Gentlemen & Players -- Joanne Harris

I loved this book.  Loved it.  I finished it and immediately hit the H's in the Fiction section.  I sense a pretty serious kick coming on.

The setting is St. Oswald's Grammar School for Boys.  Two characters tell the story:  Roy Straitley, who has been at St. Oswald's for over thirty years as a Classics teacher, and one of the new teachers, who has carried a grudge against the school since childhood, and who is determined to bring the school down from the inside.  (Bum bum buuuuuuum....)

I identified the bad guy pretty early on -- I was off on a few minor details -- but that didn't bother me at all.  Because, of course, I wasn't totally sure. 

The story is told in alternating chapters by Straitley and the mysterious baddie -- and oddly, I kind of loved them both.  Straitley just because he was purely awesome, but the villain partly because I was reminded of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley (Come on!  Sociopaths are GREAT!) but mostly because I was treated to bits like this:

Most adults assume that the feelings of adolescence don't count, somehow, and that those searing passions of rage and hate and embarrassment and horror and hopeless, abject love are something you grow out of, something hormonal, a practice run for the Real Thing.  It wasn't.  At thirteen, everything counts; there are sharp edges on everything, and all of them cut.  Some drugs can recreate that intensity of feeling, but adulthood blunts the edges, dims the colors and taints everything with reason, rationalization, or fear.  At thirteen I had no use for any of those.  I knew what I wanted; and I was ready, with the single-mindedness of adolescence, to fight for it to the death.

Super super super duper.  Read it.