I was so glad Poisoned Pen picked up this series, since it’s the sort of literate traditional mystery that is exactly to my mystery reading taste, but seems to be harder and harder to find as the cozier end of the genre gets taken over by other things. I was afraid that this series might have disappeared for good when there was a lapse of several years after the prior book, and was ecstatic when I saw this one offered for review.

Series heroine Karen Pelletier represents a classic pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps story, taking herself from young single motherhood in one of eastern Massachusetts’s poorer cities to where she stands now, on the brink of tenure at prestigious Enfield College. While any real rough edges have largely been smoothed over, it still leaves her a bit tougher and more in touch with the basics than she probably would have been coming from the sort of privileged background more common at Enfield.

Unfortunately, the brink of tenure is turning into more brink and less likelihood of tenure, even though she’s certainly earned it—she’s a fabulous teacher and is very well published. But there’s only one slot available, and department politics and political correctness seem to be pushing things another way. Doesn’t look as if things could get much worse—not getting tenure means more than just losing that guarantee—until the competition gets killed, leaving Karen as the primary suspect, with a cop in charge of the case who has a grudge against Karen’s police officer SO, who is currently adding to her anxieties by being thousands of miles away on National Guard assignment in Iraq.

An English professor like her heroine, Joanne Dobson offers a smoothly written, compelling story, richly filled with characters you believe in fully and care about just as much. That’s as true of the secondary characters, such as a pair of Karen’s favorite students who do NOT fit the usual Enfield College demographics, as it is of the primary ones. Dobson does a wonderful job of giving the reader a feel for what it’s like to go through these events as someone living in the combined pressure cooker of both a small town and an academic environment. The whole is richly embroidered with side issues, such as Karen’s concern for her traveling daughter. Recommended.