MURDER UPTOWN

Actually murder midtown, since Fuller College seems a dead ringer for Hunter, home to children's author Hill, who wields the conventions of the academic whodunit—who killed sarcastic, philandering Paul Baskin (Sociology) and stuffed his body into the cafeteria trash?— with a torpid hand. Paul's colleague Melvina Trent chats up the excruciatingly familiar suspects—the unrequited love of Vinnie Trent's life; the junior colleague up for tenure; the pregnant grad student and her would-be champions; the perennial campus bag-lady; the secretaries and student guards who call every shadow ``Professor''- -while surviving two murderous, hokey assaults and proposing a third to trap a killer she can't identify ten seconds before the climactic attack. There's rough justice in the academic murders: better perish than publish such charmless stuff.