suppose is inevitable when your narrator can only watch and observe rather than interact directly with the people around her. Maybe because we’re only seeing them from Annabel’s unique perspective, most of the characters also seem particularly unpleasant! Possibly for these reasons, I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as some of Taylor’s other books, but it was imaginative and different and I’m looking forward to whatever he writes next.
Thanks to Hemlock Press for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.
Book 3/20 for 20 Books of Summer 2025.
She Reads Novels 