Well-schooled In Murder

Lynley and Havers's investigation yields some unexpected results. The boy, who has been cruelly tortured and then murdered, was attending Bredgar Chambers on a Scholarship ; his parents, who are Lower Middle Class Londoners, were his Adoptive rather than his natural parents; in fact the boy was half- Chinese although he did not look it. Also, he was not tortured to death but died of Carbon Monoxide Poisoning .

Lynley and Havers also find out that without being noticed; they could even have done so by using one of the school's Minibus es. The Prefects themselves seem to have skeletons in the cupboard. For example, towards the end of the investigation it turns out that one of them has been illicitly leaving the school grounds on a regular basis and has fathered an illegitimate child who has Apert Syndrome . At the same time, whatever the pupils do and whatever school rules they break, there is constant fear among them of being found out, being Expelled from the school and of forfeiting their chances of going on to Oxbridge .

The Master s also have secrets which, if they were found out, would cost them their career. In particular, it is one of Lynley's former schoolmates from Eton whose collection of Child Pornography , found half-burned on a pile of rubbish, cannot easily be explained away. The Headmaster himself is a Puppet controlled by an influential journalist on the Board Of Governors whose estranged son, an Upper Sixth boy, also attends the school.

Lynley and Havers solve the case in a few days. However, although a lot of Bully ing has occurred at the school, it is the consequences of a Dysfunctional Family Life rather than anything else that has come to the surface during the police investigation which have led to the murder.

The two Subplot s of the novel revolve around Thomas Lynley's Aristocratic descent (he is sometimes referred to as "Lord Asherton")—shown through his working relationship with his Working Class colleague Barbara Havers from Acton and his unrequited love for a Lady Helen Clyde— and the strained marriage of two of his friends, Simon and Deborah St. James, all of them recurring characters in George's books.

QUOTE

We live by Code s, he {Link without Title} thought. We call them our Morals , our standards, our Value s, our Ethics , as if they were part of our Genetic Make Up . But they are only Behaviour s that we have learned from our society, and there are times to act in defiance of them, to fly in the face of their Conventions because it is right to do so.

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Well-schooled In Murder