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4.0
Passion Play is a tense mystery novel set on the isolated campus of a boys’ prep school, originally written in the late eighties and now reprinted. The death of a young man in a New York sex theater is connected to Montpelier School For Boys by a receipt, but the school seems miles away from the seedy city killing. However, when people start dying on the school campus, it seems that Montpelier might not be the safe little community that it wants to project, and the faculty find themselves under suspicion. At the same time, a production of Othello is being rehearsed at the school, with the actors needing to tap into some raw passion, but passion might be something the school already has too much of.
Blain’s novel is an enjoyable murder mystery and though—as his modern afterword acknowledges—death at American schools is no longer in the confines of fiction, the book still holds up all these years later. Some of this is due to the prep school setting which suits the lack of modern technology, giving it a more set apart from the world feel that suggests a locked room type mystery where the answers must come from within. The fact that the novel combines the point of view (via a third person narrator) of both faculty and students works well, meaning that part of the book is teenage boys worrying about their problems and not taking the threat of murder too seriously and part of it are more adult concerns about careers and relationships.
In some ways the novel feels like a more fleshed out Point Horror type book—and indeed it’s a crime book that teenagers may enjoy as well as adults particularly thanks to the setting—but it is a decent read, with the required twists and turns as plenty of people could be the suspects. Passion Play can be a little slow at times, but the ending picks up pace and has a good level of tension. It is a murder mystery for people who like stories about prestigious yet flawed communities and the strange quirks of elite schools and universities.
Blain’s novel is an enjoyable murder mystery and though—as his modern afterword acknowledges—death at American schools is no longer in the confines of fiction, the book still holds up all these years later. Some of this is due to the prep school setting which suits the lack of modern technology, giving it a more set apart from the world feel that suggests a locked room type mystery where the answers must come from within. The fact that the novel combines the point of view (via a third person narrator) of both faculty and students works well, meaning that part of the book is teenage boys worrying about their problems and not taking the threat of murder too seriously and part of it are more adult concerns about careers and relationships.
In some ways the novel feels like a more fleshed out Point Horror type book—and indeed it’s a crime book that teenagers may enjoy as well as adults particularly thanks to the setting—but it is a decent read, with the required twists and turns as plenty of people could be the suspects. Passion Play can be a little slow at times, but the ending picks up pace and has a good level of tension. It is a murder mystery for people who like stories about prestigious yet flawed communities and the strange quirks of elite schools and universities.
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