GRAVES IN ACADEME

Kenney, author of the very well-received In Another Country (1984) as well as one previous mystery (Garden of Malice), returns here with English professor Roz Howard--temporarily appointed to the faculty of Maine's isolated Canterbury College--arriving in the wake of her predecessor's puzzling, grisly death. The even more mysterious death of student Alison Nelson some months before has still not been solved. There's bitter dissension on the campus between macho Dean Luke Runyon and the English department over his wish to lower standards and retain fraternities, and there's at least one masked flasher doing his thing all over the college. In the midst of all this, Roz is drawn to sculptor Thor Grettirsdottir, an amiable vegetarian giant who seems to be a suspect in Alison's death and is promptly arrested when Professor Manciple dies in a fall while performing in a school play. A drug-spiked bottle of liquor almost kills three other profs, and Roz seems to escape near-fatal attacks on her life every few days. She survives, of course, and after arriving at a complex, pedantic and totally wrong choice of murderer confronts the real killer in anticlimatic combat. Long on words, short on crispness, pacing and involving characters, this one is strictly for those with fond memories of their English Lit classes.