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Matricide at St. Martha's is the Ruth Dudley Edwards novel where her Robert Amiss series finds the satirical-comic-mystery voice that became her signature. St. Martha's College is a fictional all-female Cambridge college whose Mistress has been quietly running the institution into the ground for years. The Mistress dies. The case Amiss is called in to investigate becomes a portrait of academic politics in the very specific Oxbridge mode.
Edwards is one of the funnier mystery writers working in the British academic register. The college politics are rendered with the kind of insider precision that the form rewards. The supporting cast of dons and bursars and undergraduates are all distinct.
Four stars. Recommended to readers of academic mysteries (Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night, Amanda Cross's Death in a Tenured Position, this). One of the strongest entries in Edwards' long Amiss sequence.
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