The Temple House Vanishing

Twenty-five years ago, a sixteen-year-old girl and her charismatic teacher disappeared without a trace from an elite Catholic boarding school in Ireland. It's a school at which the pupils live under the watchful gaze of the nuns who control virtually every move the young girls make. Seeking a reprieve from the stodgy, cloistered atmosphere, two sixteen-year-olds, best friends Victoria and Louisa, quickly become infatuated with their young, bohemian art teacher who encourages their flirtation but finds himself unable to control the emotions he has stirred up in them. Then suddenly he and Louisa disappear. Now, with the approach of the twenty-fifth anniversary of their vanishing, a young reporter is assigned to go back and research the case, with the goal of finding a resolution. Told in alternating first-person voices of Louisa and the unnamed reporter, the reality of life at Temple House is revealed as stories of jealousy and revenge and the struggle for power surface thanks to the reporter's dogged pursuit of the truth. And in the end, the truth becomes inevitable. The Temple House Vanishing is a stunning, intensely atmospheric novel of unrequited longing, dark obsession, and uneasy consequences.