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Fans of academic mysteries will really enjoy DEATH OF A PRINCETON PRESIDENT. The setting is authentic, with details of the Nassau Inn and the streets of town, the plot is well done, and the characters are well developed. McLeod Dulaney, a reporter for a Tallahassee, Florida, newspaper, has come to Princeton for a second stint as a teacher of nonfiction writing. After a class, one of her best students, Sophy Robbins, asks McLeod to help in locating her mother, Melissa Faircloth, who has been missing for several days. Because the names are different, McLeod doesn't realize that Sophy's mother is the president of Princeton. After several futile attempts at a search, McLeod and her beau, George Bridges, who is personal assistant to the president, discover Melissa's body in a closet in her private office. Only Melissa and George have keys to this confidential area. First among the suspects is Clarence Robbins, Sophy's father, who has just turned up in town. He and Melissa had a flirtation when she was a student at the University of Chicago. She became pregnant, they married, and she divorced him as soon as possible, As her career took off, his life went relentlessly downward. Never able to hold a job, he became an alcoholic. After Melissa's death, his mission is to get his hands on the trust fund the president had set up for Sophy (a task in which he is unsuccessful). To the investigating officer, McLeod makes a strong case for Clarence as the killer, but, after he turns out to have a strong alibi, she turns her attention to Provost Ken Coales, who was about to be fired by Melissa and who has a mistress in Princeton who will not leave with him if he moves (something which turns out not to be true. As soon as he becomes acting president, Ken engineers that George be removed from his job and come under suspicion as the killer, because of his access to the room. A third candidate is Max Bolt, an egomaniac film maker (is there any other kind?) in town to make a film of F Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. Melissa insists that he film only when classes are not in session, a dictum he blithely ignores (especially after her death). He persuades Ken Coales to let him continue to film by offering him a part in the movie. (Max confides to McLeod that Ken was dreadful and that his part will be cut.) The plot is very well paced, but the strength of the book is the characters: McLeod and her beau; the dreadful Clarence Robbins and the equally dreadful Ken Coales, and the misogynist Fletcher Prickett, a throwback to the days when Princeton was all-male and who regrets the number of women in positions of power in the university.
Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Devine, February 2004
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