title: Last Act
author: Marshall, Joanne
description: Last Act is the story of a friendly, gentle young woman thrown into an environment that is both unfamiliar and threatening. She finds her life at the Keyes School different and exciting, not least because of her new acquaintances--David and Erik, her suitors; Alice, her tutor: her schoolmates and her neighbors. But the air is fraught with inklings of danger that Hester comes to understand all too late.
  
  Whilst enrolling as a student at the West London Drama School run by a friend of her mother's, Hester Barnes sees a shape at a window -- is it someone or something? -- and is filled with foreboding.
  
  Alice Keyes, the Principal, seems to have become vague and eccentric, and when Hester again meets her childhood companion, Alice's godson, David, she finds her feelings toward him are unchanged. She instinctively dislikes him.
  
  To escape from the School and its oppressive atmosphere, Hester visits Holland Park where she meets Erik Pedersen, a handsome young Dane.
  
  Their friendship is encouraged by Alice, but Hester's fellow students prove unscrupulous in their dealings with her when it is discovered that Erik's work is linked with that of the television studios.
  
  When Erik invites Hester to his home to meet his parents, the Pedersen's prove elusive and the housekeeper had the aspect of a jailer.
  
  And what of Alice Keyes' oddly unobtrusive neighbors, the Mairs? What is their role in the real-life drama Hester is convinced is about to be enacted?
  