Professor Kate Fansler spends her days teaching English literature to graduate students and researching 19th Century authors, but that does not mean she isn’t sociable and au courant with contemporary life. When one of her students asks her for a referral to a psychoanalyst, she sends the young woman to her friend and ex-lover Emmanuel Bauer, but when seven weeks later the woman is found dead on Dr. Bauer’s therapy couch, Kate knows she must investigate, for the police are surely ready to assume that the most obvious suspect is the killer…. The Kate Fansler books were written between the 1960s and early 2000s, by an author who herself was a university professor and feminist scholar (real name Carolyn Heilbrun), but I had never come across them until a friend recently recommended this series to me. I liked the intellectual content of this book, the first in the series, in that the author assumes a certain level of education in her readers, but at the same time this is by no means a dry academic tome, instead it sparkles with wit and humour. I don’t know if the secondary characters here (Dr. Bauer and his wife, and Reed Amhearst, Assistant District Attorney) will be present in future books, but I hope so as I like them all and they work well together in the sleuthing business; recommended! ( )

Clearly written by an academic. A fun mystery. Not a lot of real evidence, primarily intuition. I enjoyed it. Not a quick read. The language slowed me down some. Some references were dated. ( )

"Amanda Cross" this is one of the best series i have ever read and i enjoy every bit of her details. i will also make this book a companion because i learn a lot from it ( )

It has been more than a decade since the last time I read the series of which this is the first, and the reread has been an odd and interesting experience. Many of the details and attitudes are dated but dated in a way that made me think at least as much as they irked me. I enjoy being bombarded by the constant literary allusions and I enjoy the baroque prose. I will keep this book as long as the poor paper holds together and hope that there is an ebook version available by the time it disintegrates. ( )

"Amanda Cross" writes prose in which she and her characters place a premium on sounding clever. Sometimes they do sound clever, but so what? Cross is an unbearable snob: for her, any person not a member of the intelligentsia is an idiot. She is unable to hide her bigotry and ignorance, and unaware of those things in herself. ( )