Jane O’Connor Dangerous Admission

Dangerous Admission

Jane O'Connor

Avon, Aug 2007, $13.95

ISBN: 9780061240867

Forty-three years Miranda "Rannie" Bookman is a divorced mother of two. Her love life consists of imaginary numbers and her work as a copy editor with a sharpened blue pencil went down the tubes due to an honest error of omitting the letter l in the re-release of the Nancy Drew thriller The Secret of the Old Clock.

Until the publishing world forgives her blunder, which may be in the next millennium, Rannie works where she can; for instance she embarrasses her children by giving tours at Manhattan's exclusive Chapel School private academy they attend. When someone murders the director of college admissions at "Chaps", A. Lawrence Tutwiler, her son Nate and other seniors and their parents including her are prime suspects. Unable to accept the NYPD narrow focus targeting the Upper West Side Chaps community, Rannie thinks she would like to kill authors whose books are one big run on sentence, but never did. Instead she investigates whether anyone would kill to get into their college of first choice or is some other motive the cause.

Eccentric Rannie is a charmer as she holds this amusing Manhattan murder mystery together as she cringes at fractured sentence structure or insuring the world is grammatically and punctuality correct while investigating who is killing Chaps. The breezy story line pokes fun at elitist schools, publishing companies, and amateur sleuths. The support cast, mostly the Chaps, add depth to Rannie's running amok as the investigative grammar queen of New York.

Harriet Klausner