IRISH TENURE

Sean Pottery, a veteran teacher at Notre Dame and an acknowledged expert on the works of G.K. Chesterton, is infatuated with philosophy professor Amanda Pick, who’s competing for tenure against family man Hans Weiner. Amanda shares her house with Laura Flynn, who encourages her to report Pottery’s unsought, amorous, drunken visits. Meanwhile, rare-book dealer Noah Beispiel has donated to the university the collection of alumnus Henry Horan, which includes an unknown Father Brown story written during a Chesterton visit decades before. To Beispiel’s dismay, Amanda discovers the story while going through the archives and hopes it will enhance her case for tenure. No such luck, though; soon after, she’s the one who’s found when her body is discovered in a campus lake—her death soon followed by that of housemate Laura. It takes the combined efforts of professor/sleuth Roger Knight (Lack of the Irish, 1998, etc.) and his p.i. brother Phil to prevent the arrest of an obvious suspect and canter to a tepid, perfunctory windup that will reveal the true killer. Barely comprehensible plotting and pages of high-flown vaporings on tangential subjects make Roger’s third case a self-indulgent monument to his intellectual prowess. If he didn—t already have tenure, he wouldn—t earn it through publications like this one.