The drumming of horse hooves is a dismal accompaniment to Emily Luccock's thoughts as she rides with her silent Aunt and Uncle Twice to the ship that will carry them away to faraway India. They claim that Emily cannot go with them, but couldn't they have at least taken her to Mrs. Spilking's Select Academy, the school where she is being abandoned till they return? Why is she instead being left in the hands of the stone-cold Ichabod Crawstone, the man chosen to deliver her there? Aunt and Uncle Twice have been told that a member of a royal family attends the school, so it must be a most superior place. But what if they were to learn the truth -- that the school is run by a pinched-nose woman who keeps a large, vicious dog for no other reason than to terrify the students? Before long, Emily comes to the terrible realization that Aunt and Uncle Twice have forgotten all about her, so even if they did learn the truth about Mrs. Spilking's Select Academy, would they even care?

Here in the long-awaited sequel to her popular, award-winning "Peppermints in the Parlor," Barbara Brooks Wallace has written another Victorian thriller as spine-chilling and riveting as the first, and includes the mysterious reappearance of those wicked, tempting, PERILOUS red-and-white striped peppermints!