Death in Print

June 1, 2023
Handsome Oxford University lecturer Jason Verdoodt wrote a best-selling book which launched him into publishing stardom. Then his body is found at the foot of some stairs just before he's due to attend a dinner in his honor. At first, it looks like a tragic accident. However, the autopsy shows a lethal mix of drugs and alcohol in his system. Luckily, DCI Arthur St. Just of the Cambridge constabulary is in Oxford on holiday and agrees to help the Oxford police with the case. St. Just quickly learns that Jason had dark secrets, including a string of resentful women he'd loved and left. Could one of them have murdered him? Or was it someone from Castle Publishing, which rose to fame with Verdoodt's best-seller and had a huge life insurance policy on him, or a colleague at Oxford jealous of Jason's quick rise to fame and fortune? Malliet's latest offers readers an unhurried pace, a richly diverse cast of characters, and intriguing glimpses into modern-day police work and the grit behind the glamour in the worlds of academia, writing, and publishing.

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June 15, 2023
Or Death by Print, since prodigiously successful Jason Verdoodt seems to have been bashed to death by a copy of his own first novel. That novel, The White Owl, has just sold its millionth copy, and the leading lights at St. Rumwold's, the Oxford college where Verdoodt teaches archaeology and anthropology, have joined with Sir Boniface Castle, Verdoodt's publisher, to celebrate. The only one missing from the festivities is Verdoodt, who surely would have attended if he hadn't already been killed, his body found at the bottom of a staircase. Even though his home base is the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, DCI Arthur St. Just is on hand as the plus-one of his fiancee, criminologist and crime writer Portia De'Ath, and he quickly decides to back up the impetuous DCI Ampleforth of the Thames Valley Police. There's no lack of suspects. Verdoodt had a reputation for romancing every woman in sight. Minette Miniver, his long-ago girlfriend, had crashed the party in the faint hope of winning him back. David Castle, the publisher's son and editor-in-chief, was worried that Verdoodt was going to leave Castle Publishing for a more lucrative offer from a more well-established press. And David's assistant, Gita Patel, has made a discovery about The White Owl that puts the whole case on a different footing. Malliet sketches in the characters so briefly that they're hard to remember from chapter to chapter, and the solution is likely to disappoint everyone but die-hard Oxonians. But readers will get to pass a few hours in a setting a good deal more august than their reading spaces. Will this latest case follow the meteoric curve of the victim's bestselling debut? Don't hold your breath.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.