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There is a book thief at Enfield College and Professor Karen Pelletier gets involved mostly because of her insatiable curiosity (and the fact that he nearly knocks her over one night). Police Lieutenant Charlie Piotrowski is very unhappy about her involvement, but there isnıt much he can do. A hard-boiled detective story writer, Sunnye Hardcastle, shows up in Karenıs office, searching for a research assistant for a historical novel she hopes to write. Karen has long been addicted to the Kit Danger series that Sunnye writes and even though she is put off at first by the gruff exterior, very soon she finds herself liking Sunnye very much. Sunnye agrees to speak at an academic conference organized by the Womenıs Studies Department about crime fiction. The opening night a ³mature² student finds a body in the library, that of a visiting professor who had been doing research in the Enfield College Library. Meanwhile the President of the college has hired Dennis OıHanlon who grew up in the same poverty-stricken neighborhood as Karen and who has become a private detective. He is supposed to be finding the book thief. Fittingly enough, for a crime novel, the most valuable item stolen is the original manuscript of Dashiell Hammettıs The Maltese Falcon with revisions in Hammettıs own hand. And this entire novel is really a tribute to Hammett and the other writers of the American detective novel in the forties and fifties. Some of it reads like a novel one of them might have written and occasionally the events or the descriptions are a bit over the top, as some of these novels seem to the modern reader. It is also a paean to books and especially crime fiction. The book thief seems to specialize in crime fiction and Dobson waxes quite eloquent about the value of books, the beauty of them, and the sheer wonder of the written word. Karen, the main character, has pulled herself out of poverty and into a very satisfying life with the aid of education and books. The academic life is pilloried in this novel. The speeches given at the conference are all in language no normal mortal would even understand. Academics busy themselves studying such things as ³Death and Deviance: The Aesthetics of Sexual Violence² or ³The Postmodern Detective and the Demise of Evidence.² And the organizer closes the conference with the following sentence: A hermeneutics of equality charges feminine scholars to interrogate the subtext of the ideological bunko scheme that constitutes modernist and postmodernist literary strategies. Karen is up for tenure next year and she must play the political game with the rest of them. Sunnye Hardcastle, who by the way is a suspect in the murder, travels with a guard dog named Trouble. This provides the opportunity for many enjoyable word games. ³She wore leggings and a black leather jacket. . . and Trouble dogged her heels. . . .² I like the characters and I especially enjoy Karen Pelletier who tries very hard to stay out of difficulties but never manages it. As narrator she provides us with a lucid look at academia, murder, and books, and it was a view I enjoyed very much. Kudos to Poisoned Pen Press for picking this series up.
Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows, April 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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