Sequel to A Field of Darkness, which I liked very much.
This one finds Madeline Dare working as a teacher at the Santangelo Academy, a private school for troubled teens. It's the late 1980s, and government oversight of private schools isn't as strict as one might like, so the unorthodox -- one might even say abusive -- methods of the school's founder come as a shock to Maddie. Her fellow teachers, however, seem to have fallen into his cult of personality, and most have no objections to what goes on at Santangelo. Maddie's fears prove justified, of course, when there is unexpected death at the school.
This is an odd follow up to the first Madeline Dare book. The setting is different (we've moved from Syracuse to the Berkshires), and the supporting cast is almost entirely different; Madeline's husband, Dean, makes a few brief appearances, but he wasn't much of a presence in the first book, and he's even less of one here. The tone is significantly darker in this book, with much less of Maddie's charming, self-deprecating humor. It barely feels like part of the same series at all, so much so that it seems an odd way to build readership. It would have been better, I think, to simply give this book a new heroine and publish it as a stand-alone.
That caveat aside, The Crazy School is worth reading; there's a large cast of colorful characters, an ample supply of suspects, and the clues to the solution are fairly planted.
No comments:
Post a Comment