DEATH IN AN IVORY TOWER

A visiting American finds the mystique of Oxford marred by murder.

Oxford has long been a mecca for academic scholarship and mystery fiction. So it’s no surprise to Ph.D. candidate and amateur sleuth Dotsy Lamb when someone dies at the conference she’s attending with her mentor, Larry Roberts, and her best friend, Lettie Osgood. They’re all staying at St. Ormond’s College, although Lettie has come only to babysit for her daughter, Dr. Lindsey Scoggin, who’s at Oxford on a physician exchange program. The dead man is Bram Fitzwaring, a New Ager from Glastonbury who had planned a speech he thought would rock the academic community. Unlike most everyone else at the conference and indeed throughout the world, Bram was a firm believer in the authenticity of King Arthur. The police think he died of hypoglycemia, but Dotsy, who’s diabetic herself, is far from convinced. When Lettie’s daughter is shot and badly injured, Dotsy can’t help feeling that the two very different incidents are somehow connected. While her fellow scholars wrangle over the King Arthur controversy, Dotsy spends her time trying to discover how Bram might have been killed and why Lindsey was shot.

Although she provides no serious competition to Oxford masters Dorothy L. Sayers or Colin Dexter, Hudgins (Death of a Second Wife, 2012, etc.) provides piquant dashes of local color and enough red herrings to keep the reader guessing.