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BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
by Lev Raphael
Walker & Co., October 2001
290 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0802733654


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Most baseball hitters strike out from time to time. In Burning Down the House, Lev Raphael steps up to the plate, but he misses many balls in this, the weakest of the Nick Hoffman mysteries.

A good deal of the bickering in Nick's department at SUM (State University of Michigan), where he teaches writing concerns a contentious election for department chair. The election never happens. Much angst is spent on whether or not Nick will receive tenure. The

decision is still up in the air at book's end. Too much space is given to Nick's indecision as to whether to follow his friend and colleague Juno and buy a gun.

Nick, who has been in a stable gay relationship with Stefan for some fifteen years, finds himself with lustful feelings for Juno, a professor of Canadian studies at SUM. Juno appears to have the fashion sense of Tonya Harding and the vocabulary of a truck driver. Most of the fairly flimsy plot centers on Juno and then Nick being stalked. When the stalker at last reveals himself, his motive doesn't really match the seriousness of his actions.

As usual, Raphael picks the scabs of academia. There is the SUM president, who used to be the athletic director and who has been showered with perks, even as salaries at SUM are the lowest in the Midwest. There are the toadies who agree to support the wildly overpaid

provost in her plan for a program in Whiteness Studies. The most improbable faculty member is Rusty Dominguez St. John, who was imprisoned for aggravated assault and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in prison and is now very rich thanks to the inspirational tapes he hawks.

As I read the last pages of the book, I realized that it seems to have been written primarily so that there will be a sequel.

Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Devine, April 2002

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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