Don't Even Ask Me This

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I'm sure my memories are tinged with the bitterness that comes from abject rejection. Okay, I'm sure that's not exactly true, but if someone offered me ten million dollars to go back to high school--and without the wisdom I hope I now have--I might need to think about it.

There were some wonderful parts, and people who are lovely friends now. And teachers who completely changed my life, and for whom I am grateful every day. But basically: thanks, but no thanks.

That's why our dear friend Leslie Wheeler has such a perfect setting for her new mystery! 

And ooh, leave a comment and you could win a copy
of her brand new Wildcat Academy. SO much fun to go back to high school...if you don't actually have to go.

Back to School in a Mystery

By Leslie Wheeler

My mystery novels and short stories are what you could call place-centric.

I start with a place I find intriguing and the plot and characters grow from that.

In the first book of my Berkshire Hilltown Mysteries, that place is a hill (Rattlesnake Hill), in the second, it’s a road (Shuntoll Road), in the third, it’s a bog (Wolf Bog). For my fourth book, I chose a school, but not a regular public school.

Wildcat Academy is set at a private boarding school. I went to a private school myself and so did my son, and we both had good experiences—though my son probably didn’t think so at time. In any case, the type of private schools I decided to write were called therapeutic boarding schools, or schools for troubled teens, or tough love schools. This was because they resorted to punishments and restrictions they claimed would help students in the long run. Instead, these tactics only made things worse for some students, leading to lawsuits and closures of the schools, amid charges of abuse.

My first encounter with such a school happened shortly after I’d moved to the Berkshires. My husband and I went to see a musical comedy performance at a school in a different town from where we lived. The main building was a mansion at the far end of a huge lawn with a gated fence.

We were ushered into a screened-in porch before the performance began. There, a man wearing multiple gold rings on his fingers, who turned out to be the head of the school, relaxed in a lounge chair like the shah of a foreign country, while students milled around him waiting for the show to start. Sensing there was something different about this school, my husband asked a couple of students we were talking with what kind of school it was.

After exchanging glances, one of the students said, “It’s a place for kids who don’t always go with the flow.” And that was all they would say, although obviously there was more to it. Only later did we learn just how unpleasant that “more” could be.

Meanwhile, I discovered there was a similar school in our Berkshire town, and many residents were not happy about it. I attended an angry town meeting in reaction to an incident where a group of students from this school broke into a neighboring house, when the owners were away. They got drunk on the booze they found, stole a car and smashed it on their way into town. Tempers ran so high at that meeting that some people were ready to run the school owners out of town. That didn’t happen, but a few years later, the school shut down.


Given my town’s experience with that school, it wasn’t surprising that the townspeople were adamantly against another tough love school moving in. One person even put together a pamphlet, detailing all the awful things that had happened at the school in its current location. That pamphlet added grist to my fictional mill as I began to write Wildcat Academy.

Still, as I’ve learned, most things in life aren’t totally bad. There are glimmers of light in the darkness. While the headmaster of my fictional school is not a nice guy, nor are the school bullies, I’ve given it two good people in the characters of a student and a teacher. I was an English major, so naturally she’s an English teacher. The teacher and the “good” student help my main character, Kathryn Stinson, solve the mysterious death of another student, who happens to be the son of Kathryn’s sister-in-law.

Readers, what was your high school experience like: good, bad, or a mix, and why? One of the commentators will receive a free copy of Wildcat Academy.

HANK: Oh, I absolutely cannot wait to hear this. (I have a theory.) Tell all, Reds and Readers!

An award-winning author of books about American history and biographies, Leslie Wheeler has written two mystery series. Titles in the Berkshire Hilltown Mysteries are Rattlesnake Hill, Shuntoll Road, Wolf Bog and now, Wildcat Academy. 

Titles in the Miranda Lewis series include Murder at Plimoth Plantation, Murder at Gettysburg, and Murder at Spouters Point. Her mystery short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best New England Crime Stories series, published by Crime Spell Books, where she is a co-editor/publisher. Leslie is a member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, serving as Speakers Bureau Coordinator for the New England Chapter of SinC. She divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Berkshires, where she writes in a house overlooking a pond.