ON THIS ROCKNE

Everything's fine at Notre Dame—unless you're losing sleep over the fortunes of the current football program—until megabucks alumnus Marcus Bramble offers the university $10 million for a suitable memorial to legendary coach Knute Rockne. Will the money go to a new stadium, an on-campus mausoleum, or a remake of Knute Rockne, All-American? McInerny, working outside his usual Father Dowling territory (The Tears of Things, 1996, etc.), shows an effortlessly light touch with campus intrigue until trustee Madeline Rune gets herself murdered. Feeling threatened by her estranged husband Stanley, Madeline had asked New York p.i. Philip Knight and his brother, Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies Roger Knight, for help, and now Stanley is the number-one suspect, at least until he gets killed with the same weapon as his fearful ex. But the mystery runs aground in a thousand glittering shoals, as the brothers follow the trail of The Four Winners, a boys' football novel Rockne wrote but never published; The Four Losers, a fictionalized debunking of contemporary Notre Dame football by upstart English prof Henry Hadley; the twisted connections between Madeline's dynastic forebears and the illustrious Catholic university; and a dozen other subplots that have nothing to do with the oddly perfunctory mystery. Still, you've got to have a soft spot for a novel whose police chief describes the investigating officer as ``Purdue. But a good cop.''