Another great instalment. This time with a duel narrative, past and present, at a boarding school where a young lad is murdered—unsolved, until new evidence comes in and there’s a second chance to uncover the sordid details. New detectives, another female partner, Conway, and a fresh fry looking to climb, or hop, to the murder squad ladder.

The prose work is always great, the plot nice and twisty. I can’t say I’m a fan of the dialogue work, purely because listening to tween colloquialisms generously peppered in is not at all enjoyable, for me. French manages to humanize the two groups of girls who makeup the primary suspects at an all-girls school, some of whom allegedly covertly mix with all-boys place—which presumably led to the murder. But not all that much was known because, as usual, class stratification rears its ugly mug in the form of the detectives being allowed only so much leeway to question both minors, and children of rich, influential folks.

Things move along fairly nicely with the duel timelines though, even though the plot is probably less juicy, or feels that way simply because it’s minors at a school after-the-fact. The in-group out-group is wildly intricate and predominate, and it’s probably the first one in the series where quite a few people felt like viable suspects, actually. In all the prior ones it’s pretty clear from the jump who the killer is, as these are far more about why it happened than simply means motive and opportunity. But, it’s also the first I didn’t care that much about the setup because teenagers and setting don’t appeal to my tastes off the jump. The fact that it kept me going all the way through, shows how much I enjoy French.