This is a low-key murder mystery featuring an older male Canadian college English professor. I say "low-key" because the professor never really sets out to solve the murder of a colleague's husband; he simply happens to notice conflicting stories told by the characters. It helps that he has quite an ear for hallway and academic party gossip. And it happens that the detective investigating the case is in his class, writing about the crime in one of her course papers. A second plot going on is that the professor and his wife emigrated from Czechoslovakia and recently she has been erroneously slandered as an informer on her former colleagues during their previous life under Communism. The immigrant Czechoslovakian press in Canada has picked up on this story from the press back in the homeland. The book is also about academic life in general. We learn that our main character is, let's face it, a crotchety old man who enjoys calling the young women "girls" when the political correctness police let their guard down. He also times the lengths of visits of female students to offices of his male colleagues. It's an interesting read but not a dynamic thriller.
