Aided by his housemaster Piers Fawkes - a once-famous poet who has turned to alcohol - Andrew realises he must discover the secret history behind the letters in order to prevent further deaths. Soon another classmate falls ill and Andrew finds himself increasingly drawn into a nightmare as he discovers some old letters hidden in a forgotten basement that has been bricked up.

His fellow Harrovians joke about 'The Lot Ghost' but when a classmate dies and Andrew spots a white figure bending over the corpse, the ghost suddenly becomes all too real. Before long Andrew senses a malevolent presence haunting his footsteps. It is an eccentric place, a rambling ancient building filled with England's elite and entrenched in its past, with strange uniforms and traditions that date back hundreds of years.Shortly after he arrives, the other pupils notice Andrew's striking resemblence to Lord Byron, a former pupil of Harrow, and Andrew is persuaded by Persephone, the headmaster's daughter, to play Byron in the school's forthcoming play.

Meanwhile, cast in the role of Lord Byron in a play written by drunken and bitter housemaster Piers Fawkes, Andrew finds himself adopting Byron's exotic lifestyle amid a love affair, a TB epidemic, and various bizarre elements in this disturbing gothic thriller.Fleeing an expulsion and entanglement in the death of a close friend, Andrew Taylor is sent by his father to spend his final year at the prestigious public school Harrow. Soon plagued by nightmares, Andrew learns that someone resembling this gaunt figure appeared in a performance of John Webster's Jacobean tragedy, The White Devil, at Harrow in 1803. In a cemetery on nearby Harrow-on-the-Hill, Andrew is horrified to witness the murder of a fellow student and resident of the Lot, a dilapidated dormitory reputed to be haunted, at the hands of a pale skeletal figure in an old-fashioned frock coat. Andrew Taylor, a 17-year-old American expelled from a Connecticut prep school for heroin use, gets into Harrow thanks to his father's generous gift to the school, one of whose more illustrious alumni is Lord Byron. Harrow, the elite English boys school, provides the setting for Evans's gripping second novel (after A Good and Happy Child).

The White Devil by Justin Evans