cover image Unwillingly to School

Unwillingly to School

Peter Conway, . . Hale, $35.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-7090-8325-2

In this pedestrian whodunit from British author Conway (Locked In ), Janet Creswell, a retired doctor who'd been the undermatron at Brantwood, a boarding school near Midhurst, in the 1940s, allows a professor who'd been one of her charges back then to revive her suppressed memories of the circumstances surrounding the death of Edward Blackstone, Brantwood's headmaster. Blackstone was found in the school swimming pool, apparently the victim of an accident. Creswell seeks out others who were at the school at the time, including Blackstone's daughter, who was Brantwood's sole female student, but whose gender and relationship to the sadistic headmaster didn't spare her from corporal punishments. The lack of plot twists, dearth of memorable characters and unnecessary embedding of flashbacks within flashbacks make this an unmemorable read. (June)