Poetic Justice

Kate Fansler Mystery #3

by Amanda Cross

Student riots have ravaged the distinguished New York City university where Kate Fansler teaches. In the ensuing disarray, the survival of the university's plebeian stepchild, University College, seems doubtful. President Jeremiah Cudlipp is snobbishly determined to ax it; and as sycophantic professors fall in line behind him, the rally of Kate and few rebellious colleagues seems doomed. It is a fight to the death, and only a miracle--or perhaps a murder--can save their beloved institution. . . .

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Crime, Academia, Detective, Mystery Thriller, Female Authors

Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

A psuedonym of Carolyn G. Heilbrun.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Susanna - Censored by GoodReads · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very much a period piece. Not that this is a bad thing. Some passages were howlingly funny to someone who grew up in and around English departments of about this period.

[Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found the language and attitudes of the main characters so pretentious that I couldn't keep reading. Will there ever be a plot? Or will the characters just wander around looking down on everyone all day? I'll never know. :D

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

My third reading of a Kate Fansler mystery and I will look forward to reading all 14 books in this series when able.
This one has students rioting/rebelling and as a result there is unrest at the college/university college. Even Kate is invited to the faculty club as alliances are made or broken over the survival of the University College.
This is also the book that allows the relationship between Kate and Reed to progress toward marriage. Before that event, however, we are presented with the mystery of the murder of one of their own. It is done with aspirins given to a man who was allergic to them.
The muse in this rendition is W. H. Auden, much quoted throughout the telling.
Why do I love these collegiate settings? A path not taken I think. I know I would have loved that life, and the author having lived it herself portrays it masterfully.

"But sense or not, I love you, and if we marry it shall be properly, with a ring and a judge and a license so that if you decide to leave me or I you I shall at least not be cheating some lawyer out of the chance to arrange a divorce. Do your brothers have to come to the wedding? I'm glad to hear they don't, because frankly the thought of your brothers terrifies me. Kate, let's get married on Thanksgiving. That way, we don't have to remember the date even, we can just celebrate on the last Thursday in every November-which will be a holiday, so much more convenient if you stop to think about it....I am willing enough to put up with Auden...I am even willing to quote a bit of Auden now and then on my own, but I want to make quite clear that I will not put up with the poetry of Sara Teasdale."

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe even 4.5*, just because I do so love an academic setting for a mystery!

An academic mystery which deals with the internal politics & struggles of the faculty of a major (unnamed) New York city university is the kind of mystery I would have loved to write myself. Written in 1970, student unrest provides the background to the situation but as anyone who has been a college or university professor knows, the factions & committees etc. could have been taking place at any time. I had a few laughs (such as at the doctoral dissertation defense meeting & the professor describing a recent play he had attended) as well.

I loved the Auden quotes at the start of each chapter & throughout the text; I will have read his poetry for myself sometime soon!

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetic Justice by Amanda Cross
10 out of 10


One magnificent reward that we gain after reading a chef d’oeuvre like Poetic Justice is that we have the confirmation that extraordinary, brilliant, sophisticated, superior (in the best sense), erudite, fantastically gifted earthlings inhabit the world where you also find brutes, incredibly primitive leaders (and in turn, more problematic, hundreds of millions or billions of pithecanthropus are worshipping them…the latest news is that in America, the stupid –in-chief has a 95% approval rating...among Republicans – what can you say to that and to the equally monstrous information that the one who has to be worried about the pandemic is preoccupied with these and other petty things)

Amanda Cross is overwhelming in her erudition, creativeness, the complexity of the narrative, the splendid main character and all the others that appear in what is such a scholarly, amusing, entertaining book that happens to have a crime in it – at this I am reminded of the magnetic teacher of literature we had in high school, honorable Anton Chevorchian, who maintained that any great novel has a crime story inside, from Crime and Punishment on – though if it is murder, as we suspect, remains to be seen…obviously, nothing would be mentioned on the outcome, what and who did, in spite of the fact that the work of art is solid and the aspect which has it included on The Guardian’s 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list - https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... - in the Crime department, looks rather less crucial than it generally is for such features.
Indeed, perhaps I am not alone in generally dismissing the category of ‘policiers’, tomes that deal with the cops and robbers, the detective that follows the killer or killers and gets a payback, when he catches the villain, or maybe takes for himself the stash of jewels, as happens in some of the genre, or in the more modern versions, it can be someone with the spotlight on the Vatican, the centuries old secrets, The Da Vinci Code - http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/03/t... - as in the famous plot by Dan Brown.

As in any domain, there would be the ‘cheap’, if not in currency value, then in intellectual worth, and the phenomenal, deeply rewarding, thought provoking and challenging works as we surely have the case with Poetic Justice, which is a masterpiece in its own right and the crime committed appears more like an added ingredient, a welcome addition to an already full course gourmet meal, with champagne, caviar and all the more expensive, refined dishes, and this outstanding novel looks more like a tribute to the Poet W.H. Auden, a tabernacle for high culture in general, since we have mostly quotes from Auden – the heroine, Professor Kate Fansler is an admirer – but my absolute favorite Proust, Boccaccio, Yeats (magnificent and silly according to Auden) and many others are mentioned a few times, sometimes in passing or with their views on W.H. Auden…
Christopher Isherwood, author of the superb Goodbye to Berlin - http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/08/g... - is a character in Poetic Justice, he has studied with W. H. Auden – on second thought, Auden is the second most important personage in the crime novel – the latter sang in the choir opposite Isherwood, who would have some witty, provocative comments on the poet…the relationship between him and the heroine is also perfect, in that ‘it was wholly satisfactory to Auden could be inferred from the fact that he had never heard of it…’

In the introductory lines, we learn that there had been a rather violent and destructive rebellion of students, which have trampled all the flowers, turned the grass covered patches into scorched earth and did much more substantial damage to the institution and what follows is a clash between President Jeremiah Cuddlip and his acolytes and a group to which Kate Fansler is invited to belong and then she becomes a fervent promoter of the University College, which snobbish, arrogant, old fashioned men want to eliminate.
The dispute appears both esoteric, a clash of ideas and egos, but it does have some quite material implications, for instance we have people trapped in elevators, because students pushed by Cuddlip – we would discover – tamper with the electricity boxes and stop the moving cages in their journey between floors – alas, this would prove fatal in one situation where the victim of poisoning has to be taken to the hospital and the delay of the elevator, stuck again, would prove tragic in that the time to arrive at the emergency care proves too long to save the dying man…

Quotes in this miraculous magnum opus are fantastic – ‘unready to die, but already at the stage when one starts to dislike the young’…Don Juan needs no bed, nor do Tristan and Isolde, much to in love to care for so mundane a matter’…’I wish I were an African nation, it must be so comforting to think of oneself as emerging’…TS Eliot said that ‘Auden is no scholar ‘and indeed, the fact that WH Auden wrote that Tennyson is the stupidest poet appears to prove that point, for if he were a scholar, he would have found others, stupider…
Reed Amhearst is working with the DA’s office and as the love interest of the heroine – they would soon decide to marry, for after a long period during which he had expressed his intention, she decides she would like to move in with him and since he would agree only after they have their marital vows, a sacred union is planned – he becomes involved in solving the murder mystery, that looks like a crucial element in the fight for the survival of the University College, in jeopardy if not imminent death throes, before the demise of President Jeremiah Cuddlip.

As Reed Amhearst and Kate Fansler have a party thrown for them by the secretaries and other personnel, Jeremiah Cuddlip comes to the celebrated, soon to be married opponent and he sates he has a headache, prepares to take two pills, but immediately after, he collapses uttering ‘aspirin’, he is taken to the elevator by Reed, but by the time they arrive at the nearby hospital, the victim has had hemorrhage and is declared dead, mainly because of the aspirin he mentioned, which must have been introduced in the tube of medicine he used regularly and for which he had a violent intolerance, the allergy finally causing his demise…though in the analysis of the now investigator of the case, the one who tampered with the aspirin had had the intention to cause some damage, but not to kill the man –circumstances in the transportation caused the departure, for if the elevator were to function properly, Cudlipp would have been saved, only physically though, for they would establish that the mind of the man had not been functioning properly for quite some time, deserting the body before the latter became terminally incapacitated itself…

Posted 22nd April 2020 by realini

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[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is set during the turbulent student uprisings. Kate is charged with saving the University College, sort of like NYU's New School, primarily for adults returning to finish their education. The powers that be do not want the school to continue, the reasons are not clear. The leader of the movement is Professor Cudlipp, a stereotypical academic snob, and he is murdered. Kate and Reed are bound to find out the truth.

This is one of Amanda Cross's best, wittiest, best conceived mysteries. The characters are well drawn and three dimensional. Some of her descriptions were so true to type that I laughed until I cried. It may be her most literary novel. Each chapter is introduced by a quotation from the great English poet, W.H. Auden and Auden is present --though generally in absentia -- throughout the novel.

The mysterious death of one of the University's most bigoted faculty members (Cudlip) is presented against an accurate picture of University politics, during the Columbia student revolt of the last '60s. (The author, AKA Carolyn G. Heilbrun, is Professor Emeritus from Columbia, where she was awarded an endowed Chair in Humanities after teaching Victorian literature for many years.) Lionel Trilling, the great American literary critic and scholar appears, thinly disguised as "Frederick Cremance." Trilling/Cremance coined and popularized the expression "the life of the mind." Heinlein was one of his students, though he doubted that women were capable of having a "life of the mind." As Kate Fansler she has an opportunity to challenge him at long last. The writing is graceful, literary and tasteful.

[Colin Mitchell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written in an academic style and the story content is mainly about University politics and general infighting. The mystery doesn't occur until the halfway point in the book and then it is Kate Fansler's love interest, Reed Amherst who does the investigating.

Very little to enjoy in this story. Good job it was 177 pages, Just about mustered 2 stars from me.

[Calum Fisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a strange beast. Rarely has the mystery in an ostensible mystery novel felt so cursory - nothing happens murder-wise until halfway through, and even then it's all wrapped up pretty sharpish and Agatha Christie can certainly rest easy in the cunning plotting stakes. Cross/Heilbrun was a pioneering academic, and you can tell - she is clearly far more interested in endlessly quoting Auden and discussing academic politics than in constructing a compelling mystery. Her hero Kate Fansler is appealing enough, but clearly a huge author-substitute. In short it's fantastically self-indulgent, with whole chapters about the finer points of university administration and all with everyone quoting Auden at each other all the while. As part of the university world, I enjoyed its portrait of university life in late 1960s New York, the bitchy infighting and factionalism of academics, the politics both within departments and across the university and society as a whole. As academics complain about workload and students occupy the admin blocks, I was struck by how little has really changed! However for those less indulgent of, or less interested in, such stuff - and instead looking for a gripping mystery novel with a great plot and appealing characters - I suspect they'd find this fairly interminable.

[Tex · Rating 2 out of 5]

There has never been, with me, a great love of poetry nor of repeated quoting of authors and poets. This story had just too much of both. While the story was somewhat interesting, I wasn't thrilled with having to weed my way through names of literary B-list (C-list, I'm just not sure) celebrities to get, finally, to the tale. Kept from 1 star by the sheer force of her writing.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another wordy, witty but not very compelling mystery. I would like to find myself a Reed Amhearst of my own, though.

[Quiver · Rating 1 out of 5]

Difficult to get into; far too concerned with itself; disconnected from the prescience of current school blockades and events the world over. Left unfinished. Perhaps it will read better in different times.

[Pamela Mclaren · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like the era in which it was written, Poetic Justice opens with a university coming back from recent student upheaval. The top administration is gone and there are many in acting roles while there is a general review of how the institution is operated. One of the proposed changes that seems to be coming is the closure of University College, that part of universities that offer specialized studies and in this case even degrees.

The efforts to keep or eliminate the program is university politics at its highest and Professor Kate Fansler finds herself in the midst of it all. And that, classes and committee work is not enough, she finally accepts the marriage proposal from her boyfriend, district attorney Reed Amhearst. It is during a departmental engagement for her, tragedy strikes, sending both Fansler and Amhearst into full investigative mode.

For light reading this was OK — much like what I feel about the character of Fansler herself. I indeed have had a love-hate relationship with this series of books. Fansler reminds me of a caricature of a college professor — perhaps they were more like this in the 70s, especially those first women who became tenured professors on college campuses, as did Carolyn Gold Heilbrun who wrote under the Amanda Cross name. And some of her dialogue came over as a bit of gobbligook, frankly, to me and dragged down the story. Fighting, however, over 'territory' is not unusual on a college campus, so that part of the book is realistic.

So the setting for the mystery was realistic and the resolution is clever, but its not much of an 'ah ha' solution. Only a 2 - 2.5 for me.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rereading this great series. Kate is now engaged to Reed. The story begins in the spring with student sit-ins and general destructiveness, which rather lowers the morale of the faculty. Kate is requested to help the University College - formerly extension courses but now an "adult" college within the University itself, which even grants degrees. Faculty of the University, especially the undergraduate college and some members of the graduate English department, are trying to shut down the University College (UC) on the grounds that its degrees somehow cheapen the value of those given by the University. The depth of the antagonism is a little difficult to understand. Kate accepts some students from the UC into one of her graduate courses, and is impressed by both their brains and their determination. At a staff "engagement party" for Kate and Reed, one of the loudest enemies of the UC takes aspirin for a headache, apparently by mistake for his normal paracetamol, and becomes violently ill. Reed and others take him downstairs to meet the ambulance, but the elevator stalls and by the time they are rescued, it is too late. Apparently the elevators have been stalling at inconvenient times, such as right before important meetings when everyone is trying to arrive on time, and Kate herself had been trapped by a stall some weeks before this. Reed is asked to try to determine if the death was an accident or murder, and of course Kate helps him. The fate of the UC appears to hang on their decision. If it was murder, was it committed by one of the several members of the University who have been embroiled in the UC decision, or was it committed by someone from the UC itself?

[Eloise · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I included a quote from Carolyn Heilbrun in one of my college papers, my professor asked if I knew her other identity: Amanda Cross. I did not. And at the time I did not have time (in my pursuit of a degree) to find her. Years later, I found his note, went to the used bookstore, bought a bunch of her books, and am now finally reading them. This one is set in 1970. I remember that year well: my first son was born in September that year.

Her books have a certain charm for an English major, but she is not someone I would recommend to anyone but my fellow English majors. The format is pretty standard and predictable. The "take" on college campuses, however, tickles my funny bone.

[Priscilla Herrington · Rating 4 out of 5]

When this book was written in 1970 it was contemporary. Reading it today is interesting (to say the least) especially if the reader has any experience of and interest in the world of academia! On the one had, there is a dated quality - yet on the other, we see some of the roots of today's college life and issues.

But this is a murder mystery! Although the murder itself doesn't take place until the second half of the book! So it is definitely a murder mystery, but also a commentary on academia and feminism, on the snobbery of the upper classes, and politics and revolution behind the ivy=covered walls! Altogether, a delicious read!

[Jan Priddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

. . . and despite what I am about to write, I really really enjoyed this novel. "It took me back" and showed me an authentic view of a period I know very well from the other side of the country. The characters are authentic and the times and academic issues are fascinating to me. Even if the murder does not arrive until more than halfway through and the resolution is almost silly, it was a great read.

I was 17 when I began my education at the University of Washington in Seattle. It was the only college I applied to, the only one I knew well. I know I considered the local Shoreline Community College, but not seriously. Years later my dad said he'd wanted me to attend San Francisco Art Institute but my mother insisted they could not afford to send me (they could). In any event, I would not have left Seattle and I knew the UW. I had participated in the marches, visited classes, and the Art Dept. was excellent. I paid my way through six years and three degrees at the UW, graduated with honors and Phi Beta Kappa. I was an earnest, if troublesome student.

This novel is about higher education in an unnamed elite university. I was aware in those days of how such private universities and colleges operated, how wealthy young teenagers who would grow up to become Joan Didion and Sandra Alcosser were chosen for prestigious internships by Mademoiselle magazine. They were listed as "College name, graduation year" e/g Radcliffe, 1972. All the entering freshman flew straight out of prep schools and finished college in four years. The boys too.

So this 1970 novel is about the breakdown of that prescription beginning with student unrest.

I can't be sure how much she gets wrong. She certainly fails to make even a passing reference to the Viet Nam War (generally not "Vietnam" in those days), and Kate herself comes across as stuffy and entitled. By the time this novel was published, Kent State should have required even a disguised murder mystery author to make some mention of the war. But no. Not a word. The protests are presented as being carried out by spoiled young men with no particular agenda. That's not what I lived through.

The author's alter ego insists that the way for women to become liberated is to stop carry what other women think. I knew women like that—entitled, always white and talented, women who claimed to suffer no discrimination. Like Margaret Atwood who refuses to consider claimed feminism. Another disappointment.

And Kate dismisses (and misunderstands) The Medium Is the Message in a way that seems hopelessly clueless. Marshall McLuhan was probably not right in his theories about how the very media even more than the wedges it projects demands closer study, but it would be naive to deny him entirely given how the internet has impacted public understanding of the world today.

[Budge Burgess · Rating 2 out of 5]

A novel which had me waiting for it to start. Forty pages in and the writer has mentioned student sit-ins (the book was published in 1970) at the university where her central character, Kate, teaches. As a political aside, Kate discovers that the former dean had a genuine Van Gogh hanging in his office. And we don’t really get any further along this road or develop any more political insight.
We have this American academic who is obsessed with the English poet, Auden, and who seems to have an Auden quote for every occasion. I’d be more impressed if the author had a murder for this occasion. We’re 60 pages into a 170+ pages book and I’m still waiting for something to happen … ideally the murder of an American academic or two choked to death on undigested pages of Auden.
70 pages in and our poetry-reading sleuth is stuck in a lift (they call them elevators in the USA). If someone doesn’t die soon, and die violently, I’ll not be prepared to answer for my actions.
89 pages in, we’ve had a committee meeting – does anyone ever feel any nostalgia for committee meetings? At this one somebody referenced Godot … as in ‘waiting for’. But … but … yes., it now looks like we’re promised a murder, there’s one on the horizon!
By page 100 the author has finally killed off some poor sacrificial bastard whose existence, till now, has largely been pointless. In death, he gives the story some point, dull and blunted though it may be.
120 pages in and we’ve got our bloodied stiff. “There’s been a murder!” And we’re still prattling on with faculty meetings and chitchat.
I remind myself, this book was published in 1970. In 1968 I was standing in an English field watching Hendrix, in 1968 I watched scores of rock acts, listened to scores more, lived a life which was wall-to-wall music.
In 1969 I marched against the war and waved a Vietnamese flag outside the US embassy. In 1970, I sat in at a couple of universities, spent days and nights arguing politics, spent days and nights trying to get laid, spent the odd few minutes actually getting laid.
This book was published in 1970 while the author was lecturing at a US university! Did she actually take time out to notice if anything was going on down the corridor, never mind in the rest of the world? A book with zero atmosphere, zero tension, a book which has left me with zero memories.

[Alison C · Rating 3 out of 5]

There has been a lot of upheaval at the College in recent months, and Kate Fansler is reluctantly drawn into various groups trying to effect change in the light of student revolts. One change in particular is to bring University College, a former extension program now including degree courses, into the fold of the College as a whole. A reasonable idea, Kate thinks, but there are powerful people at the College who oppose it vehemently. When one of those people dies unexpectedly as a result of an allergic reaction, Kate and assistant district attorney Reed Amhearst, her fiance, try to determine whether that death was purely an accident or if there is a more sinister explanation…. This is the third Kate Fansler novel, published in 1970 and set against the backdrop of student activism in that era. I felt that the whole “student revolution” theme was treated very dismissively, although the students themselves were very earnest about their demands in the real world, but I suppose long-serving academics might well have felt that way. In terms of the infighting and politics of the school itself, all rings especially true in this story, at least with respect to what I know about such situations (having worked in an academic setting myself and also knowing numerous people more deeply ensconced in that environment). All that said, though, somehow Kate came across as rather more waspish in this novel as compared to the earlier ones, and I found myself not liking her very much for most of the book. Not enough to prevent me from reading further into the series, but I’m a little more impatient with her at the moment; therefore, mildly recommended.

[Ken Ryu · Rating 3 out of 5]

The language of this mystery is cumbrous to the point you ponder if Cross is purposefully playing up this pseudo-sophisticated phraseology. If so, she succeeds in nauseating the reader. The backdrop is a NY city university's English department. The large cast of faculty members all speak in this arrogant manner. Rather than chatting up the latest movies, sports events, politics or weather, the staff speaks of university gossip and invariably introduce a poem, literary reference or some other esoteric academic montage during their unconvincing dialog exchanges. Interspersed through the book are scores of W.H. Auden poems and references. The main character Kate is an English professor and is sponsoring a PhD thesis on the British poet.
This short book has more university inner-working discussion than murder mystery. Only after the first maladroit half do we finally get to a murder.
Cross is more interested in paying homage to Auden and examining the elitist attitude of Ivy League colleges over the more pedestrian universities that attract working class and older students than telling an engaging murder mystery. The characters are snobbish prigs and the drama and conflicts are ho-hum. This fall short of a literary work and fails as a mystery novel.

[Jim Mann · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first half of this mystery really isn't a mystery. It's a story of university politics. Kate Fansler's university, in the aftermath of student protests, has decided to make changes. One such change is a reactionary one: there is a push to get rid of University College, the college of older students who have returned to school later in life. Some elements of the university think that University College dimities the university as a whole, and want it gone. Kate is recruited to the side of University College, and comes to support it, in opposition to what she views as snobbish and bigoted behavior from some university members.

But when one advocate for abolishing University College dies after ingesting aspirin, a substance he's allergic to, Kate and soon-to-be-husband and assistant DA Reed investigate whether this was murder or an accident.

This is an entertaining novel, even if it takes a while for the mystery part of it to get going. It's full of literary references, particularly to the poetry of D.H. Auden (who actually shows up late in the novel for a poetry reading that Kate and Reed attend). I really enjoying such literary datective novels (I'm also a fan of Colin Dexter's Morse novels), and this one is lots of fun. Recommended.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the characters teasingly accuses Kate Fansler of “talking like a bad imitation Nancy Mitford,” and we should probably take that as a confession rather than a one-liner. Much of the novel reads like a pastiche of Nancy Mitford and Gaudy Night, like Sayers occasionally offering something profound and like Mitford occasionally striking off a spark of real wit, but just as often producing little more than the pose of an actor waiting for applause or laughter. I suppose that what I mean to say is that there are a number of moments in Mitford and in Sayers where they misvalue the effects they have achieved; their self-satisfaction and the reader’s satisfaction are not in tune. There are more of these moments in this novel.

On the other hand, one could read Poetic Justice as a work of unflinching realism; English departments (and academia in general) teem with people who cannot accept fully that they are in fact not as clever as Wilde or as limpid as Auden (the literary genius of this novel) or as rakishly eccentric as Byron. Perhaps Poetic Justice should be read not as a comic mystery but as gimlet-eyed reportage.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange beast this: a murder mystery in which both the murder and the mystery seem academic to the novel. Academic is indeed the word, both for the setting (an unnamed New York College) and the writing style ( in which the nominal sleuth, Kate Fansler, indulges in back-and-forth quotations of Auden's poetry with everyone). More relevant than any victim poisoned by aspirin to which he is allergic, are the demonstating students and philosophical discussions about the relevance of and access to higher education. Cross will be worth hunting down as I feel that although this may be the highest regarded of her novels, the others may be more fun.

[Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amanda Cross was a pseudonym for Carolyn Heilbrun, who, like her fictional sleuth, was a Columbia English Lit professor. So this is the real inside scope on Ivy League academic life circa 1969ish.

I always find the Amanda Cross books difficult to start. If I stick with the first ten pages or so, I get the rhythm, and in this case, then went very quickly. The plot has one or two twists beyond my understanding, but the cast of characters and Kate's succinct speech about marriage were great.

I love to read about elevators, and they feature heavily here.

[Jan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is set during the turbulent student uprisings. Kate is charged with saving the University College, sort of like NYU's New School, primarily for adults returning to finish their education. The powers that be do not want the school to continue, the reasons are not clear. The leader of the movement is Professor Cudlipp, a stereotypical academic snob. Predictably, he is murdered and Kate and Reed are bound to find out the truth.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me awhile to get into this story. I’m not sure if it was the plot or distractions in my life. Nonetheless overall I enjoyed this story. This one was more focused on its literary subject, W.H. Auden: much quoting, discussing, and an appearance. The setting of revolution in the late 1960’s university was interesting and surprising. The revolution was not surprising, the politics were.

I’m on a quest to work through all of the Kate Fansler novels, I will continue...

[Delmar H. Dolbier · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring. Pretentious, bordering on precious. As a mystery, a flop. For whatever bearing it had on the "mystery," the material in the first half of the book could have been presented in a few paragraphs. The author could have written a novel about academic life and politics or she could have written a murder mystery. She tried to do both and failed.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

Student riots seem a thing of the past, but the efforts of those of privilege to keep their turf as exclusive as possible, is not.
A lot of Amanda Cross goes over my head, especially the poetry of Auden of which she is so fond.
Enough remains to enjoy. A well-wrought mystery.
"Esoteric, scholarly," but I hope not too "turgid."

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was as much a treatise on the changes in colleges in the 1970s as a murder mystery. The murder didn't happen until the last quarter of the book, although it became apparent early on just who would be murdered. And I figured out the murderer quickly. But, I just love the "literary talk", so I enjoyed it.

[Lisa Day · Rating 2 out of 5]

Academic arguments

This book reminds me of two truths: that the more English departments may change, the more they stay the same, and that academic arguments are so fierce because so little is at stake.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Likeable characters and a simple mystery but VERY ‘intellectual’. Makes me sound like a dummy but these university types were all very much in love with themselves and their different fields of study.