Apparently the second in a series, which explains the rather abrupt mis-en-scene. I guess is this a YA novel, but I wonder how many in the target audience are up to snuff with interwar British public school slang.
It’s well creepy, though. Newman has come quite a way since I read Anno Dracula back in the day, and I haven’t really read much of his stuff after that. The setting is between the wars, and some people are Unusuals - they can do magic, basically. In a all-girls boarding school, something returns after a disastrous trip to London…