JANE HADDAM – Quoth the Raven.

Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, September 1991.

JANE HADDAM Quoth the Raven

   This is the fourth “holiday” adventure of retired FBI agent Gregor Damarkian, the holiday this time around being Halloween. Location: a small school called Independence College, somewhere in southeastern Pennsylvania.

   As someone wiser and far more knowledgeable once told me, the reason academic politics are conducted so fiercely is that the stakes are so low. The victim is obvious from the word go: an obnoxious new professor with ambitions of becoming a new Program Head.

   But small surprises are in store. First of all, he’s not the first victim. Before that happens, a woman in the college cafeteria line is poisoned to death — with lye. Since the only item on her tray is a cup of tea, this is a puzzler. As Gregor knows fully well, lye fizzes on contact with any form of water. It couldn’t be an accident, but who’d want to harm a mere secretary?

   Haddam is a perceptive writer who makes many wickedly sharp observations along the way, and yet the incident above occurs on page 94 and for the next 150 pages, very little seems to happen.

   What it all amounts to, in the end, is that this small bizarre mystery is far too intense to be entertaining, and the one small element of the impossible is just too fragile a base to support the grand total of 276 pages of high angst that otherwise prevails.

   Not recommended, unless you’re in an offbeat sort of mood anyway.

– This review first appeared in Deadly Pleasures, Vol. 1, No. 2, Summer 1993 (very slightly revised).



Editorial Comment:   Reviewed here by me earlier on this blog was Cheating at Solitaire (2008), also a case for Gregor Demarkian.