"On a summer morning in 1926, a young woman alights from a bus in a Cape Cod village and embarks on an odyssey she cannot foresee. Chatham is a tiny seacoast town, boasting a main street with a few shops, a white-spired church, and Chatham School, an elite boys' academy dedicated to turning boisterous or insolent boys from good families into dutiful, moral young men." "The school's new art teacher, Elizabeth Channing, has come from a world barely imaginable by the townspeople of Chatham to live in a small cottage beside Black Pond. She has spent her life traveling with her father, educated by him in the plazas of Madrid, along the canals of Venice, in the apartment overlooking Rome's Spanish Steps where John Keats died. Life must be seized, the passion of the artist must be served, morals are a restraint to the spirit - these are the lessons her father taught her. These are the lessons that will bring catastrophe to Elizabeth Channing, to the Chatham School headmaster's young son, and to Chatham itself."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Attorney Henry Griswald has a secret: the truth behind the tragic events the world knew as the Chatham School Affair, the controversial tragedy that destroyed five lives, shattered a quiet community, and forever scarred the young boy. Layer by layer, in The Chatham School Affair, Cook paints a stunning portrait of a woman, a school, and a town in which passionate violence seems impossible...and inevitable. "Thomas Cook's night visions, seen through a lens darkly, are haunting," raved the New York Times Book Review, and The Chatham School Affair will cement this superb writer's position as one of crime fiction's most prodigious talents, a master of the unexpected ending.