NIGHTS IN WHITE SATIN

Even though men will sometimes be boys when women and drink are on offer, nothing could be more decorous, or more jealous of its propriety, than the May Ball, when Cambridge students celebrate the end of exams. That’s why Philip Patterson, the master of St. John’s College, passes over the police to ask Laura Principal, who’s just finished arranging security matters for the ball, to look into the disappearance of Katie Arkwright, a visitor from lowly Anglia University across town, who asked her prim escort, Jared Scott-Pettit, to leave the dance and then took off without him when he declined. The briefest investigation discloses Katie’s earlier brush with Cambridge: while she was waiting tables at a private dinner for the Dorics, 40 undergraduates and recent alumni of St. Bartholomew’s, in the college’s Echo Room, her clients turned on her, stripped her, and assaulted her. Is the person behind her disappearance now Roger Duff, ringleader of the Dorics, or Stephen Fox, senior tutor at St. Bart’s, who sniffs to Laura that Katie was anything but blameless in the incident? Before Laura—bereft of her partner and sometime lover Sonny Mendlowitz, who’s off trying to vindicate a client accused of beating a prostitute—can focus her suspicions, murder narrows the field of suspects and raises the stakes for those remaining. Good Cambridge backgrounds and a strong sense of moral outrage offset the predictability and occasional self-importance of Laura’s fourth case (Standing in the Shadows, 1998, etc.). (Mystery Guild selection)