The Bursar's Wife

January 4, 2016
Cambridge, England, is the setting for this unconvincing series launch from the pseudonymous Rodford. Sylvia Booker wants to hire George Kocharyan, of Cambridge Confidential Services, to check on her daughter, Lucy, a fresher at Emmanuel College, whose behavior concerns her. Lucy’s father is the bursar at Morley College, where Kocharyan’s father once worked as a servant before leaving abruptly. A little surveillance reveals that Lucy is visiting Quintin Boyd, a senior partner in a corporate law firm, and as Kocharyan gets pulled further into the case, he discovers additional connections among Boyd and the Bookers and other former students at Morley who belonged to the Cambridge Blue Club. Further coincidences link Boyd to another of Kocharyan’s cases. Kocharyan proves he can take punishment and keep on coming in the best hardboiled tradition, but Rodford, the pen name of Mischa Hiller (Sabra Zoo), strains credulity beyond reason. Agent: David Grossman, David Grossman Literary Agency.

March 1, 2016
Armenian PI George Kocharyan keeps his one-man operation in Cambridge, England, going by tracking cheating spouses and benefits spongers in the months after his wife leaves him for a woman in her book group. Then Sylvia Bookerwife of the bursar at the college where George's father, now suffering from dementia, once workedhires George to check out her 18-year-old daughter, Lucy, whose recent behavior is suspect. Meanwhile, George's most recent client is accused of murdering his wife, who favored sex in public places and is found strangled with her husband's belt in a car park. Sandra, George's part-time assistant, who is urging him to register with an online dating site, agrees to have her son, Jason, a classmate of Lucy's, help with the investigation, until both George and Jason receive strong warnings to back off. Decades-old relationships lead to stunning discoveries that join disparate plot threads in this first of a projected series, an auspicious start by Rodford, a pseudonym for award-winning author Mischa Hiller (Saber Zoo, 2010).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)