Susan Moody had two sons in Linacre House in the late 1970s. In her fictitious Abbot’s School, Canterbury, there is a boarding house in “a four-square Queen Anne house, approached via a set of ruined arches.” There are also entertainments at the end of the Summer Term (“probably pinched the idea from the King’s School, which does the same thing only better.”) And it is possible to detect allusions to Andrew Dobbin’s production of Francis Warner’s Light Shadows (King’s Week, 1979), as well as to other characters and events in the School’s life at this time.

The heroine – “she’s black, she’s cool, her appetites are demanding, she’s Penny Wanamake” – solves the mystery when a recently retired history master is murdered.