two profs killed by tylenol in a drink

"So you don't think there's any possibility that anyone wanted Dexter out of the way?" McLeod asked.

"Out of the way? What on earth do you mean?" Margie stared at McLeod.
"Margie, forgive me, but I'm a journalist. And whenever a death is from mysterious causes, I can't help but ask if foul play was involved."

Mildly amusing, pleasant read set in the university of Princeton. I wonder what the university thinks?
This is a candy floss book suitable for dull days in bed with 'flu.

Well written with a tight plot and interesting characters it is a nice read for those who like whodunits without all the gore and four letter words.

Small town reporter, McLeod Dulaney, has won the Pulitzer prize fo journalism. Life plods on and then she is invited to Princeton to teach a class in writing journalism. The professors seem friendly until one and then another drop dead. How did they die and why? Our eager journalist investigates.

This was a lot of fun. Don't know anything about the campus at Princeton but the campus politics sounds a lot like any college campus I've ever been on, just on a bigger scale. The method of murder was a bit scary, and a little to easy to do and get away with, but our heroine manages to solve it all in good time. I'll be going on with this series, I like her writing and her characters. ( )

McLeod Dulaney is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist in Tallahassee who gets invited to be a guest professor at Princeton University for a semester, teaching non-fiction writing. Upon arrival at the university she strolls about a bit soaking in the Ivy-league-ness of the place, attends a rather astonishing number of parties and hooks-up (platonically) with a charming chap called Archie who, alas, becomes an accidental murder victim due to his consumption of a cocktail meant for someone else. Of course the medical and legal authorities are monumentally dim-witted and see nothing odd in his death from liver failure for no apparent reason so treat the death as a natural one. Archie’s colleague Dexter, who was meant to drink the cocktail that knocked-off poor Archie, finally succumbs to our persistent murderer and also dies from liver failure for no apparent reason a few days later but the authorities (still displaying an alarming degree of dim-wittedness) remain unconcerned. McLeod’s students however are much smarter and they decide it must have been murder. Their ‘investigation’ involves repeatedly asking inane and irrelevant questions of the half-dozen or so people who attended both functions at which the fatal cocktails were consumed and participating in a load of guesswork about which one of them might have done it based, for the most part, on how fat they are (I started to count how many times a character’s fat-ness or lack thereof was mentioned but I lost track after 23).

Aside from the utter tedium of the plot it was also incredibly clumsy as everything was telegraphed well in advance. I knew for a certainty from page 15 onwards that the culprit would turn out to be a woman called Ginger. I have no particularly astute powers of deduction but when McLeod, for no sensible reason whatsoever, says to Ginger with respect to her email password “I always use ‘Peaches’ as I’m originally from Georgia” I caught on to the fact that Ginger would soon be reading McLeod’s emails. Seriously it was the literary equivalent of being at a child’s pantomime and having all the kiddies yelling “look out he’s behind you”. But if that wasn’t sign enough of who the murderer would be McLeod kept repeating that Ginger couldn’t be the culprit because she was too nice (and not nearly fat enough) to be a killer so none of the students ever spoke to her though all the other suspects were grilled multiple times. To top off the plot sloppiness Ginger’s motive (she’d had an affair with and been dumped by the bloke she wanted to kill) was never mentioned until after she’d been caught although all the other suspects’ possible motives were discussed at nauseating length.

Frankly I think even those who look for gimmicks sometimes associated with cosy mysteries would have been disappointed by this offering given that the ‘recipes’ were for such gourmet treats as champagne and orange juice (that is literally the entire recipe followed by the instruction ‘mix’) and a slightly fancy version of cheese on toast. In the end I found the characters completely devoid of any understanding of human nature and the plot about as puzzling as carpet. Hrrrrmph. ( )