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Rating: 
Summary: Good First Effort
Review: As an avid reader of "tea cosy" mysteries, I am constantly on
the lookout for new authors of this genre. I really wanted to
like this book! However, after the first couple of chapters it was fairly apparent that it wasn't going to be what I had hoped for. Another reviewer mentioned that it should have been set in the 50s and I have to agree. There seemed to be a pruddishness about it which casts a dull glow over the entire book. Although
frankly the main problem is just plain old lack of intrigue and perhaps some witty dialogue between the characters. I was hoping for something along the lines of earlier Amanda Cross mysteries and came away disappointed.
That said, I would still give Rosemary Stubbs another chance. It is the first book after all.
Rating: 
Summary: Mildly entertaining, if flawed
Review: As the other reviewer has already mentioned, Rosemary is not convincing as a young woman - she definitely seems as if she is a widow in her fifties, not in her thirties. Also, the authors obviously know a lot about school, but very little about the ministry. They don't even mention whether Rosemary is ordained or not until the book is nearly half over, and it is alluded to in the most casual of ways, and we never know what denomination she is! Ordination to the ministry is a pretty significant event! I've also never heard of a chaplain being called "Dean," but that might have been the case at their schools. Finally, that Rosemary might find one or more love interest in a small college town amused me. The murderer was fairly obvious, to me, at least, and the book was nicely written and entertaining, but I am glad I got it from the library rather than buying it. I'd give it two and a half stars if I could.
Rating:
Summary: Good First Effort
Review: I enjoyed this first effort at an academic mystery. The protagonist, a woman college chaplain at an Eastern liberal arts college, was interesting and likable. I would look forward to reading another installment in the series, hopefully seeing progression in plot and character development. I do agree with other reviewers who commented that Rosemary acted older than a 38-year-old should in 2002, about a decade or so older. This can be remedied, however. Perhaps, the two authors should read two recent excellent mystery series about women clerics--the Lily Connor books by Michelle Blake and the Clare Ferguson book (I hope it will become a series) by Julia Spencer-Fleming--and the English professor Karen Pelletier series by Joanne Dobson for a little guidance.
Rating: 
Summary: I expected so much more from Conway and Kennan!
Review: My women's college alumnae book club read this book last month and we were uniformly disappointed. I guess the writing is better than the writing in many mystery series, but nothing else was particularly interesting about this book. The murderer was blatantly obvious, many of the references were pedantic, and the characters seemed too braodly drawn. Our biggest complaint, however, was that the setting seemed so wrong--it should have been set in the 50s and not the late 90s. To begin with, the women (ages 20-45ish) are named Rosemary, Blanche, Madge, Gertrude, Leslie, Martha, Louise. All the women we know in that age range are named Michelle, Karen, Jennifer, etc. Then there was the language--you can't tell me a 35-year-old American women uses the phrase "I daresay" in normal conversation. Rosemary Stubbs is supposed to be 35 but she acts 55. And British. A male president of a women's college? Not in the 90s. It was just all out of place, and that distracted us from the under-developed plot. It's too bad that this book is just another example of women's colleges getting press as a bunch of arcane, repressed, anacronistic institutions. You'd think Conway and Kennan could have given a more realistic portrayal.
Rating:
Summary: Possibilities Abound
Review: This is the first entry in a proposed series featuring Rosemary Stubbs who gave up a lucrative job as a CFO to attend Yale Divinity School and then take a job at a small liberal arts college in Vermont. In this outing, Stubbs no sooner arrives on campus than dead bodies start appearing. Stubbs finds the woman who recruited her dead in the new gym's swimming pool. She sets out - kind of - to find out who killed the woman while trying to settle into her new job. It is obvious that this book was written by two authors (Jill Ker Conway and Elizabeth Kennan writing as Clare Munnings) because one author uses polysllabic words where a one syllable word would suffice - I found it jarring and disruptive. I'm not opposed to polysllabic words, I just don't like seeing them used for the sake of using them - it's as if the author wanted us to know that she could use the words. It is this same author who could have used a strong editor because some of her sentences were very hard to understand in the context of the paragraph and the events occurring in the book. Also there isn't a smooth flow of time in the book. One minute Stubbs in on the streets of New York and the next she's driving up I-91 in Vermont. I'll read the second book in this series, but I won't read beyond that if the problems mentioned above continue.
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