Campus Crime Novels
Miss Pym Disposes
On any credible list of all time great mysteries, you'll find at least one novel by Joesphine Tey: Daughter of Time, Brat Farrar, The Franchise Affair. They're all fantastic. My pick is Miss Pym Disposes, a brilliant and uncommonly perceptive novel that takes place at a women's college. Pop psychologist Lucy Pym is an alum. She returns for a lecture and ends up staying on for a while, a respite from the hustle and bustle of fame, and she's enjoying the company of the young students. The novel is fascinating for so many reasons, not the least of which is the way in which Miss Pym applies her version of psychology to what she observes, and how the various characters are viewed sympathetically and unsympathetically. The blurb below, which comes from the publsiher, does not do justice to the novel's complexities, especially to its elegant, stunning ending, which leaves us with much to consider, long after we turn the last page.
- Jim Huang, Bookshop Director
Audition for Murder
Black Hour
Gaudy Night: A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery with Harriet Vane
"Gaudy Night stands out even among Miss Sayers's novels. And Miss Sayers has long stood in a class by herself." --Times Literary Supplement
The great Dorothy L. Sayers is considered by many to be the premier detective novelist of the Golden Age, and her dashing sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, one of mystery fiction's most enduring and endearing protagonists. Acclaimed author Ruth Rendell has expressed her admiration for Sayers's work, praising her "great fertility of invention, ingenuity, and wonderful eye for detail." The third Dorothy L. Sayers classic to feature mystery writer Harriet Vane, Gaudy Night features an introduction by Elizabeth George, herself a crime fiction master. Gaudy Night takes Harriet and her paramour, Lord Peter, to Oxford University, Harriet's alma mater, for a reunion, only to find themselves the targets of a nightmare of harassment and mysterious, murderous threats.
Horizontal Man
Lost Keats
Murder Is Pathological
Maggie Ryan # 3
Name of the Rose
Shortest Way to Hades
Die first, pay later. It seemed the perfect way to avoid three million in taxes on a five-million-pound estate: change the trust arrangement. Everyone in the family agreed to support the heiress, the ravishing raven-haired Camilla Galloway, in her court petition--except dreary Cousin Deirdre, who suddenly demanded a small fortune for her signature. Then Deirdre had a terrible accident. That was when the young London barristers handling the trust--Cantrip, Selena, Timothy, Ragwort, and Julia--summoned their Oxford friend Professor Hilary Tamar to Lincoln's Inn. Julia thinks it's murder. Hilary demurs. Why didn't the heiress die? But when the accidents escalate and they learn of the naked lunch at Uncle Rupert's, Hilary the Scholar embarks on the most perilous quest of all: the truth. Don't miss any of Sarah Caudwell's riveting Hilary Tamar mysteries:
THUS WAS ADONIS MURDERED - THE SHORTEST WAY TO HADES - THE SIRENS SANG OF MURDER - THE SIBYL IN HER GRAVE