Synopsis
When Professor Simon Shaw begins investigating the murder of a woman who turns out to be the long missing heiress to the Bloodsworth estate, he finds himself trying to find answers to a case that is more than seventy years old and that someone wants to keep unsolved
Reviews
A first novel set in Raleigh, N.C., where Pulitzer Prizewinner Simon Shaw teaches history at small, prestigious Kenan College, built largely on the estate once owned by the Bloodsworth family--now reduced to a distant cousin and her son Bobby Hinton, a student at Kenan. Historic Bloodsworth House is a feature of the campus, and it's on the grounds surrounding it that archeologist David Morgan unearths the corpse of a young woman, shot in the back of the head and long buried. Simon, recently divorced, his talents underused in summer school classes, is determined to plumb the mystery. Identification is easy: Anne Bloodsworth, daughter of industrialist Charles, disappeared from Bloodsworth House, the family residence, in 1926, never to be heard from again despite her father's efforts to find her via both the police and the Pinkerton Detective Agency. There are a few people still living who remember Anne--one of them the Bloodsworth housekeeper Bessie Cofield. Simon talks to her and to others, struggling at the same time with the jealousy of fellow teacher Alex Andrus; with a new-born attraction to Julia McGloughlan, legal counsel to massive Sergeant Gates of the Raleigh police; and with a couple of clumsy attempts on his life, the last of which nearly succeeds. Bright, brisk dialogue; a perceptive take on academic rivalries; and a flawed but very appealing Simon Shaw help to offset the sometimes unfocused, often unconvincing two-sided plot. Still, an accomplished debut. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Simon Shaw, Pulitzer Prize-winning history professor at a small, private college in Raleigh, assists police in identifying a body discovered behind an historic house on campus. Although the victim, a young heiress, died in 1926, Shaw feels compelled to find out who killed her. His quest, plus the attentions of a police lawyer interested in the case, pull him out of a depression caused by his recent divorce and departmental politics?but then someone tries to kill him. Although the prose is a bit cut and dried, the Raleigh setting and historic elements should please most readers.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Shaber won the St. Martin's Malice Domestic Contest for Best First Traditional Mystery Novel with this academic cozy, whose central character is a historian and whose central crime, fittingly, lies in the past. At Kenan College in Raleigh, North Carolina, excavations at Bloodworth House unearth a surprise: the corpse of a woman murdered 70 years previously. The police turn to history professor Simon Shaw, an expert on Bloodworth House, to help solve the ancient crime. But while investigating the past, Simon finds himself the target of a quite contemporary murderer, who might be linked to the case or who just might be a rivalrous colleague. Shaber plays nicely on the parallels between historians and detectives, though as mystery puzzles go, neither the old nor the new here poses much of a challenge. A low-key mystery, this is a personable book, with a likable, vulnerable protagonist, an abundance of wry humor, and a strong atmosphere of small-town life in the South. Gail Pool
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