DEATH AND THE MAD HEROINE

Another of Dean's literate gems bringing professor-sleuth Neil Kelly back to New England's Oldhampton University just long enough to solve an old mystery. One early morning, in 1960, someone shot the school's super-star foot-ball hero Dick Colrane, destroying a kneecap and ending a blazing athletic career. That same day Dan Murphy, a town character obsessed by dreams of religious miracles, disappeared. Now, 25 years later, his fiery, crippled daughter, Margaret Mary, married to Neil's faculty replacement, is trying to write a book that will reveal the truth--and nothing but the truth--about those unsolved events. Neil guides her efforts to stir the memories of those concerned--aging football coach John Venuti; retired cop Carl Parrish; Dan Murphy's crotchety priest, Father James Sullivan; and Dick Colrane himself, now a rising academic presence soon to marry Acting President George Purlie's daughter Jill. A bitter war being waged by the university's intellectuals against the town's polluting industrial complex brings the solution to Dan's disappearance, and Neil's deductive powers bring a kind of justice to the killer of Dick's erstwhile dreams of glory. Rich in humor, plot, atmosphere, and psychological dimension, Dean's work is a shining star in the genre.