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A delayed pleasure. I haven't read this because I wanted one more Kate Fansler mystery before lights out. Alas, Kate is a peripheral character in some ways, but central in ways that don't add up. Heilbrun went out on a sour note with the academic community within which she functioned. The themes in this book pick up on others that run throughout the Fansler ouevre, but with a twist. The protagonist is a fat --- her incessant word, not mine --- female private investigator who tools around on a motorcycle. Woody, as she is known, is sent to Kate about a case involving an academic homicide.
And we're off. Woody is presented as an academic naif, despite the fact that she has attended college and law school, which seems like a lot of higher education for someone who doesn't understand the concept of a core curriculum. Woody looks into the murder of the Chair of the English Department at Clifton College, a small liberal arts college in New Jersey. I myself work at a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. And no one, but no one, uses the language Heilbrun puts into the mouths of the Clifton professors. As long as the stories were told from Kate's point of view, Heilbrun's style made sense. It was like Woody Allen's concept of New York City dwellers' conversation. Something to which one could aspire. But Woody blows it. She wants us to believe that she finds academics odd when she herself uses the word "chap." This is a pet word of Heilbrun's; her characters have always called each other that, and the reader thinks, "oh, well, somewhere there are bunch of WASPS who do that." (I seriously doubt it.) But to have your narrator mocking the oppressor --- because Heilbrun clearly used her swansong to settle accounts with the patriarchy --- while talking just like them? The reader is constantly jarred out of the story. And that isn't hard to do, because there really isn't one. That fact is underscored so hard by the "solution" to the "mystery" that I wound up slamming the book shut with unnecessary violence.
But Kate does float through the story, acting much as she always has, and there is a final glimpse of Banny and Reed. Read it for that.
And we're off. Woody is presented as an academic naif, despite the fact that she has attended college and law school, which seems like a lot of higher education for someone who doesn't understand the concept of a core curriculum. Woody looks into the murder of the Chair of the English Department at Clifton College, a small liberal arts college in New Jersey. I myself work at a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. And no one, but no one, uses the language Heilbrun puts into the mouths of the Clifton professors. As long as the stories were told from Kate's point of view, Heilbrun's style made sense. It was like Woody Allen's concept of New York City dwellers' conversation. Something to which one could aspire. But Woody blows it. She wants us to believe that she finds academics odd when she herself uses the word "chap." This is a pet word of Heilbrun's; her characters have always called each other that, and the reader thinks, "oh, well, somewhere there are bunch of WASPS who do that." (I seriously doubt it.) But to have your narrator mocking the oppressor --- because Heilbrun clearly used her swansong to settle accounts with the patriarchy --- while talking just like them? The reader is constantly jarred out of the story. And that isn't hard to do, because there really isn't one. That fact is underscored so hard by the "solution" to the "mystery" that I wound up slamming the book shut with unnecessary violence.
But Kate does float through the story, acting much as she always has, and there is a final glimpse of Banny and Reed. Read it for that.
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