I have a number of challenges on the go and several books to read for each one piled up but when Margot Kinberg’s second Joel Williams novel arrived on my doorstep on Friday I decided it had to skip to the top of the TBR list even though I can’t count it for any of my challenges.

Just as with the first installment in the series, Publish or Perish, this book opens with a series of deliciously intimate portraits of people at Tilton University whose lives are interconnected in interesting ways. Among the deft depictions we meet student Serena Brinkman, a violin major whose campus fame is on the rise and who is in the running to win a major music competition. Michelle Park, also a gifted violinist and Serena’s rival, is under immense pressure from her parents for whom the only acceptable outcome at the competition is a win. Troy Brinkman is Serena’s cousin and friend but he’s having money troubles causing him a lot of stress. Marcie Bratton is a dormitory advisor to Serena and her roommate Tessa who dreams of a career in the military but worries about a secret she has that might prevent her from fulfilling that dream. One of the Music Department’s staff covets Serena’s antique Amati violin and seems to think such a beautiful object is wasted on Serena and one of the campus newspaper’s photographers does not take kindly to Serena’s rejection of his romantic advances. Of course things do go horribly wrong, this is crime fiction after all, and although at first the death which occurs appears to be an accident the Police and one of the university’s professors, ex-policeman Joel Williams, do accept that it was murder and start investigating.

Once again Margot Kinberg has created a delightful whodunnit with a plethora of clues, red herrings and potential suspects. The book drew me in immediately as it revealed snippets of information about all the players with nice pacing and a really strong sense of credibility. Both the university setting and the day-to-day lives of the cast of mostly young characters all felt very realistic to me. When a writer of Kinberg’s calibre creates this kind of picture it starts to seem perfectly reasonable that multiple people would see murder as the solution to their particular problem and, for me, that’s what makes a thoroughly enjoyable whodunnit.  Though I did chuckle at the beginning when several sets of parents select Tilton University believing the small town setting would be safer for their children than a big city. If only they were crime fiction fans they’d have known not to trust those idyllic looking small towns!

Unlike many of the great tomes being published these days, the book comes in at a very satisfactory 202 pages which just goes to prove that a good writer can tell a good story without requiring the deforestation of a small country to provide the paper and I’m also impressed by the fact that you could easily read and enjoy this book without having read the first book in the series (though you should read that one too, you just don’t need to in order to understand what happens in this one).

I can wholeheartedly recommend this book, especially to those of you who like a good puzzle to solve and enjoy matching wits with the professionals as they unravel the clues. Perhaps you’ll have more luck than I did at predicting the culprit in this fine novel.

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My rating 4/5

Publisher: Publish America [2010];  ISBN: 9781448971213; Length 202 pages; Setting: America, present-day

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My review of Margot Kinberg’s first Joel Williams novel Publish or Perish.

B-Very Flat has also been enthusiastically received at DJ’s Krimiblog and Petrona.

Margot Kinberg shares thoughtful and intriguing ideas about what makes crime fiction tick at her excellent blog Confessions of a Mystery Novelist.

Title: Publish or Perish

Author: Margot Kinberg

Publisher: Eloquent Books [2008]

ISBN: 978-1-60693-747-1

Length: 211 pages

Genre: Amateur sleuth/police procedural

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My rating: 3.5/5

One-liner: A light and delightful mystery

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Nick Merrill is a graduate student at Tilton University where he is also a tutor and software developer. He’s popular with his students, is juggling sexual relationships with two women and looks like being successful in both an academic and commercial sense with his new software. Unfortunately for Nick, Tilton University is a hotbed of insecure, ruthless and desperate people, any of whom could have it in for him. His two love interests find out about each other, his fellow graduate student is incensed when Nick receives an award she believes is due to her and his academic mentor might just be taking credit for Nick’s hard work in a last-ditch effort to obtain tenured status.

I have read Margot Kinberg’s excellent blog for a while now and one of the things that is crystal clear is that she is a fan of classic crime fiction, in particular the work of Agatha Christie. It probably won’t come as any surprise then that this book reminded me in some ways of those great Christie tales in which readers are introduced to the victim and all the potential suspects before a murder takes place. It didn’t really strike me until I re-read a couple of Christie novels this year that this particular style of introducing people doesn’t happen much anymore but when done well, as it is here, it’s an excellent way to draw readers quickly into the story because you ‘know’ the victim and are invested in finding out which of these people you’ve met is a killer. In procedurals and even in most ‘cosy’ mysteries someone stumbles across the body of an unknown person and only meets the suspects after the murder has occurred which means you never see the characters behaving ‘normally’. Introducing them all before the death gives a different, more intimate, perspective that I find I really enjoy.

There’s a full cast of interesting characters here including Joel Williams who is a former policeman turned Professor at the University whose classes are observed by Nick as part of his work as a research assistant. When there is a murder, and then another one, Williams uses his contacts at the police station to learn what’s happening with the investigation and uses his own skills and access to University personnel and students to assist the police with the case. Even some of his students get in on the act in a quite delightful thread although they soon decide that murder investigation is a little more dangerous than what they’ve seen on TV.

As Kinberg is herself an Associate Professor at an American University I can only presume that she has depicted the environment well which means it must be a scary place to work! It reminded me of those small town mysteries I enjoy so much where all the characters are connected in some way and seemingly all have at least one secret the want kept hidden. I would recommend the book to anyone who wants a light, well-written mystery without a lot of blood and violence and lots of good old-fashioned plot threads to unravel.

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Full Disclosure: I won a copy of this book in a ‘name a character’ competition at the author’s website

Publish or Perish has also been reviewed at Mysteries in Paradise, Petrona and DJ’s Krimiblog