The Headmaster's Wife by Orania Papazoglou (2006, Paperback, Reprint)

Even though we have this book listed in our store, I cannot in good conscience recommend this book--I didn't like it at all. In fact, a little more than halfway through I tossed it for another book. She's a best-selling author, highly acclaimed, but I was so bored that I hated to pick it up and continue reading. I usually don't make it that far into a book I don't like, but I kept thinking that it would improve. It didn't--not in my eyes anyway.
It's about a student in a private high school, Mark DeAvecca, who thinks he sees a body at the school's pond, and later finds his roommate hanged in their dorm room. It's common knowledge around the campus that the dead student was having an affair with the married wife of the headmaster, but no one talks about it even though the campus is rife with gossip of everyone and everything else.
Mark is having suspicious symptoms that closely resemble drug use, and when he tries to tell authorities at the school that something is wrong with him, no one pays any attention, thinking it's all drug-related. In desperation he calls on Gregor Demarkian, a homicide investigator friend of his family, who quickly finds that he's been poisoned with caffeine tablets and possibly arsenic as well. This is as far as I made it, and it shouldn't have taken more than a few chapters to set it up, instead of 250 pages.
The author goes into boring detail after boring detail about each character's psychological and life history, saying in pages and pages of trivialities, what she could and should have said in just a few sentences.
If you are a Jane Haddam--Papazoglou's pen name--fan, and have liked her previous novels, then you will probably like this one, but if you like more action and less drivel, don't waste your money.