MURDER IS AN ART

The chronicler of Prof. Dan Burns, Sheriff Dan Rhodes, and investigator Truman Smith (The Prairie Chicken Kill, 1996, etc.) is back in the classroom again—or rather in the gossip-filled offices, the faculty lounge, and the student art gallery at suburban Houston’s Hughes Community College, where Sally Good, chair of the Division of Arts and Sciences, finds Art Department chair Val Hurley beaten to death by a copy of Winged Victory. Not a very distinguished exit for Val, who was already getting uncomfortable questions about painting one of his students, Tammi Thompson, in the nude (and was evidently also involved in a modest, hitherto successful plan to bilk Hughes of $5,000). Both the local cops and Eric Desmond, the lord of campus security, assume the killer is Tammi’s husband, craft-shop owner Ralph Thompson, and consider it nothing more than a temporary setback when Sally stumbles over Tammi as dead as Val. But Sally’s a lot more interested in a painting that disappeared when Val was killed. Pairing off with her colleague Jack Neville, an unapologetic fan of Buddy Holly and the Minesweeper game that came installed on his computer (though his heart isn’t really in it what with the murders and all), she ends up doing some very silly things in pursuit of the nondescript killer. Crider’s sweetly unreasonable faculty types, though individually zany, are no more threatening than a Frank Capra family. It’s no surprise when the plot never thickens.