Twin Sisters and a Murder in a Gothic, Boarding-School Setting

By Michele Campbell, author of She Was the Quiet One.

My first psychological thriller, It’s Always the Husband, struck a nerve with readers by chronicling the twisted relationships among three young women who meet as freshman roommates at an elite Ivy League college. The book is full of secrets and murder, but also focuses intensely on the female friendship dynamic. The women in the book adore and hate each other. They are friends and rivals. Ultimately two of them become suspects in the murder of the third. I loved writing about their relationship. Thinking about my second book, I knew I wanted to keep writing about these intense relationships between women and dig even deeper. But how?

With my new book, I found the answer. She Was the Quiet One is the story of twin sisters, Bel and Rose Enright, who are sent away to boarding school at the tender age of fifteen under tragic circumstances.

Their parents have died, and their wealthy grandmother is not up to the task of raising them. For Rose, enrolling at the prestigious Odell School is the opportunity of a lifetime.  But for vulnerable Bel, overwhelmed by grief at her mother’s death, Odell is a place of temptation and danger. Rather than leaning on her more practical and secure sister, Bel turns to the wrong people for support and guidance.

One of those is Heath Donovan, a charismatic and ambitious English teacher whose weaknesses put Bel at grave risk. But there’s also a crowd of wild rich kids, who pressure Bel into hazing her own twin. The fallout from the hazing attack leads the sisters down a dark path, to the moment where the book opens: one twin is locked in the school infirmary, about to be questioned for the murder of the other. Which twin died, and which is suspect?  And how did it come to this? Subsequent chapters twist and turn, going back in time to find the answers.

In addition to the sisterly dynamic, the factor that most inspired me to write She Was the Quiet One was the boarding-school setting.

Despite their reputation for obscure traditions and cliquish privilege, boarding schools fascinated me from the moment I first read F. Scott Fitzgerald at an impressionable age.

My inner-city public school with its dented lockers couldn’t compete with the fantasy of reading the great works of Western civilization on a leafy campus while clad in a Fair-Isle sweater and Bean boots. So smitten was I with the idea of prep school that I begged and pleaded until my very un-wealthy parents scraped together the funds to send me. There I found the education I dreamed of, and, along with it, a fishbowl social scene full of brilliant and compelling students and teachers.

With its verdant playing fields and its old brick buildings that smelled of chalk and dust, my alma mater is serene and iconic rather than Gothic. British essayist Pico Iyer wrote of his English boarding school: “Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones. . . . We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord’s Prayer in Latin every Sunday night.”

My school retained the romantic flavor of boarding school life while fortunately dispensing with the darker aspects.

The school in She Was the Quiet One is both idyllic and dangerous, due to a phenomenon that’s been in the news a great deal recently. At my alma mater, the vast majority of teachers were brilliant and dedicated. But there were a few about whom rumors circulated. Teachers, or coaches, who reputedly had inappropriately intense relationships with certain students. I confess to finding those rumors both disturbing and fascinating. But back then, years before the Catholic church abuse scandal became public, decades before Me, Too, it seemed unlikely that they were true.

Yet, in recent months, one famous prep school after another has faced claims of sexual abuse of students by teachers or staff, with many of the reports of abuse stretching back decades. Such storied schools as Exeter, Andover, Choate-Rosemary Hall, Deerfield, Milton Academy, Hotchkiss, St. Paul’s and St. George’s, among many others, have faced such reports. And boarding-school sex abuse is now a hot topic in the press, on television as well as in major newspapers and periodicals, including intensive investigative reporting by the famous Boston Globe Spotlight Team.

The relationship between Heath Donovan and Bel Enright is the most controversial aspect of She Was the Quiet One. Heath’s wife, Sarah, is a major point-of-view character. She’s a dedicated math teacher and advisor in the dorm where the sisters live. She’s also a wife and mother whose young family faces unfathomable risks due to her husband’s ambitions and flaws. The choices Sarah makes as she tries to unravel whether the terrible rumors about her husband and a young student are true will change the twins’ lives forever. Writing about these dynamics against the deeply atmospheric setting of an old New England boarding school was a thrilling experience, which I hope produced a thrilling read.

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Michele Campbell is a graduate of Harvard College and Stanford Law School and a former federal prosecutor in New York City who specialized in international narcotics and gang cases.  A while back, she said goodbye to her big-city legal career and moved with her husband and two children to an idyllic New England college town a lot like Belle River in IT’S ALWAYS THE HUSBAND. Since then, she has spent her time teaching criminal and constitutional law and writing novels.

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About SHE WAS THE QUIET ONE

From the author of It’s Always the Husband comes a riveting new suspense novel about privilege, power, and what happens when we let ambition take control. 

When twin sisters Rose and Bel Enright enroll in The Odell School, a prestigious New England boarding school, it seems like the opportunity of a lifetime. But the sisters could not be more different. The school brings out a rivalry between them that few ever knew existed. And the school itself has a dark underbelly: of privileged kids running unchecked and uninhibited; of rituals and traditions that are more sinister than they seem; of wealth and entitlement that can only lead to disaster.

For Sarah Donovan, wife of an ambitious teacher who is determined to rise through the ranks, Odell also seems like the best thing that could happen to their small family. But how well does she really know her husband? What lengths will he go to to achieve his goals? And when one dark night ends in murder, who is guilty, who knows the truth, and who has been in on it all along? SHE WAS THE QUIET ONE. Because murderers are almost never who you expect.

In a novel full of twists, turns, and dark secrets, Michele Campbell once again proves her skill at crafting intricately spun and completely compelling plots.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing