The sudden death of a pupil in Fleat House at St Stephen’s – a small private boarding school in deepest Norfolk – is a shocking event that the headmaster is very keen to call a tragic accident.

But the local police cannot rule out foul play and the case prompts the return of high-flying Detective Inspector Jazmine ‘Jazz’ Hunter to the force. Jazz has her own private reasons for stepping away from her police career in London, but reluctantly agrees to front the investigation as a favour to her old boss.

Reunited with her loyal Sergeant, Alastair Miles, she enters the closed world of the school, and as Jazz begins to probe the circumstances surrounding Charlie Cavendish’s tragic death, events are soon to take another troubling turn.

Charlie is exposed as an arrogant bully and those around him had both motive and opportunity to switch the drugs he took daily to control his epilepsy.

As staff at the school close ranks, the disappearance of young pupil Rory Millar and the death of an elderly Classics Master provide Jazz with important leads, but are destined to complicate the investigation further. As snow covers the landscape and another suspect goes missing, Jazz must also confront her own personal demons . . .

Then a particularly grim discovery at the school makes this the most challenging murder investigation of her career. Because Fleat House hides secrets darker than even Jazz could ever have imagined . . .

Review:

Riveting, meticulous, and unpredictable!

In this latest novel by Riley, The Murders at Fleat House, she transports us to Norfolk, England, home to St. Stephen’s School, an elite boarding school that has all the usual fare, entitled students, unrelenting bullies, ghost stories, favouritism, and a history of scandals, violence, and death that may be about to repeat itself.

The writing is sharp and tight. The characters are vulnerable, troubled, and multilayered. And the plot is a suspenseful, twisty tale filled with manipulation, familial drama, deception, lies, neglect, jealousy, secrets, revelations, vengeance, mayhem, and murder.

The passing of Lucinda Riley in the middle of last year was a tremendous loss for the literary world, and it’s an honour to be able to read anything she wrote. The Murders at Fleat House is not the typical novel we’ve seen from Riley in the past several years as she swept us away into the stories of The Seven Sisters, but it is nevertheless a clever, tortuous, cunning page-turner that kept me guessing from the very first page and ultimately left me surprised, satisfied, and thoroughly entertained.

This book is available now.

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