In the Shadow of King's (Missing Mystery, #12)

Rating:
Summary: History's a Mystery
Review: Joining the ranks of Michael Innes, Amanda Cross, and many, many other writers of academic murder mysteries, Nora Kelly offers this first look at historian and unwitting sleuth, Gillian Adams, who returns to her alma mater of Cambridge while on sabbatical from her position at the University of the Pacific Northwest in Vancouver (She is half Canadian, half American.). The title _In The Shadow of Kings_ is ambiguous: it refers first of all to the literal shadows of King's College, where the much esteemed but little adored historian Alistair Greenwood is murdered, awkwardly and publicly, at Gillian's guest lecture. Gillian assists her boyfriend, a Scotland Yard detective, in solving the murder, while she simultaneously confronts her ambivalent feelings toward the relationship and fears that her old college chums may be implicated.

First of all, the strength of the novel is in Kelly's style. She writes beautifully, almost poetically, as she lovingly describes the hallowed halls of Cambridge through the eyes of one who returns after a long absence. The dialogue is natural and yet full of subtexts. And she knows when to use humor (a must in academic mysteries, I think) and when to pull the plug on Gillian's sentimental journeys.

Unfortunately, Kelly does not lavish the same attention to her plot, an unforgivable lapse in a mystery. The novel's solution is unsatisfactory, even disappointing, and the motives of one character (the colorful Fiona Clay) are never really explained. Moreover, the old ploy of pairing up the amateur sleuth romantically with a cop is handled badly here, with too much of Edward without Gillian. The reader starts to wonder who, after all, is the protagonist.

The most interesting theme in _In the Shadow of Kings_ is that history is both alluring and an embarrassment. This idea aligns nicely with Gillian's real (however tiresome) struggles with career and personal life, with modernism and tradition.