From Publishers Weekly
Summertime and the living's uneasy for levelheaded English teacher Amanda Pepper (last seen in How I Spent My Summer Vacation). Not only has she reached a crossroads in her relationship with Philadelphia cop C.K. Mackenzie, but she has also been sentenced to teaching summer school at Philly Prep, where a series of assaults against minority students and faculty starts the session off badly. A black teacher's classroom is vandalized in an act that's clearly racially motivated; a Vietnamese boy is murdered in a drive-by shooting in front of the school; and Amanda's favorite student, April Tuong, disappears. As the number of incidents increases (eventually striking the English teacher, too), Amanda becomes convinced that the missing girl and the attacks are related, and that the culprit is connected with the school. Aside from a few instances of stiff dialogue, this outing is full of pleasures as the literate sleuth runs up against some all-American racists. The Anthony Award-winning Roberts gives Amanda an appealingly dry wit-perfectly suited for taking on bureaucratized political correctness and describing what it's like to stand in front of a roomful of less than motivated teenagers.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Product Description
"Here's the Dorothy Parker of mystery writers...giving more wit per page than most writers give per book."
--Nancy Pickard
Mellow old Philadelphia, where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have flourished for centuries, now has a new claim to fame. The City of Brotherly Love has been proclaimed number one in the nation...for hostility. English teacher Amanda Pepper, crabbily gearing up for summer school at exclusive Philly Prep, feels she fits right in with the hostility mode.
And it's going to get worse. Amanda gets her first prickling of unease in her own classroom, where a reading of Romeo and Juliet activates some very strange chemistry. Then the computer science teacher begins receiving anonymous "go-back-to-Africa" phone calls. A young Vietnamese boy dies in a drive-by shooting. And late one night, outside a Chinatown massage parlor, student April Tuong is kidnapped.
Random violence? Perhaps. But Amanda refuses to let gentle April vanish without at least asking a few questions, starting in her own classroom.
Gillian Roberts's Philadelphia is the real thing. So, too, are her wit and humor, and her gripping story of Amanda's tenacious search for the missing girl--along the brick streets of historic Philadelphia, in exotic Chinatown, and through the shady, sinister back alleys of the impoverished. The truth, when she finds it, is appalling, deadly, and much too close to home.
From the Hardcover edition.
