Stillton Academy, a small art college on the New England coast north of Boston, is in financial trouble, and its days are numbered unless someone provides extraordinary help. The final straw may be the sudden disappearance of an instructor with a female student, daughter of the Academy’s only significant donor.   Fred Taylor, called in to trouble-shoot, goes undercover as a member of the faculty and shortly finds himself enmeshed in the conflicting motives and designs of faculty and students, as well as those of a board of trustees whose interest in the long-term survival of the operation seems lazy, misguided or – perhaps – a good deal more sinister.   Meanwhile, as the town of Stillton, Massachusetts, is visited by murder, the motives of Fred’s employer, the collector Clayton Reed, remain obscure.
