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DEFINITION MURDER
by Annette Burget Bailey
iUniverse, November 2004
258 pages
$16.95
ISBN: 0595329381


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Sarah Sinclair would never finish her freshman year of college; the promising student was found strangled in her dorm room early one morning, with a torn page from a dictionary next to her body. What had been an unusual case turned into serial murder a few days later when her classmate Michelle Swanson died under similar circumstances.

Inspector Meg McCafferty, a cynical alcoholic, is assigned to the case. It's an uphill climb, as she has to deal with the slippery, charismatic Professor Marshall Monroe, his knockout vindictive soon-to-be-ex wife Marilyn, a chief of police who wants easy answers and doesn't like women on the force, and the well-defined fear that more freshmen will die.

The first thing that struck me about this book wasn't the mystery, it was the sex. This is the randiest precinct I've ever seen outside a soap opera. McCafferty seems to be obsessed with what she isn't getting, so her narrative introductions include listing which coworkers she has slept with previously, plus who they're all 'partnered' with now. And it's not just her -- police borrow each other's Viagra, discuss their conquests, and one particularly eager couple runs off for an adulterous quickie in a squadroom closet.

On the other hand, this does make them the perfect precinct to deal with crimes of passion. Each of the murdered girls had sex before she died; one of them is pregnant. It's an open secret on campus that Professor Monroe is sleeping with all of his students and has been for several years, ever since his marriage went sour. Frankly, I find it very hard to believe that current students and school administration would allow a professor to fill his classes exclusively with blonde women, much less that anyone -- students, administration, or outraged parents -- wouldn't stop him from deflowering every one of them. It's not like these were quiet conquests; he gave them all identical t-shirts in a ritual when classes began and made them get his initials tattooed on their shoulders to mark the loss of their virginity.

In addition to that leap of illogic, McCafferty is such a poor policewoman that she ends up getting the important parts of her investigation suggested by her crime-writing boyfriend, who seems to be added to the book solely for the purposes of wrapping up the plot and ending McCafferty's unwilling chastity.

The final resolution is, of course, sexual in nature. But to get there you have to wade through an unbelievable mix of sexual acts, sexual preferences, sexual identity, and sexual predation -- and the titillation factor is as scanty as the logic and the clothing.

Reviewed by Linnea Dodson, December 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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