
Maxwell’s Mask
By M. J. Trow
They say that school days are the best days of your life. But for some, school can be murder.
Deena Harrison was one of Leighford High School’s ‘characters’. She set fire to the toilet block when she was eleven, and threw Ollie Wendell down the science lab stairs soon after her twelfth birthday. But she had the voice of an angel and could act the skin off of a rice pudding, so Mr. Diamond, the headteacher, invoked all sorts of inclusion clauses to keep her on.
The autumn she comes down from Oxford, there is something of a crisis in the drama department at Leighford High. Mrs. Carmichael is in danger of losing her baby and the Little Shop of Horrors is in danger of closing down. So Deena comes back – just to help out. And people start dying.
DCI Henry Hall is called in to see what is happening. With his favourite DS, Jacquie Carpenter, expecting her own baby, and with murder treading the boards, Hall has his hands full.