The Headmaster's Wife (Gregor Demarkian Series #20) by Jane Haddam

From the Publisher

Windsor Academy ranks as one of the best New England prep schools money can buy. From its Gothic arches to its ethnic diversity, it looks picture perfect...as long as nobody notices that the headmaster’s wife has a student lover and drugs are as available as candy. And when freshman Mark DeAvecca looks out a faux medieval window and sees a body across the campus, he wonders if he’s hallucinating—especially when no corpse is found. Since everyone thinks that Mark is a druggie, they all ignore him—until he returns to his dorm room to discover his roommate dead, hanged by the neck from the ceiling.

Desperate, Mark calls his mother’s friend Gregor Demarkian, former FBI agent and the one person Mark knows will listen. Demarkian is world-weary and ready to retire from his investigative career, yet he can’t turn down a plea from a scared kid. And it doesn’t take long before Gregor knows something is very wrong at Windsor Academy...something like manipulation, dirty tricks, and murder.

Library Journal

Suspicion falls on an unstable prep school student who finds his roommate (rumored to have been having an affair with the headmaster's wife) hanged in their room. The suspect's famous mom hires retired FBI agent Demarkian (Conspiracy Theory) to look into the matter. The latest in a solid series. Haddam lives in Connecticut. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Dear old bloody school days. Smugly egalitarian Windsor, a Massachusetts boarding school where every rich boy is equal to every other rich boy and there is a precisely calibrated ratio of minorities, accepts Mark DeAvecca, perhaps hoping for an endowment from his superwealthy mom, writer/media nabob Liz Toliver, and stepdad, rock idol Jimmy Card. Mark, however, is soon blacking out, spacing out and acting like a world-class druggie. He's so addled he can't tell what's real and what's not, and when he finds his roommate Michael Feyre hanging from the sprinkler pipes, most of the faculty think he caused the death and should be expelled. Unable to defend himself, feeling sicker by the minute, Mark calls on family friend Gregor Demarkian (Conspiracy Theory, 2003, etc.), who arrives just in time to have Mark sent to the hospital, where caffeine and arsenic poisoning are diagnosed. Headmaster Peter Makepeace tries to keep a lid on the scandals, but more follow quickly. Makepeace's flamboyant wife Alice has picked out a different boy each year to have sex with. One teacher is a closeted gay, another has easy access to student allowances, another has a secret identity and another ingests cyanide and falls from the library catwalk. An in-depth study of educational elitism, emotion versus intellect, and the question of what women really want. In a contest against Elizabeth George for Most Long-Winded, Haddam would win on style points.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0312989113
  
• ISBN-13: 9780312989118
• Format: Mass Market Paperback, 480pp
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Pub. Date: February 2006
• Edition Description: Reprint
• Sales Rank: 237,802
• Series: Gregor Demarkian Series, #20

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents