Drama Therapy 
 I originally posted this as a five-star review, but mature reflection has prevailed. I read it with eager enjoyment, but admit that part of that was personal. The novel is set in Edinburgh, which is a city I know well. The protagonist, Alex Morris, is a theater director, which is my own original profession. And, like me, she teaches drama to young people. Though not young people that I would ever attempt to engage. At the beginning of the book, she accepts an invitation from a former mentor to conduct drama therapy sessions at Rankeillor, a privately-funded school for children thrown out of the state school system because of behavioral difficulties. The class we hear most about is her oldest group, a quintet of fifteen-year-olds, two boys and three girls. Alex decides to challenge them with the Greek tragedies, not acting so much as discussing the moral problems that they raise. And I am a sucker for stories featuring a gifted and caring teacher. 
 When the novel opens, however, there are hints of both a back-story and what you might call a forward story. The main reason that Alex flees her job in London (at the Royal Court Theatre, no less) and moves to Edinburgh is to escape the memories of her fiance, a young lawyer who has been unexpectedly killed; we will learn more about this as the novel unfolds. And there is the suggestion that she is assembling a narrative of events to prepare for an eventual court case. What this case is, who will be on trial, and what Alex's role in it will be, is something that we do not find out until much later. But hanging over the entire novel is the idea that even study of the ancient classics can impinge on the contemporary world, and the best-intentioned teaching can end in tragedy. 
 The publishers describe this as a psychological thriller, and they are right. But I would not call it a mystery. Although Haynes is very good with her pacing (I found the last hundred pages unstoppable), there are no courtroom dramas or last-minute revelations. Perhaps I could have done with more of them; there is a certain quality of anticlimax, and the author's attempts to suggest an eventual happier ending seemed a bit forced. More seriously, I could never quite see Alex as ever having had the professional status that the author says; she is just too young to hold many of her positions, and she does not seem to have the director temperament. And we never see her teaching actual drama, as response to a performance text; her lessons, though good, could equally well have been taught from summaries of the myths: Oedipus, Alcestis, Agamemnon. Yet I absolutely hail Natalie Haynes for what she does best: showing the struggle of people who have been damaged--whether by loss, violence, or neglect--to get back on their feet and make some sense of their lives.