Jane Isenberg Hot Wired

Hot Wired

Jane Isenberg

Avon, Dec 2005, $6.99, 336 pp.

ISBN 0060577533

Tenured professor Bel Barrett of River Edge Community College loves her job and is proud that the students like her and that the chairman and president are aware that she deserves the accolades she has won over the years. She is therefore very distressed when a website aimed at evaluating the teachers of RECC includes a rapper dissing her. She feels mortified, ashamed and wonders who it could be. After going through her records she concludes that it is Naftali, a student she gave a D to a few years ago who was so incensed he went before a committee to get his grade changed.

He wanted to be a hip hop gangsta rapper singing about the Iraqi war so he enlists and comes back missing an arm. He blames Bel for the D that stopped him from being eligible for a four year college. The press gets hold of his message on the website and Bel finds her reputation in shreds. When someone kills Naftali the police zero in on Bel as the prime suspect forcing her to begin one of her infamous investigations and this time the person who will benefit the most if she finds the real killer is herself.

One of the reasons the Bel Barrett mysteries are such a success is the heroine is funny, independent and determined. She is a female readers can identify with as she investigates murders in between hot flashes. Jane Isenberg raises the quality bar of her own series with HOT WIRED because the heroine has a personal stake in the outcome of her latest sleuthing but she still remains the same character readers have come to love.

Harriet Klausner