AVENGING ANGEL

Somebody's poisoning members of the Apostles, a Cambridge secret society—titled undergraduate David Glen Tannock by penicillin; eminent physiologist Charles Phipps; and has-been topologist Godfrey Stanley by some especially foul neurotoxins—and sending them death- notes with little classical tags. David's barrister cousin Sir Patrick Scott finds Cambridge so thick with suspects and motives—did David's tutor, Peter Tredwell, kill him after a homosexual come-on, or was philosopher Vera Oblomov avenging her father's killing years ago, or was American arriviste Dale Bishop protecting the tell-all book he was hatching on the Apostles?—that the final choice of one among many (reached with the help of an obliging database) carries no special weight. Aggressively literate and fawningly Anglophilic, though the storytelling is enervated and the detective a noble cipher. First of a promised series.