Well-Schooled in Murder

Well-Schooled in Murder is a crime novel by Elizabeth George, published by Bantam in 1990. It was the third book in her Inspector Lynley series, which originated in 1988 with A Great Deliverance. In 2002 its screen adaptation was broadcast as the first episode of season one in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, a BBC TV series. Set in the late 1980s at an elite public school in the South of England founded in 1489, the book, which is a mystery novel in the tradition of the whodunnit, revolves around the strict yet unwritten code of behaviour prevalent at independent schools which says that under no circumstances must pupils ever tell on their schoolmates, no matter what they have done. Accordingly, when a 13-year-old boy goes missing one Friday afternoon and two days later is found dead in a churchyard an hour's drive away, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his partner, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, both of the Criminal Investigation Department of New Scotland Yard, are up against a wall of silence as none of the 600 pupils of Bredgar Chambers School seems to be willing to co-operate with the police and communicate what they know. Plot summary Teacher John Corntel asks his former Eton schoolmate Lynley for help when the 13 year old schoolboy Matthew Whateley has disappeared. Initially Lynley refuses, until Deborah St James finds the naked body of the boy in a churchyard in Stoke Poges. Lynley and Havers start their investigation at Matthew's school Bredgar Chambers, an elite boarding school in West Sussex.