CLUE Revisited: In The Hall With The Knife

In The Hall With The Knife, by Diana Peterfreund, is a young adult CLUE remake. During a freakish storm at the private Blackbrook Academy, stranding a few students and staff members in one of the creepiest camps buildings, with no access to the local village or power and internet, when then there’s a murder and everyone’s a suspect. I almost always love a good locked-door mystery, or a good school drama, and this sounds like a perfect blend with maybe the occasional movie-line callback.

Unfortunately,  there are too many characters snowed in, and it takes ages to sort out their personalities. Mostly because everyone seems to hate each other (except for the Platonic Power Couple of Scarlet and Plum), without acting on it.  I was DYING for some students to prank each other or enemies to extract some prep school revenge under the minimal adult supervision, but — spoiler alert — nope. No one has any drugs or booze, either,  and there weren’t even any hookups. I love the blend of teen secrets and dangerous secrets, so I admit I found these well-behaved teenagers a bit dull.

The characters all have color names, in a nod to the Clue characters, but somehow no one ever comments on this. (Only the guy who ISN’T named Mustard, but chooses that as his nickname, gets an eyeroll.) And the unfortunate victim, Headmaster Boddy, does spend most of the story as, well, a corpse.  No one mentions that, either.

There was just too much going on to really assess this story. Every good boarding-school thriller has stories of secret passages and what the classic buildings once were before it was a prep school, and the Blackbrook used to be a girl’s reform school.  I was excited for the specters of wayward girls or maybe a horror story about a suicide in the dorms. Instead, somehow when the prestigious science academy absorbed a girl’s reform school they kept an inmate on as dorm matron? And this is pretty much known, but isn’t suspicious to everybody?

Any prep school story could comment on privilege, but this one simply just says, over and over, that the kids’ sneakers/electronics/clothes are pricey. There’s no brand namedropping, there’s no one-upping comparison, either, or subtle digs at classmates with the wrong fashions in their survival bags.  We are told, repeatedly, that students are rich, but there wasn’t much lifestyle porn to envy or to set the scene. Vaughn Green, a townie on scholarship, could be a counterpoint to their wealth and ease, but even that is a bit flat because he’s too obviously connected to the local secrets.

Despite too many characters with almost no distinctions, the book has an over-the-top Clue themed mystery.  I loved the entrance to the secret passage (of course there’s a secret passage!), the evil twin reveal (of course there’s an evil twin!), the famous actress hiding in hoodies and *gasp* glasses, the famous YouTuber who can’t update without power. I especially loved Finn Plum sneaking away to the secret tunnels to work on his scientific invention of VantaBlack and keeping it from Stuart Semple, I mean,  developing a very, very black paint that Headmaster Boddy thinks the school should have the patent rights too. There’s a lot to enjoy in this snowy prep school mystery.

I really wondered how it was all going to wrap up, especially when I had just a few pages left,  and so much was unresolved, and the answer is that, well, it doesn’t. This is the first of a CLUE YA trilogy, so there a lot of cliffhangers. 

Mixed feelings. I’ll almost surely read the next one, but I’d only recommend it to readers with a real fondness for high school dramas, locked-room mysteries, and reimaginings.