Amy Bloom spent a career on literary novels and memoir, taught writing at Wesleyan, works as a psychotherapist, and then at this point in her life decided to write a detective novel. An old professor at a fancy East Coast university gets bludgeoned in his office with a bronze bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Nobody liked him much, so the suspect list runs longer than the guest list at his funeral. The school would rather not have cops and reporters crawling around, so they bring in Dell Chandler — failed English professor, pushed out of academia under a cloud, now working as a self-taught private eye, having learned the trade as a kid in her uncle’s agency. She knows exactly how these departments work and who hates whom and why. The mystery holds up fine, but the fun is the voice and the skewering of campus life, which Bloom clearly enjoyed.