This is dense, complicated, and really quite enjoyable, provided you can overlook a significant degree of homophobia. It’s an academic setting. The deceased, Adamson, is a faculty member in the English department of a fictional Ohio university. In best academic fashion, all his colleagues detest him, for once with good reason: he’s a blackmailer with a hold over nearly all of them. So the detective, Stryker, has a closed list of suspects, none of whom have great alibis, all of whom have some motive. And away we go.
Let’s get the homophobia out of the way first. Adamson is gay, and while it’s never quite implied that he’s a detestable blackmailer because he was gay, there’s all the same a fairly strong suggestion that his sexuality is meant to be another of his detestable features. It’s only ever invoked with squeamishness or disgust or prurience, depending on which character is invoking. I think one can overlook this, but one could also be reasonably quite put off by it.
If one overlooks it, the rest is pretty good, despite some things that are usually also off-putting. The character list is long, there’s an apparently digressive plot involving a janitor, there’s arch allusion to Christie novels and other crime fiction, there’s the added complication that Stryker has history with the English department generally and one faculty member specifically.
But somehow this is all executed and integrated well enough to make the book pleasingly dense, rather than annoyingly so. It also all interacts nicely with the central investigation plot—distraction enough to make it tricky to quite see what’s going on, not enough distraction to be obfuscatory. The circle of suspects does shrink a little too early for the conclusion to be fully satisfying, but it’s presented in a genuinely tense scene. The writing is generally unobtrusive, which is more of a compliment than it seems. And there’s a lot of the sort of university faculty sniping and gossiping and such that anyone who works at a university will wish they didn’t recognise and will also enjoy recognising. Gosling goes on the list of authors from this series whose other works I’ll actively look out.