Bill Crider writes the kind of mysteries that I enjoy. My favorite of his several series is the long-running Sheriff Dan Rhodes books, but this first book in the Professor Sally Good series stays in the mold of male-written Texas mild mysteries. It is relaxing, rather than spine-tingling or mystifying, to read Crider's stories.
In this one, we find Professor Sally Good, department head of the English Department of a small Texas community college--easy for Bill Crider to write about, as he is an English professor at a small Texas community college. A colleague is murdered for reasons unclear. As we become familiar with the English Department people and those they associate with, some suspicions arise.
Professor Good follows the clues down several wrong roads, and eventually unravels the matter. Along the way she is dismissed and patronized by the campus police and local police. She'll show them!
The story ambles along pleasantly until it arrives at a reasonably logical conclusion.
This is mild praise, but if you don't need hair-raising best-seller thriller pap, this is a good story. If you do enjoy hair-raising, best-seller, spine-tingling, multiple-twists-at-the-end mystery thrillers--well, good luck with that. There are plenty of those books around. For the more mellow folks--like me--books like Bill Crider's are a little harder to find, and much more enjoyable.
In this one, we find Professor Sally Good, department head of the English Department of a small Texas community college--easy for Bill Crider to write about, as he is an English professor at a small Texas community college. A colleague is murdered for reasons unclear. As we become familiar with the English Department people and those they associate with, some suspicions arise.
Professor Good follows the clues down several wrong roads, and eventually unravels the matter. Along the way she is dismissed and patronized by the campus police and local police. She'll show them!
The story ambles along pleasantly until it arrives at a reasonably logical conclusion.
This is mild praise, but if you don't need hair-raising best-seller thriller pap, this is a good story. If you do enjoy hair-raising, best-seller, spine-tingling, multiple-twists-at-the-end mystery thrillers--well, good luck with that. There are plenty of those books around. For the more mellow folks--like me--books like Bill Crider's are a little harder to find, and much more enjoyable.
