In New York City, a young man is found murdered in a dingy Times Square sex theater-his neck gruesomely snapped-and the only clue is a torn receipt from the Montpelier School for Boys bookstore.

Christmas break is just a couple of weeks away when Montpelier student Russell Phillips fetches up dead. Headmaster Lane, preferring to view Phillips's death as a suicide, decides to keep the school open for the remainder of the term. But as the nights grow longer and colder-and more corpses begin to surface in connection with the rehearsals for Othello, the winter play-it becomes all too clear that the students and faculty are being stalked by a cool and calculating killer.

The local police and school administrators find themselves out of their depth. Even so, many people's suspicions begin to focus on a single suspect-until he, too, turns up dead.

A gripping tour de force that brilliantly uses an isolated boarding school campus as the setting for this propulsive mystery, Passion Play will keep the reader guessing until the final act.