REVIEWED BY BARRY GARDNER:

VERONICA STALLWOOD – Oxford Exit. Kate Ivory #2. Scribner, US, hardcover, 1995. Np US paperback edition. First published in the UK by Macmillan, 1994.

   Yet another author new to me. Stallwood was born in London and lives in Oxford, where she has worked at the Bodelian and Lincoln College libraries. The first book in this series is Death and the Oxford Box.

   Kate Ivory is a struggling romance novelist who has experience with computers and library cataloguing. She is called on by a friend to help investigate a possible series of thefts from the Oxford University Library System, and after agreeing is plugged into the system as a roving cataloger and consultant.

   Shady doings are afoot, all right, and Kate discovers that a young library assistant who was murdered in the recent past may have stumbled across them also, What seemed to be a relatively safe assignment now takes on a darker hue.

   Were this an American book, I’d call it a cozy, but given how I’ve defined those I think I’d be doing this an injustice. I like Stallwood’s prose, and I like her characters, an dI like the milieu. She tells her story by interleaving chapters told from the viewpoints of Kate and the anonymous murderer, and I thought she made unusually good use of the device.

   Secondary characters were also well done. It’s a type of book that British authors do exceptionally well, and Stallwood does this reputation no harm.

      

— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #19, May 1995.

       The Kate Ivory series —

1. Death and the Oxford Box (1993)
2. Oxford Exit (1994)
3. Oxford Mourning (1995)
4. Oxford Fall (1996)
5. Oxford Knot (1998)
6. Oxford Blue (1998)
7. Oxford Shift (1999)
8. Oxford Shadows (2000)
9. Oxford Double (2001)
10. Oxford Proof (2002)
11. Oxford Remains (2004)
12. Oxford Letters (2005)
13. Oxford Menace (2008)
14. Oxford Ransom (2011)