Murdering Americans

January 22, 2007
In Dudley Edwards's provocative, humorous 11th Robert Amiss mystery (after 2004's Carnage on the Committee
), the outrageous Baroness "Jack" Troutbeck—Mistress of St. Martha's College, Cambridge, and member of the House of Lords—experiences culture shock as a distinguished visiting professor at Freeman State University in New Paddington, Ind. With Horace, her loquacious parrot, perched on her shoulder, the conservative academic arrives in the Midwest to find a campus where political correctness has taken over, threatening to destroy Western Civilization as she knows it. Jack has her suspicions about the previous provost's death, and no trust in the left-wing current provost and the university president. She launches an investigation and convinces her partner-in-sleuthing, Robert Amiss, to cut his honeymoon short and help expose Freeman State's corruption, crime—and shoddy knee-jerk liberalism. Dudley Edwards wittily satirizes political correctness in this fast-paced academic romp.