J.T. Toman

On the day C.J. Whitmore became a tenured Professor of Econometrics at Eaton College is the day that her conservative business attire and appearance retired and she became herself once more. A Texan and an economist who wears pink cowboy boots and opens her now brash and opinionated mouth. She still plays the departmental politics and doesn’t burn her bridges. An interesting caricature.

When Professor Edmund DeBeyer is found dead in his office, strangled to death by his own Ph.D. hood. This opens the door to a look inside this Ivy League institution of higher learning, where graduate students can and are treated as indentured servants; where prestige is measured by the address of the office or the area of specialization; where education and research is secondary to prestige and power.

This is a slightly comedic look at murder, one where C.J. uses the economic principle of selecting a used car by identifying which car is a lemon and which is a dream car. She equates the status of lemon to the murderer. This is not a follow the clue murder because when an “AH-HA” moment occurs the realization is not always shared with the reader. But it is entertaining and I happened to like the brash C.J.… (mer)

4 STARS

I liked this more than I thought I would. Just because I saw the word economics I was afraid it would be boring. There were little parts that were but not many. I did figure out a few of the mysteries but not all of them.

I really liked C.J. Whitmore and her pink boots. She hid her true personality till she made tenure. Now that she has tenure she is not hiding. She teaches, does research and is busy. She is single. She starts to figure out where everyone was and if they were telling the truth.

One character is a very old Professor, a young man who was denied tenure, black man who might win a Nobel prize, only woman with tenure, head of department, the wife.
The rest have alibies or were still on vacation.

One of C.J.'s classes wanted to use economics to solve the case as a class project. They wanted to find the lemon car in the used car business to compare it too.

Their are a lot of professors who I did not like but to kill them. The police for having two murders were not really involved in the story much.
We find most of the information about the murders by gossip.

I like the story of example by telling that no one liked Professor Edmund DeBeyer by his not winning a job when he ran unopposed.

The story is set in Eaton University close to New York.

It would be interesting to read another C.J. Whitmore Mystery see where it leads too next.

I was given this ebook for purpose of reviewing it by the author. All opinions are mine… (mer)