Members of Professor Wynn O'Leary's English department at a Columbia-like university on Manhattan's Upper West Side are being knocked off by someone with an animus toward academe and a wicked knowledge of poetry in this mystery–cum–academic satire in the form of an epistolary novel from Columbia professor Stade (Confessions of a Lady Killer
). O'Leary's letters to his dead brother, Joel, recount the deaths of his colleagues, his new love interests and his battle to overcome a decade of impotence. Stade's portrait of a po-mo English department, circa 1990, is hilariously funny, the sendup of academic politics perfectly pitched. (Think Richard Russo meets Amanda Cross.) O'Leary is the novel's hero in every sense of the term—winsome, vulnerable, tough, utterly compelling. You'll wish he could walk out of the book and take you to dinner. But for all that, the tale is far from perfect. The supporting characters are hard to keep straight, even with the aid of a preface that lists the "Major players"; the unmasking of the murderer comes as no surprise; and the epistolary device is just that—a device, whose purpose never organically meshes with the heart of the novel. Agent, Timothy Seldes at Russell and Volkening
. (Oct.)
