Murder at the B-School by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The kid was floating facedown in the whirlpool, naked, suspended at forty-five degrees in a limp, looming bird-of-prey pose. The whirlpool's circle of underwater seats had caught his toes."

As a college professor I like to read detective or mystery fiction with university-themed plots. Alas, it is very hard to find good novels in this genre. The beginning of Jeffrey Cruikshank's Murder at the B-School (2004) promises a lot: indeed the first chapters kept me glued to the book. But soon the plot lost its edge and already by page 55 I began turning the pages faster and faster wishing the book to end as soon as possible.

The dead kid floating in the whirlpool is Eric MacInnes, a third-year student at the Harvard Business School, heir of a very rich family. Captain Barbara Brouillard, also known as "Ms. Biz" for her no-nonsense, competent handling of cases, leads the investigation. The main character in the novel is Dr. Wim Vermeer, a fourth-year faculty, as yet untenured, in the business school. In the disgustingly cliché literary trick, Barbara and Wim conduct parallel investigations. This way, the author attempts to have both a police procedural and a novel describing tribulations of a young faculty at a prestigious university. Naturally, this does not work.

The struggles of an untenured assistant professor are portrayed with a degree of accuracy. No wonder: the author is a real-life professor in the Harvard Business School, and a distinguished author of books in his field of research. He knows the university environment inside out and he writes very well. Unfortunately - and that's the problem with 90% of all mystery books - while the author has a great idea for the setup of the novel the denouement falls way short of this reader's hopes. The novel has a particularly lame ending - I almost cursed out loud when reading the last fifty pages or so. Implausible and ridiculous are the tamest words that come to my mind considering that Dr. Cruikshank is a famous academician.

And now the worst: there are several totally incongruous passages in the novel that seemed like copied from some other book or advertising brochure. Just consider this:

"The Acura NSX, real green, with two seats and an excess of swooping body angles [...] there was the front seat, which urged you into a semirecumbent position. And once ignited, the car made two noises at once: a throb and a whine. When you stepped on the gas, the throb got bigger and the whine got higher. And because the engine was right behind you, almost square in the middle of the car, it seemed to be taunting you, behind your back. Egging you on."

And what about the passage about flying in old planes? Or the very long and touristy passages about visiting Puerto Rico? What are all these pages doing in this novel? And what is the relevance of the fact that Wim a descendant of the phenomenal 17th-century Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer? Dr. Cruikshank should know that an unusual, surprising literary component should eventually play some role in the plot.

To sum up: good, interesting bits about a young professor's ordeal at a famous university. As a mystery - almost complete failure, except for the beginning.

Two stars.



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