Alison Greaves

Detective Inspector David McClennan has only been in Ayton, Cumbria, for six weeks, but he quickly assembles a team when a young woman is murdered on the Ayton university campus; it turns out that she was one of a cohort of sociology students who shared a dorm building on campus and a teacher, Caroline Morland, a fiercely independent feminist who is adored by all her students - and who happens to live very close to where the body was found. In the course of his investigation, DI McClennan will come to know Caroline, and her students, very well indeed….I no longer recall why, but I put this book on my wish list in 2014 (it was published in 2012, set in 2003), and I’m only coming to it in 2022. I should have saved my money. Aside from the problematic fact of having police investigators sleeping with their suspects/witnesses, aside from a DI so independent that he apparently has no superiors to whom he must account for his (very questionable) actions, aside from a definition of “feminism” that seems to mean “I can do completely as I like with no regard for any other person” (rather than meaning, say, equal pay for equal work, equitable sharing of child-rearing and other domestic chores, and the ability to control one’s destiny in the context of the society in which one lives) - aside from all those problems, the author makes use of “someone else is dead/in danger - who can it be?” cliffhangers not once but several times, and her secondary characters are so poorly differentiated that half the time it’s unclear who they’re supposed to be. Also there’s much mention made of the then-starting Iraq War as being a major point for protest among the main characters and then….it just stops being mentioned at all. Really awful.… (plus d'informations)