C.A.T. Caper

It's bad enough that a tribe of high school English teachers, convened at the Beasley Center to evaluate their students' C.A.T. (Collegiate Aptitude Test) essays, must be subjected to the murder of the English language by thousands of teenagers--but when one of their own number, albeit not a very popular figure, is himself murdered, things take a more ominous turn. And when it is revealed that the victim has done the unspeakable--breached the sacrosanct security of Beasley by sending a few ``poison postcards'' to the authors of the more execrable essays--the very foundation of the Center and the C.A.T. seems to rock. In order to safeguard tradition, Prescott Beasley asks teacher Dodge Hackett to assist the police effort. Hackett agrees, mainly to expiate the guilt he feels over the suicide of a former student, whose face he sees superimposed on that of the case's prime suspect, high school senior Jason Armbruster, a recipient of the victim's hate mail. A large cast of characters and changing point of view hinder Logan's ( Deathhampton Summer ) mystery; the secrets of the central characters might have made more compelling reading than the throes of a not-so-interesting English teacher. Still, her plot is an inherently ticklish one. (July)