Literature teacher Clare Cassidy is prepping for the start of the new school term when she receives terrible news: Her best friend and colleague, Ella, has been murdered. Police find a note beside Ella's body, scribbled with a quotation from Shakespeare's The Tempest…words also found in one of Clare's favorite Gothic short stories, The Stranger by R. M. Holland. Then Clare finds a foreboding message in her private diary—a message written in a stranger's hand. And when another colleague is murdered, the link to R. M. Holland—and to Clare—is undeniable. Unfolding through the eyes of three women—Clare, Detective Sergeant Harbinder Kaur, and Clare's teenage daughter, Georgie—this contemporary whodunit delivers a thrilling homage to Gothic literature!