Some fine description helps offset plot weaknesses in this competent first mystery from former Harvard Business School administrator and financial writer Cruikshank (The Greenspan Effect
). When Eric MacInnes, a handsome, rich student at the business school, turns up dead in a whirlpool bath in a campus building, Dean Jim Bishop asks Wim Vermeer, a low-level finance professor headed nowhere, to keep the MacInnes family informed about the investigation. That the dean should select the rather lackluster Vermeer for such a sensitive task isn't particularly plausible. Nevertheless, Vermeer goes to the powerful MacInnes family, whose members are predictably hostile when he tries to placate them. Vermeer bumps into Capt. Barbara Brouillard, the Boston police detective assigned to the case, and they agree to work together, an arrangement that again feels forced. Before they've gotten too far, Eric's purported girlfriend, Jeannette Bartlett, jumps off a bridge and another murder follows. The relationship between Vermeer and Brouillard is feasible up to a point, but the leap it later makes leaves the reader behind. The entertaining picture of the world of academic finance and university politics gives the story a bit of an edge. Agent, Helen Rees. (Oct. 25)
