Fifteen-year-old Tom Carew is newly orphaned when he arrives at a Cornwall boarding school for problem students. Tom soon discovers that the school is a very strange place: it is rigged with surveillance equipment so that Dr Mancus, the man in charge of the school, can watch the boys' activities. The boys believe that Mancus is somehow involved with the mysterious deaths and disappearances of several boys. When Mancus and the languages teacher Flamel find Tom snooping around, they punish him with a barbaric device that electrocutes him until he is unconscious. What are Mancus and Flamel up to, what does it have to do with the boys' inheritances, and how will Tom escape Mancus's grasp?
