This winning first mystery from novelist and memoirist Bloom features an English professor turned private eye with the perfectly hard-boiled name of Dell Chandler and a charming, ironic, super cool narrative voice to match. She\u2019s hired to investigate an untimely death at Cromwell University, a private college in a snooty area of Connecticut: A professor named Oliver Bullfinch was bludgeoned to death in his office with a bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Low expectations of the local police lead college president Elizabeth Cutty to hire Dell, who can very much use the $500 daily fee. She brings to the task a solid background in lock-picking, file-snatching, and basic snooping, much of it gleaned from old episodes of Law & Order. Fortunately, she also knows something about the tenure-mad, prestige-hungry, and often alcoholic nature of the standard-issue academic, as well as their endless backbiting. And she\u2019s no wimp. \u201cI\u2019m built fairly big and very solid. I look best in smooth, tailored clothes or in jeans. I look my very best stark naked. In ruffles and florals, I look like a pale side of beef with ribbons around it.\u201d As for the naked part, we\u2019ll learn more about this once Dell starts lusting after Sgt. Nat Baker, a strong, silent type on the local force. When someone cuts her brake lines, when someone throws a rock through her godfather\u2019s window (he\u2019s a local, and was a pal of Bullfinch\u2019s), Dell can tell she\u2019s getting close. Lots of action, late-breaking twists and characters, plus the emergence of a buried secret in Dell\u2019s own past make the last quarter of the book a bit of a whirlwind, with a second highly educated corpse dropping into the mix, but Dell Chandler is a cool character and a quick study, and her sense of humor never deserts her.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This winning first mystery from novelist and memoirist Bloom features an English professor turned private eye with the perfectly hard-boiled name of Dell Chandler and a charming, ironic, super cool narrative voice to match. She\u2019s hired to investigate an untimely death at Cromwell University, a private college in a snooty area of Connecticut: A professor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6531,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6530"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}