By Frequent Anguish (Professor Neil Kelly Mysteries) | S.F.X. Dean

book: By Frequent Anguish (Professor Neil Kelly Mysteries) | S.F.X. Dean

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By Frequent Anguis...

	By Frequent Anguish (Professor Neil Kelly Mysteries) S.F.X. Dean Felony & Mayhem, 2006 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Professor Neil Kelly is passionate about language, passionate about his scholarly work on John Donne, passionate about teaching at his venerable New England college. But with his wife dead these several years, he?s resigned himself to the belief that his chance for more personal passions . . . has passed. He?s reckoned, however, without the vibrant, brilliant Priscilla Lacey, his prize student and the daughter of his oldest friend. Incredibly, Priscilla has fallen wildly in love with him, and with a mixture of joy and terror Kelly has begun allowing her ardor to thaw his emotional frost. When Priscilla is murdered, Kelly roars to life, abandoning his scholarly pursuits and turning his ferocious intellect to the task of tracking down her killer. ?Murder is often employed as a peg on which to hang a story,? said the San Diego Union-Tribune, ?but in By Frequent Anguish it becomes what it actually is: a gut-wrenching, world-shattering tragedy for all concerned, including the murderer.? The 1st Neil Kelly mystery

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Intelligent and witty with emotional depth and a great puzzle

I'm a grad student and my mom is a professor, and we both love mysteries with academic settings. Ok, I'll admit it: We both love mysteries where evil professors and college administrators get murdered. The murder victim in "By Frequent Anguish" is neither an evil professor nor an evil college administrator - and she isn't even evil - but that's the only thing wrong with this book. In all other respects, it's lovely. The writing is so intelligent and witty that it lifts the book miles above the average mystery.

The other thing that lifts it is the emotional depth. In so many mysteries, the protagonist stumbles across a dead body, and it's all "Wow, a dead body! I better start sleuthing!" There's little acknowledgment that violent death is a huge violation; it destroys our sense of trust and security in the world. In "By Frequent Anguish," the hero is a professor whose wife died of cancer. He has spent the past several years cautiously rebuilding his faith in a benevolent universe, only to have it shattered again when his beautiful young love is killed. He determines to find her killer not because sleuthing is such a groovy game, but because that is the only thing he can do to bring any sense of balance back into his world. Underneath the puzzle - which is a good one - and underneath all the genuinely witty, erudite prose is a seriously moving story. I am definitely looking forward to the next book in this series.

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