Set in the late 1980s at an elite public school in the South of England, the plot revolves around a strict yet unwritten code of behaviour which dictates that under no circumstances must pupils ever tell on their schoolmates, no matter what they have done.

Accordingly, when 13-year-old Matthew Whateley goes missing one Friday afternoon, and two days later is found dead in a churchyard an hour's drive away, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his partner, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, both of the Criminal Investigation Department of New Scotland Yard, find themselves up against a wall of silence as none of the 600 pupils of Bredgar Chambers School seems to be willing to co-operate with the police and communicate what they know.

Chemistry teacher Emilia Bond, who is in love with colleague John Corntel, discovers that he is collecting child pornography, and tries to dispose of the evidence.

His biological parents were Pamela Byrne, the wife of one of the school's Board of Governors, and Edward Hsu, a former pupil who killed himself after the affair was revealed.

Giles Byrne, Pamela's husband, feeling partly responsible for the death of Hsu, obtains a scholarship for Matthew at Bredgar Chambers.

The Baltimore Sun wrote: "Ms. George has crafted a fine and powerful novel sure to delight readers in the mood for a thought-provoking, hard-hitting mystery."

People wrote: "Like P. D. James, George knows the import of the smallest human gesture; Well-Schooled in Murder puts the younger author clearly in the running with the genre's master.