i grabbed this from netgalley thinking it was going to be a The Secret History kind of story, just because: teacher, troubled students, greek tragedies, "cruel fate and bloody revenge," yadda yadda. but it is a very different kind of story. not a bad thing at all, but if you are looking for The Secret History knockoffs like i always am, know that this is not the same kind of narrative arc. there are troubled students, yes, and there will be crime, but it is a much narrower story than s.h. and its friends. 
 in this one, alex morris is a 26-year-old woman living in london whose fiance has been killed. she cannot cope with her old life with its layer of new grief, so she leaves everything behind: her friends, her job, her possessions, and goes off to edinburgh, where she had studied theater in her youth. despite having no background in education - she is a successful up-and-coming theater director - she lands a job teaching dramatherapy at a school for children who have not been able to succeed in the traditional school system: bullies or the victims of bullies, troubled or dangerous, special needs or simply not academically-inclined. so - a grieving, distracted woman who is unqualified in both teaching and psychology, put in a windowless subterranean classroom with a bunch of volatile teenagers completely unsupervised... well, it goes better than it should with those ingredients-for-disaster, but it's definitely not what anyone would call a happy ending. 
 at least this guy had a leather jacket and a bat 
 although alex is responsible for several different classes of various age groups throughout the course of her day, only one class is given any page-time: the one with the most troubled five students in the whole school. alex's idea of teaching is to have them read greek tragedies on their own time and then come in and talk about the characters' motivations as a way to trick them into talking about their own feelings and driving forces; all the big things like love and loyalty, fate and revenge. naturally, some of the kids don't even bother reading the plays, and the classes are pretty formless and frequently devolve into fighting or storming out. this is not a stand and deliver inspirational teacher kind of book, where troubled kids make good, but alex manages to obtain a kind of grudging respect from them, and the very special regard of one student in particular, who develops an obsessive need to find out everything about alex - where she goes, what she does, what is at the root of her palpable sorrow. 
 and that's where it gets criminal. 
 so, rather than being a The Secret History story of a charismatic teacher leading impressionable students astray, it's more of a "hey, maybe troubled kids should be taught by specialists and not just people who happen to know the director of a reform school" scenario. it's a perfectly entertaining book - it held my interest and i wanted to see how it was all going to end, but it isn't really a "mystery" nor is it even "psychological suspense." there's no escalating tension building to an unspeakable conclusion; it's a very measured and even restrained story. i do wish there had been more about the other classes she was teaching, just as a sort of contrast point, or even more about the students in the class that was the focus. i mean, there were only 5 kids - but we only know a very little about them, except for the one who gets all obsessive. it just seems a little uneven, and i would have appreciated a little more detail overall. but still - a strong debut novel, and i would read her next book with pleasure.