This is the Amanda Cross book I bought at my church's Christmas market do on the first of Advent. I read it shortly after that, and have been feeling the blog guilt ever since. I tried to not read anything else and ONLY play Angry Birds until I'd blogged about it, but it didn't work. But I'll do this now, and start working off my list.
Looking at it now though I know there were some things I definitely wanted to say about it, but for the life of me I'm not certain what. It's a very political novel, very definitely with a strong agenda.
Kate and her husband Reed agree to guest-teach at an extremely chauvinistic law school. They are invited by one of the faculty, who wants to use his safe, tenured position to stir things up a bit, and who also suspects that somehow or other the all-male faculty is responsible for the recent death of the only woman professor there. Kate is also approached by a rather odd secretary of the law school, who claims to be a spy on the inside, modelled on John le Carré's Smiley. I might have read a le Carré or two somewhere in the distant past, but this rang no bell. At the same time Kate ponders her marriage and wants to have "the old Reed" back - this serves to tell us that she's no stranger to the odd affair because she's her own person or something.
This was too obviously argumentative for my taste, but that said, I realise that while I'm feeling a bit incredulous and "surely those men are just too much" they probably aren't at all. Things really were this bad, not long ago, and Cross wanted to write about that chauvinism (the book is from -95). But you know, the book needs more story to work.
Anyway, it's okay, but, just like the Muller, disappointing. Two of my previous faves disappointing me, oh the sorrow.
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