The novel opens in present-day England with the villain claiming that murder is no big deal. He remembers the first time he laid eyes upon the hated St. Oswald’s, an exclusive private school for boys. He was nine years old. His father, the school’s new janitor, warns the kid with several punches on the arm that St. Oswald’s is no place for grubby little trespassers.

Of course such a prohibition only attracts the kid to the school. Scrawny and smart and picked-on, he skips his own classes at the chaotic public school. He steals the St. Oswald uniform. Soon, under an assumed name and made-up past, he blends in with the rich boys as a St. Oswald’s student himself. He attends classes, poses in school photos, and gets to know all the teachers while remaining unnoticed. By night, he lifts his father’s keys and prowls the school from cricket grounds to rooftops, memorizing every square inch.

As a child, St. Oswald’s was his secret refuge. But now he’s grown up and back at the school, posing as a teacher. Something happened to turn his childish love to hatred. Now he plans to destroy the St. Oswald’s, dragging it down in an explosion of scandal and murder. First he will target the faculty members through their weaknesses.

Only one teacher, Roy Straightley who has a bad heart and is nearing retirement, realizes that a destroyer lurks in their midst. Who is the villain, and what are his motives for attacking the school?

It took me awhile to warm up to this book. The chapters alternate between the first-person narratives of Straightley and the villain – and they both sound exactly alike: like C.S. Lewis, in fact. The villain once refers to someone as a “beastly” fellow. Does anyone in Britain still use that term?

My other gripe centered on my inability to get especially excited about either the villain’s, or Straightley’s, conflicting agendas. The villain needs to get a life: why should the school matter now that he’s grown up and successful? The fussy Straightley also over-inflates the importance of St. Oswald’s. He likes to insult the less-educated characters with smug quotations in Latin, and this is especially annoying because we the readers are not likely to understand either!

However, the novel really got a grip on me the more I read. The writing is effortlessly clear and beautiful. Old Straightley starts to grow on you. He’s intelligent and compassionate towards his students. St. Oswald’s is the only world he knows and he’s intriguingly outmatched by the villain. I started to realize that the villain’s nature as a sociopath is rooted in his inability to mature and let go of the past.

I still didn’t care in the slightest about the rarefied world of St. Oswald’s. But I did start to worry about poor Straightley and his heart while getting increasingly intrigued by the villain’s back story which included a misguided crush on another student. I could sense that there were layers to this story that were not immediately obvious.

When the shocking twist comes at the end, I just about fell out of my chair. By the time all is made clear, you find yourself marveling at what you missed and how it all ultimately comes together. It ends up being an exhilarating read. Gentlemen & Players, an Edgar Award nominee, is available on Amazon through this link: Gentlemen and Players: A Novel (P.S.)