England, May 1945
Monkshill Park School for Girls seems a world away from the violence that engulfed Europe during World War II. Yet its lonely, decaying grounds have witnessed a murder.
Annabel Warnock, a teacher with a secretive past, left for the holidays and never came back. Both teachers and girls assume she simply walked out, but the truth is quite different. Her body tumbled from the Maiden’s Leap, a viewpoint on the clifftop Gothic Walk, and was washed out to sea.
But Annabel herself is still trapped at Monkshill, unable to move on. As she haunts the grounds and school, she discovers a hidden world – students, staff and servants are riven with deadly rivalries and dangerous tensions.
And one of them is her killer…

IN A NUTSHELL
The premise for this book hooked my imagination. The novel itself sent my imagination to sleep.

A novel offering me a ghost story wrapped around a murder mystery with Dark Academia undertones in a 1940s England historical setting, how could I not enjoy that?

The answer turned out to be: when the pace is so slow and the tension so absent that you lose interest. 

I set this aside at 26% even though the writing and the narration were both good, because the story wasn’t working for me.

The main character was hard to like and was, by necessity, passive (being dead will do that to you). There was no tension and not much by way of pathos or passion. There was a strong sense of how dreary, grubby, small-minded and soul-destroying the school was, but that wasn’t enough to keep me engaged. In the absence of other things, it just made the reading experience depressing. 

I think the main problem was that the pacing of the story didn’t work. It was slow and meandering, with nothing urging me to read the next page. I was a quarter of the way through a murder mystery, and I didn’t care who the murderer was. So, I set the book aside. Life’s too short to snooze through a novel.