Quaker Witness

When an eminent Harvard paleontologist is murdered in his lab, Irene Allen abandons her nonviolent existence to help the prime suspect in the murder, a friend who once filed sexual harassment charges against the late professor

Elizabeth Elliot, a widow and clerk of the Quaker Meeting House in Cambridge, Mass., was introduced in the quietly effective novel Quaker Silence . Near the beginning of this return engagement, Elizabeth listens to the anguished outpourings of a young woman Ph.D. student in paleontology at Harvard. Janet Stevens has endured escalating sexual harassment from her male faculty advisor. Unable to put up with it any longer, she has filed a complaint at the university and is sure her hopes of a career in science are over. When the professor is murdered in his lab, Janet becomes the prime suspect. Evidence mounts against her, and Elizabeth, with the help of a friend who is a secretary in the paleontology department, begins her own investigations. Though the dialogue is sometimes slightly stilted, Allen delivers a thoughtful and suspenseful story that examines issues of personal morality and social responsibility, even as it exposes the ambition and ruthlessness depicted as rampant in Harvard's hallowed labs and administration buildings. Elizabeth, who questions her own motives while probing the actions of others, is a fully dimensioned, appealing heroine. Literary Guild selection.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

No need for Harvard grad student Janet Stevens to press her sexual harassment complaint against her advisor, eminent paleontologist Prof. Peter Chadwick: somebody's killed him in his lab by a clever method that pretty well narrows down the suspects to his professional colleagues. Was it one of his other grad students--beady-eyed Forrest Lang or nice-guy Eric Townsend--or his hungry junior competitor Peter Kolakowski? Or, as the Cambridge police insist, was it Janet herself? Fortunately, Janet ends up in the capable hands of Quaker clerk Elizabeth Elliot (Quaker Silence, 1992), whose no-nonsense authority (``humor of any sort was suspect to her'') is just what Janet needs (``Would you be so kind as to come to my house for lunch?...A can of soup seems called for'') to steel her against assorted villains of satisfyingly deep hue. Apart from an irrelevant but sharply observed subplot in which Elizabeth tries to deal with a newly released rapist she's taken in: as self-assured and ingenuous as Nancy Drew, and about as mystifying. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.