Ruth Dudley Edwards, Murdering Americans

Murdering Americans

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Poisoned Pen, Apr 2007, $24.95

ISBN 1590584139

The Mistress of St. Martha's College in Cambridge, England, Professor Baroness "Jack" Troutbeck accepts an invitation to become a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Freeman State University in New Paddington, Indiana. Leaving behind the House of Lords, Jack, accompanied only by her loquacious (some might say loud mouth - just not in front of Jack) right-wing spouting Horace the parrot, expects hotbeds of philosophical debate as seen by 1950s classic movies.

Instead Jack is appalled by what she finds in Indiana; and not just the prison food and chlorine water. The campus is owned by the liberal-leaning, politically-correct police-called Freeman State University academia who dumb down debate and threaten the essence of civilization, dating back to Ancient Athens, as no group has ever challenged it before. Ready to wrestle these miscreants into submission, the outraged, outrageous right-winger begins to make quiet inquiries into the death of the Provost Helen Fortier Pritchardson even as the Baroness struggles with the Americanization of thought, starting with Randy the waiter and ending with an amalgam of anti-alliterations.

Ruth Dudley Edwards provides a take-no-prisoner satire that rips into the phoniness of political correctness and the perhaps even more phoney anti-political correctness by the use of hyperbole and character comparisons. The whodunit is cleverly designed to support the Baroness' foray into life in the proper American Midwest. Lampooning liberals and stinging anti-liberals, Ms. Edwards writes an amusing tale in which the assimilated Americans don't know Jack even after the third war with the Brits ends.

Harriet Klausner