Death of a Department Chair
is an academic lesbian mystery novel, so it might have plenty of cross-over
potential.  Isabel Vittorio, Chair of the Department of Literature and Rhetoric
at Austin University, is found dead, sitting naked at her office desk.  She was
murdered some time over the weekend.  She has made so many enemies over the
years that several members of her department, two job candidates for a senior
position, and one of her students are all suspects.  There’s Hannah Weinstein,
Vittorio’s current lover, who is applying for a position in the department;
their relationship seemed unstable, and Vittorio seemed to be using her as a
pawn in her political game playing.  There’s Paula Fabian, the other job
candidate, who Vittorio was scheming against.  There’s Reggie Bradley, a female
student with a crush on Vittorio, whose advances were rejected by the chair. 
And there are Sigmund Froelich, Richard Lester, Bettina Graf, Miriam Held, and
other department colleagues who have all been thwarted and frustrated by
Vittorio’s scheming and double-dealing. 

The text is purportedly written by
Miriam Held, but as a neutral observer, so she writes about herself in the
third person, occasionally adding editors notes in the first person.  It also
includes several journal entries written by Vittorio, and a few other letters. 
This breaks up the flow of the story, and makes it harder to identify with any
particular character.  There’s also rather little humor, and given that there’s
nothing that academics find funnier than descriptions of department struggles,
that’s a shame.  Although set in a literature department, there’s little
description of the battles over theory or academic politics, which is so much
of the fun of such novels resides.  Furthermore, the characterization is weak,
so it is hard to care whodunit.  So on the whole Death of a Department Chair
is disappointing. 

© 2007 Christian
Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities
Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online Reviews.  His main
research is on philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Fiction