1994 mystery, fifth in its series. Sheila Malory spends a semester
guest-lecturing at a small American university. Of course there are
faculty politics, and in particular a hateful pair of brothers. But
nobody is expecting one of them to be murdered, still less both… vr
Detective In Residence.
There's a stylistic trick here that irked me slightly: when
considering alibis and enumerating suspects, there's a lot of "what a
pity X didn't turn up for our meeting, because they would been my
alibi" without ever actually pointing out that this makes X an
un-alibied suspect too. Often that's a sign of a writer who is trying
to sneak things past the reader. Whether it is here I won't say of
course, but it annoys me when I meet it.
But this is more a story of character than of mystery. In particular,
the senior investigator is clearly attracted to Mrs Malory, and while
she likes him well enough she certainly doesn't want to contemplate a
romance. But at the same time he's her window into the investigation,
and genuinely values her insights. And then she has to decide what
to do when people confide in her…
Which does make it a little awkward that she ends up being the only
person who actually knows what happened, everyone else involved being
dead by the end of things, and decides to suppress it. It is in
character, but it feels like a minor violation of the rules of the
mystery-story game. What's the point of knowing what really happened
if you don't share it with the world? It makes the protagonist's
detection superfluous.
Good, even so, and effectively melancholy.