I avoided reading the back cover so as not to pick up any accidental spoilers, so it took me several chapters to twig to what kind of book this was. Unlike in Call For the Dead I did not at all pick up on what lay in the hole at the centre of the centre of the story, being perhaps too caught up in looking for some clever mechanism. Also worth catching John le Carré's afterword on the English boarding school as an institution.

A Murder of Quality shows, I think, just how close a good spy story lies to the fields of the murder mystery.