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Alistair Greenwood, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, hosts a luncheon at his faultless 17th Century home. Its perfection is marred by the incompatability of the guests and the arrogance of the host. Gillian Adams, an American scholar revisiting the unversity while on sabbatical from Vancouver, finds it distasteful, but she's truly appalled when the eminent Greenwood is gunned down the next day while listening to her lecture. Involved as a witness, she's also hooked into the case by her friendship with Edward Gisborne of the Yard, who had come to hear her and remains to capture Greenwood's killer.... This debut novel, first published in 1983, is polished in its plotting and its prose and beautifully depicts Cambridge, doing for that ""ancient seat of learning what Dorothy L. Sayers did long ago for Oxford in Gaudy Night.""… (more)
User reviews
a brief description, no spoilers:
Gillian Adams is a professor in Vancouver, Canada, and is taking a year's leave in London. She is invited to give a short talk at her old alma mater, Cambridge. One of her old professors is killed, leaving behind a list of suspects who want to do him in. Gillian is right there when it happens, as is her sometimes boyfriend Edward, who is a detective from Scotland Yard.
I do have to say that the ending was far from satisfying; it was too hurried as if the author realized that she needed to get the book done and just stuck in a solution. Personally, I kept wondering how the police came to the conclusion they did, because there's no leading up to it; it's just boom boom boom and they know who did it. I like to at least feel that the author gives me a chance to figure it out, by leaving clues to follow & characterizations that allow me to understand each principal character. Oh well. This is the last of her books I'll read.