I quite enjoyed this historical mystery with a hint of ghostliness. Set in a girls' boarding school in 1945, it tells the story from the perspective of the murdered Annabel Warnock. Who murdered her and why?
I thought it was a clever and interesting premise, however it was far too long with unnecessary and irrelevant details.

Miss Annabel Warnock, lately a teacher at Monkshill Park School for Girls, is now a ghost wandering the grounds of her previous employment. Everyone assumes she just walked out of the school one day and never came back. The truth is much worse. Someone shoved her off a cliff, and it is now her aim to find out the culprit and make them pay. But how can she do it as a ghost? The answer comes in the figure of the new male teacher on staff. Can she find a way to make him investigate and solve the murder?

I loved the atmosphere of this story. Set in the immediate aftermath of VE Day and before the end of the war in the pacific, the author brings the whole period to life. Britain is still living frugally and with many deprivations. Attending a boarding school does not shield the girls and the staff from the realities of the time. We also find out that the class divide is still very much to the fore. These elements added to the story.

The new teacher on staff, Alec Shaw, has hopes of being an author. His interest in mystery means he is the ideal candidate for Annabel’s plan to uncover her murderer. But he also has his own secrets. There are a surfeit of suspects and some pretty nasty people within the school estate. It was hard to like them - and even harder to guess the truth. The supernatural element worked well and gave an interesting twist.

Annabel is haunting the school where she was murdered. Except no-one knows she's dead, they think she left her job suddenly. Her replacement Alec is the only person she can communicate with and it takes him a long time to realise he is dealing with a ghost. Now that Annabel can learn some of the secrets of the girl's boarding school inhabitants can she find out why she was murdered?

This murder mystery is definitely helped by having the murder victim as the narrator but it's also frustrating - the repeated explanation of 'I couldn't go there as I hadn't when I was alive', Annabel also often arrives just after something has happened and sets up several suspects simply because they are secretive, vicious teenage girls. Not a gripping crime novel but a nice interlude.

I loved Ashes of London and so was really excited to read this one! Set as World War Two is coming to an end, A Schooling in Murder is an unusual murder mystery set in an old, failing girls boarding school.

I thought the use of a ghost as the narrator was especially clever and gave a classic whodunnit a unique twist. While this genre is usually characterised by a detective or rookie investigator interviewing suspects or snooping around, Annabel Warnock is invisible to those around her and therefore privy to the private conversations and secret outings of those involved, but can do nothing with the information she gathers. This really added to the suspense of the book and helped drive the narrative along.

I loved the gothic setting of Monkshill Park and the use of the young schoolgirls as almost amateur detectives. Andrew Taylor portrayed life in a 1940s boarding school with real nuance and detail and it really came to life on the page.

A brilliant read!

When you get an email from a publishers marketing department saying since you liked that book you will love this one. I should know that’s not always the case and I did not really engage with this novel.
Told from the view of a murdered school teacher, stuck in an in between world and trying to solve her own murder. The staff at her school think she just gave up on the job and walked away never to return.
The thing I didn’t like about the book is there was a lot of character studies and no real action. I guess that categorises it as a cosy crime? I’m not sure as that’s a genre I don’t read.
Although the book wasn’t for me I am sure it will appeal to others.

#ASchoolingInMurder. #NetGalley

A Schooling in Murder was a first book I read by the author. I was intrigued by the idea and enjoyed the first few chapters. I liked the writing style, the moody atmosphere and the characters seemed interesting. However, as the story progressed, my interest started to wane. The plot moved at a frustratingly slow pace, and mostly seemed to consist of mundane details that didn’t add much to the story. The endless, overly detailed descriptions of the woods—while perhaps intended to build atmosphere—started to feel repetitive. By 50% I found myself struggling to stay engaged and decided to stop reading as I realised I am not even interested enough to find out who the murderer was.

Historical crime fiction at its best and this book had me hooked from the very first page. The setting of Monkshill Park School for Girls sees teacher Annabel Warnock leave for holidays never to return. Although she has died her ghosts now wanders the halls only to find out some very interesting facts in order to solve the mystery of her own death.

Love the setting, love the characters and it is such a different and new way to write an historical crime novel which I really enjoyed. A booked filled with mystery, twists and turns, tension and ghosts of course. I loved it and now need to find more books written by Andrew Taylor.

Thank you NetGalley and HarperCollins UK, HarperFiction for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.

Annabel is pretty peeved as this novel opens. Someone murdered her and she isn’t sure who (there are contenders for the role of murderer wherever she probes)- so she sets out to solve the mystery.

An entertaining read set in a girls’ boarding school at the end of WW2 in a very unique setting. I’m a fan of Andrew Taylor’s Marwood books so was keen to get my hands on this one. Wildly different, but it didn’t disappoint.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC.

In ‘A Schooling in Murder’, Andrew Taylor takes the reader to the constraining, wearisome, drab final months of the Second World War. For those boarding girls ensconced in Monkshill Park School, the triumphs of VE day feel inconsequential as they live out their sepia tinted dull lives, barely educated, often bored and rarely happy.

So, when that rarity of rarities, a male teacher, comes to replace the recently departed Annabel Warnock, a School Cert teacher, there is much speculation. Is he a spy? Is it true that he is writing a detective novel? No and yes – and there is certainly more to Alec Shaw BA than meets the eye, not least that he becomes a conduit for Annabel’s concerns and questions.

Narrator Annabel is a ghost; she has been murdered. But by whom? Before dismissing the novel as a piece of nonsense because of this possibly hackneyed storytelling device, hold fast and let Taylor immerse you in a world of snobbery, child neglect (at the very least), surreptitious desire and cruel decisions underneath the supposed respectability of a boarding school for young ladies. As Annabel observes, ‘…I hadn’t realised how the exercise of power ran like a dark vein through every relationship at Monkshill … where there was power, there tended to be cruelty, often all the nastier when it was subtle; it left no visible bruises but festered in the mind, in the heart and in the memory.’

Taylor not only conjures up an entirely credible way of life through his descriptions of boarding school austerity in the 1940s. He also brings us a myriad of characters who are equally plausible, whether they be the aptly named school caretaker, Tosser, or the damaged pupil, Venetia, who is both vicious and vulnerable. Whilst ‘A Schooling in Murder’ will likely be marketed as a ghost story, it is also a thoughtful, nuanced study of prejudice and deprivation and how people are driven to take desperate measures. Recommended!

My thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins UK for a copy of this book in exchange for a fair review.

The setting is a crumbling and struggling girls' boarding school in 19445 Two of the teachers fall in love and plan a passionate week-end away. Enid leaves a day early, Annabel is to meet her the next day but disappears. She never saw who pushed her off the Maiden's Leap into the river gorge, but her spirit returns to the school to watch and listen and try to track down who it was. In a school full of secrets and intrigue there are plenty of candidates. The idea of the spirit looking for its murderer is not new - the Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a previous example but the setting in a boarding school in wartime gives immense scope for interpersonal rivalries and hatreds. The plot is pleasantly complex and the outcome unguessable.

The book had a lot of promise. A creepy school setting, a murder, a ghosts perspective and a mystery.
However, I found the execution to be very poor. It was a slow-burn that never ignited and left me wanting more. I wish I could give a positive review but in the end this one was a let down.

An overall excellent well depicted psychological mystery, almost gothic in style. Not so much in my opinion full of the conventional "twists and turns" but a sad and poignant story which becomes even more intriguing as it unfolds. So much so in fact, that I stayed awake into the small hours in order to finish it in one sitting, which is not a common occurrence these days!

Set in a private girls' school in the closing stages of WW2, we see at once both the relatively sheltered lives of the inhabitants living in England's pleasant countryside, alongside the fairly unpleasant reality of an institutional life in a shabby decaying environment. As with many such schools after the war, it is clearly failing, with no funds to be able to provide the level of excellence promised in its brochures, either in facilities or quality of teaching. Taylor seems able to brilliantly depict any era he sets his mind to, and is rightly acclaimed for his historical fiction (even though I find it hard to deal with the mid 20th century being "historical"!). Despite this being all slightly before my era - though the war cast a long shadow over the next two decades - nor was I ever sent to board at a lesser (or otherwise) private school, how true to life the characterisations of the school environment. The complex relationships and petty rivalries in the classroom and staff room are all magnified in their enclosed little community with few outside influences - all rather reminiscent of P D James' favourite trope.

I came to this author through the Marwood/Lovett books - and then the Lydmouth series, so this story line was a definite deviation from my own preconceptions - though not at all unwelcome. Unlike some other readers, I found this departure from the norm very refreshing, and the writing was, of course, as brilliant as ever. (I'm not going to expand on that at risk of spoiling the plot, even though it soon becomes apparent at the start of the narrative.)

Good. The story is set in an all girls school towards the end of world war 2. It was a very slow story and the ending was a bit rushed and some ideas were started but never finished. The only thing that kept me interested was the unusual narrator of the book which I won't spoil.

I love reading crime/thriller novels, but they can start to feel a bit 'same-y'. The setting of A Schooling in Murder - set during World War 2 in a school (Monkshill School) out in the countryside - and the fact that it's narrated by a dead teacher, Annabel, creates a refreshingly different crime novel!

Annabel is dead, but she doesn't know who came up behind her and pushed her off a cliff in the woods. No one else knows she is dead; they simply think she has left suddenly. As Annabel observes the school she taught at, the students, and the man who has replaced her role, she starts to discover secrets of both teachers and pupils.

There's a slight 'locked room' feel to this mystery, because we know the culprit is likely to be one of the limited cast of students or teachers at the school. We unearth more and more about what happened to Annabel along with Annabel. I don't usually enjoy supernatural elements in my crime novels but here it just worked. It wasn't overdone, and Andrew Taylor has created an engaging plot which, despite its at times dark subject matter, also has humorous moments that I really enjoyed. Highly recommend if you enjoy historical fiction and crime novels - it's a brilliant blend!

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.

It’s May 1945 and we find ourselves at a forth rate girls boring school where one of the Mistresses has disappeared without a trace and nobody seems to be doing much about it her ghost finds this a bit vexing. Annabel Wanick haunts the school peeping into the lives of the teachers, girls and staff and soon finds out there is much more going on at the school than she knew. When her temporary replacement arrives in the scandalous form of a male tutor, Annabel finds she can communicate with him through his poor attempt at novel writing. This novel has all the classic hallmarks of a golden age mystery which I enjoyed while also offering something different in it form of narration as it is told from the perspective of the victim who has both more and less freedom than she did in life. Taylor also has a great skill at making all his characters pretty unlikeable but somehow sympathetic, they are mostly awful but I love them anyway. I enjoyed this book a lot but I felt there were a lot of things that were left half finished or open ended in some of the subplots. A fantastical/historical/ghostly/detective murder mystery!

Teacher Annabel Warnock was murdered at Monkshill Park, a boarding school for young girls. But her ghost can still wander around the estate and she discovers she can communicate with her substitute Alec Shaw when he is writing his detective novel. Together, they try to solve Annabel's murder.

I previously enjoyed Taylor's Marwood and Lovett series and was curious for his new standalone book 'A schooling murder'. Historically, it's set during World War II - the novel opens in May 1945 - but that setting is not heavily developed. It reads like some kind of closed setting detective.

The angle of the victim playing detective herself is original. Annabel has her own secrets - both in at Monkshill, and in her past. As a ghost she can follow each dialogue so we get to know everyone who wroks and lives at Monkshill, but she can only go to places where she's been in life.

I found this book rather a slow burner with too many unsympathetic characters and an ending that is rather predictable and leaves many other things unanswered. Taylor stages so many red herrings that those storylines are not always finished - what about Venetia for example?

I quickly figured out the killer simply because that person was never brought up as a suspect. I found myself not super eager to read on in this book. Too bad, but I am very much hoping for a new Marwood and Lovett book.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in return for my honest opinion.

A measured and thoughtful take on the classic whodunnit.

Set brilliantly in a struggling girls’ boarding school just after the World War II. At time of uncertainty, financial struggles and the conflict in the Far East still to be resolved.
A wonderful balance of adults and children. The teachers and pupils and those working in auxiliary services to allow the establishment to just keep its balance sheet in the black.
The interesting element to story is that a murder has happened. It is beyond the usual murder mystery as the victim is the narrator of the text. A ghost walking the grounds of the school and the places she had been in life. Now trying to find a means to communicate with the living and solve her murder.

I loved the location. The closed community and therefore limited number of suspects. There are some clever character observations and we quickly learn there are two-sides to most of the people involved. With secrets, boredom, gossiping and a sense of menace lingering around the place. All is not well and no-one even our missing corpse is whom they seem.

I loved the range of issues and topics covered. The growing need for young women to be educated. The difficulty to throw off the uncertainty of war. The displaced and missing. A fear as much as hope in the future. The constant struggle to maintain the reputation of the school, boost income, pay bills and meet parental expectations.

I particularly liked the first approach in this genre and the juxtaposition of a ghost story within a closed community closer to period saga than the postwar promise. It throws up many societal issues as well, both in terms of relationships and lengths needed to keep secrets where half truths, speculation or discovery could destroy reputations.

A pleasant book to lose yourself in and discover those things we should value and embrace.

Thank you for allowing me to review this book. An unusual mystery written in the first persons account. The story was a little slow and didn't always keep me fully engaged. However the conclusion was totally unexpected. I didn't see that coming. Set towards the end of the war, in a girls boarding school. The teachers and staff were not particularly nice and the girls felt like they gad been neglected by their families. Not a happy place.
I'm sure that many will enjoy this book.

Set at the the end od World War 2, Annabelle Warner, is a teacher at a second rate girls boarding school When she suddenly disappears, the school community assumes that she just left them in the lurch, even though it was out of character.. Well everyone except her killer.
Told by Annabel herself, who doesn't know who pushed her into the sea,. She is a spirit looking to solve the mystery.
This unusual idea worked well. Andrew has nailed girls' boarding school life and teacher very well and there were enough well drawn characters and plot to keep me guessing. I'll look out for more of his books.