The Chatham School Affair - Thomas H. Cook

 

Even in mid-December 2023, I had (probably) still not heard of Thomas H. Cook despite all the crime fiction the man has written over the last several decades. But by the end of the first week in February 2024, I had read three of Cook's books, and knew that I'd be reading more of them.

It's a cliché to put it this way, but reading a Thomas H. Cook novel is very much like peeling an onion layer by layer...it can be hard work, but in the end it will have been well worth the effort. Cook is the master of inserting foreboding hints of what is yet to come just when the reader leasts expects them. And he doesn't often do it the easy way by ending chapters on successive cliffhangers like so many authors do. Cook's clues and hints are usually subtle enough that my eyes sometimes do a double-take before the words I've just read have consciously sunk in.

The Chatham School Affair starts feeling ominous even in the novel's second chapter as Henry, the book's narrator, looks decades backward to the unexpected consequences resulting from his father's hiring of a new art teacher for the all-boys private school he heads. Henry says that this broke his mothers spirt and physically ruined her; that the school was boarded up, the grounds "gone to weed;" and that the school's reputation was "reduced to dark and woeful legacy."

What could such a young, inexperienced teacher possibly have done that was bad enough to ruin lives and destroy an entire school within months of her arrival on its campus? By the third chapter, readers know that whatever it was she did, the teacher ended up in a courtroom fighting desperately for her freedom. We have barely begun to peel away the layers of The Chatham School Affair, but already we know we had better pay close attention to what each successive chapter reveals.

This is the story of a single school year, one that forever changes the lives of many of the people who experienced it along with Henry, his father, the young school teacher, and the married teacher whose eye she catches on the first day of classes. Rather than risk revealing any spoilers for future readers of the novel, that's enough about its plot. Just know that this onion of a novel has way more layers to peel away than it first appears - and once you begin peeling them away, it will be difficult to stop. 

The Chatham School Affair is a complicated novel filled with memorable and well developed characters I'm still thinking about several days after turning its last page. Some of the characters turned out to be just who I expected them to be, others not so much. The fun came from trying to figure out which would end up being which. 

Cook won the 1997 Edgar Award for The Chatham School Affair, and it's easy to see why. This is a good one.

Thomas H. Cook author photo