Murder at University Park by Cheryl Miller Dellasega

Murder at University Park is the first mystery novel by American writer (and emerita professor at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine) Cheryl Miller Dellasega. Due out in August, it’s an engaging look at killer campus politics that bogs down occasionally under the weight of the narrator’s domestic and professional ordeals. Many thanks to NetGallery and the publisher for the preview.

Set in 1998, when higher ed hadn’t yet taken a comprehensive and survivor-focused approach to sexual harassment and academic bullying (okay, I can dream), Miller Dellasega’s novel features a likeable protagonist, Dr. Lacey Redd, who will soon be up for tenure in her nutritional studies department.

She’s already contending with a department chair who’s a sexist bully when her closest friend, Sandy, a lab employee, dies suddenly in the campus library from an overdose. Lacey is convinced it’s murder, not suicide or an accident: Sandy had been helping her look into irregularities in the chair’s acclaimed and lucrative research.

At home, her two pre-teens are a handful. Lacey isn’t getting much support from her husband, who’s reverted to the heavy drinking that marked earlier years of their relationship, when he was grieving his parents. His own experience hasn’t made him empathetic to Lacey’s recent loss, and their marriage is teetering on the brink.

Teaching’s not always a haven, either. While Lacey enjoys friendly relationships with her graduate TA and other women on campus, as well as with a select number of her male colleagues, she’s often isolated and powerless. Students who are well connected pressure her for grades they don’t deserve. Colleagues denigrate her work.

The turning point is a post-New Year’s party with required attendance at her chair’s house, where the stakes ratchet up significantly for both Lacey’s personal and professional survival.

Reading about late 1990s higher ed life is a bit grim: this may be a better pick for people outside of academia who aren’t dealing with our current institutional contractions and budgetary crises.

But this is a thoughtful and carefully plotted novel, with the caveat that Lacey’s umpteen responsibilities mean that her amateur detecting is squeezed into an already-overfull schedule. Figuring out who killed Sandy often has to recede into the background as Lacey tackles other crises.