Judy's Review:

This clever and compelling book is a fabulous read, steeped in atmosphere and suspense.

Hannah arrives at Pelham College, Oxford, a wide-eyed working-class girl unable to believe her luck she’s got into Oxford.

Her new roommate is April Clarke-Cliveden, as exotic as she sounds, rich, beautiful, wayward and uber-confident. Hannah falls under her spell and is accepted into April’s upper-class circle; college is wonderful except for one unpleasant worm in the apple - a creepy college porter, John Neville, who stalks Hannah and makes her feel incredibly uncomfortable.

One night after a college dramatic society play in which April plays the lead, Hannah comes back to their room to find her dead. She tells police that she saw John Neville hurrying away from their staircase a minute before she arrived.

Neville is arrested, tried and convicted of murder.

Richard's Review:

Ten years later, Hannah is married to April’s college boyfriend Will and expecting her first child. Then she hears that Neville, who always protested his innocence, has died in jail.

Hannah feels uneasy. At the back of her mind she’s always had a secret doubt that her evidence of the porter’s guilt was inadequate. Then she’s contacted by a journalist who is convinced Neville did not kill April. He asks her to join him in finding the real killer.

This is a teaser of a novel, and I guarantee you’ll change your mind umpteen times about the identity of the real killer. It’s also terrific at assembling a cast of upper class privileged undergraduates who are both charming and nasty, glamorous and secretive, reminiscent of Donna Tartt’s A Secret History.

The writer’s seductive portraits of Oxford really get into your head in this excellent and atmospheric mystery.