CELT AND PEPPER

Notre Dame fund-raiser David Simmons invites wealthy alumnus James Elliot to breakfast with Padraic Maloney, professor of Celtic Studies, in the hope that Elliot will be charmed and beneficent. But Elliot dislikes Maloney and is more amenable to establishing the Malachy O’Neil Center of Catholic Literature in honor of the late, beloved Notre Dame teacher, with rotund Roger Knight as its director. While Knight mulls over the proposition, the Fighting Irish are overwhelmed by backbiting. Maloney sulks and sneers at O’Neil’s output, and Donald Weber, an exile to neighboring Midlothian University desperate to return to Notre Dame, campaigns aggressively for the directorship. When Knight suggests that visiting Irish poet Martin Kilmartin, whose health is so fragile a sneeze could stop his heart, might be perfect for the post, someone slathers poor Kilmartin’s telephone with pepper and achoo! that’s the end of him. And there’s more skullduggery on and off campus. Special student Deirdre Lacey, Maloney’s obsession, Kilmartin’s fiancée, and—wow, has she been busy—biker Fritz Davis’s not-quite-ex-wife, disappears, and then someone tries to strangle Maloney. With an assist from his gumshoe brother Phil and university archivist Greg, Knight sorts through office keys, specious alibis, romantic liaisons, snippets of poetry, and warring professors to identify the guilty and turn down the directorship.

McInerny (Emerald Aisle, 2001, etc.) is in top form, wittily sending up academic infighting, student grading, benefactor kowtowing, and (this being Notre Dame) stadium seating at home football games.