Haddam, Jane. The headmaster's wife. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005. ISBN 0-312-98911-3.

Summary: The mother of a student at a prep school in New England is alarmed by her son's erratic behavior and appalled by his roommate's apparent suicide, under suspicious circumstances. She asks an old friend who is a former agent of the FBI, now retired, to make inquiries. He turns up an assortment of mostly unpleasant motives and sifts through them to find the truth of the matter.

The deployment of the plot is enlivened by some interesting, though probably unfounded, criticisms of the structure, purpose, and staffing policies of private schools. The prevailing moral relativism and the staff's indifference to the welfare of students are played up. (Oddly, however, the author seems to think of these tendencies as “liberal.”)

There is, unfortunately, a tedious subplot about the investigator's inability to communicate with his quarrelsome girlfriend. He broods, pointlessly but at length, about their relationship. Possibly this material would be more interesting to someone who had read earlier books in this series (this is the author's twentieth novel about the investigator).