Murder Most Puzzling: A Literary Mystery - Hardcover

Robinson, Lillian S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 094196809X ISBN 13: 9780941968096

Publisher: UNKNO, 1998

Synopsis

The first of a new series of literary mysteries appealing to the readers of Amanda Cross, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

In order to help out her friend Becca Parsons, who's dying of stomach cancer, Margaret Jameson agrees to take Becca's place for a year as Professor of Poetry at Ebbing College, in the middle of Pennsylvania, in the middle of nowhere. Caring for Becca and sharing her house promises to be a challenge for Jamie, whose rolling-stone life since she took her Ph.D.a Fulbright Fellowship followed by a marriage to an experimental French novelist that would entitle her to call herself a countess except that shes to get a divorcehas kept her from holding a regular academic job. And of course more challenges await. The hundred- year-old manuscript by college donor Elizabeth Ebbing Brock that Jamie discovers, filled with fascinating revelations about Lizzie's lifelong liaison with her school friend Helen Breckenridge, disappears before she can arrange its publication, or even make copies, then reappears even more surprisingly. Preston Walters, the dean of faculty, sedately takes Jamie to bed, and then, when a quarrel arises over another of Jamies lovers, promptly replaces her with authorized Ebbing family historian Sharon Reilly, who gets herself killed with almost indecent haste. The modern side of the mystery, however, carries much less weight than the 19th-century intrigue, which in turn is less definite than first-novelist Robinson's professional feel for the leisurely annual rhythms of college teaching. Readers with a distaste for loud noises and unwelcome surprises will find quiet echoes of Amanda Cross here, and intimations of a thinner, less disciplined Gaudy Night. Becca's gentle decline, the core of Jamie's year, is handled with firmness and sensitivity. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: UNKNO
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 094196809X
• ISBN 13: 9780941968096
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 338