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Bloody Halls is one of the Carl Brookins Minnesota-set mysteries, with the protagonist working as an investigator on a small-college campus where a beloved faculty member has been found dead under circumstances the dean would like to call accidental. The board politics, the faculty union, and the campus-and-town dynamics all get the kind of careful regional attention Brookins' series has been delivering for years.
Brookins is one of the quieter Minnesota crime writers who never gets the shelf space he deserves. The procedural beats are competent. The campus geography is rendered with affection. The reveal is fair.
Three stars. A pleasant regional cozy. Recommended to readers who like their crime fiction set on smaller campuses than the Yale-Harvard ones the form usually defaults to.
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