Wed 2 Dec 2009
JANE HADDAM – Quoth the Raven.
Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, September 1991.
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.
Editorial Comment: Reviewed here by me earlier on this blog was Cheating at Solitaire (2008), also a case for Gregor Demarkian.
December 2nd, 2009 at 8:36 pm
These were extremely popular but for the life of me I could never figure out why. I tried several times to get into them and just could not. The mysteries weren’t particularly good and there was enough angst to make Spiderman look cheerful. If ever a book could trigger clinical depression it was one of these.
Though I have to say I would really like to know what her fans enjoyed so much, because I cannot fathom it. Usually I can at least understand what someone else likes about a series I’m not into, but in this case it is a complete mystery.
I really am curious what it is I’m missing.
December 2nd, 2009 at 9:23 pm
I actually am rather fond of this one by Haddam (though not of the others in the series).
My affection for this one, despite the gruesomeness of the murder-by-lye killing, is undoubtedly due to my love for Autumn and Halloween; as well as my general enjoyment of novels set in small-town American college communities.
Demarkian is not an especially intriguing character–he is a figure of multiple described characteristics in search of a unified character — and I find his constant henpecking by his Armenian-American neighbors and non-girlfriend gal-pal remarkably irritating.
More than most series the Gregor Demarkian books are dependent on the quality of the suspect pool, because Gregor usually doesn’t appear in the books until the books are well under way.
Of the four or five of these I’ve read, this is the only one I’ve reread…but only for the raven, pumpkins, scarecrow, and the fall college campus atmosphere, I can assure you.