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A haunting is never a simple thing. That's very much the case for Andrew Taylor, an American teenager whose family has sent him to Harrow School, an exclusive public school outside of London. When a fellow student dies, Andrew realizes that the skeletal, diseased figure he saw over his friend's body is not a real person, but rather a ghost. Meanwhile, Andrew, a dead ringer for another, famous student – Lord Byron – is tapped to play the Romantic poet in a play. This only seems to intensify the hauntings. The ghost, who quotes from the Jacobean tragedy "The White Devil," pulls Andrew down into the bowels of the school building, an unused basement, and back 200 years in time, to when Lord Byron attended Harrow. It's as if the ghost wants to show Andrew another long-ago murder. But why? Fortunately, Andrew has allies – his housemaster, Pier Fawkes, once a famous poet but now an alcoholic who struggles to write a play about Lord Byron; another housemaster's daughter, the beautiful Persephone Vine; and the school's librarian, Dr. Judith Kahn, who helps him research Byron. But as they race to solve the mystery – before any more students die – their own lives are placed in danger. Not only does author Justin Evans write beautifully, but he accomplishes the difficult: wrapping his mystery in a ghost story. Read it late at night, if you must, but just don't go down to the basement. § Lourdes Venard is a newspaper editor in Long Island, N.Y.
Reviewed by Lourdes Venard, October 2011
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