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Alfred Alcorn's Murder in the Museum of Man is a work of fiction, and any similarity between its setting and cast of characters and Harvard and its inhabitants is purely coincidental. True, novelist Alcorn now runs the travel program at Harvard's Museum of Cultural and Natural History, worked before that at the University news office, and has observed the behavior of Harvardians for many a year. But here he writes about Wainscott University in the city of Seaboard.
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The entertainment begins straightaway. By page 11 Dean Fessing, who is investigating the finances of the Museum of Man, has been murdered, butchered, and cooked quite expertly before being eaten (presumably). His buttocks are baked with a cinnamon honey glaze, and medallions of his thigh, dressed in a basil curry beurre blanc, are served with a thyme-infused purée of white beans and black olives in a marinade of citrus and fennel. (It could never happen at Harvard.)
The head of a second sitting dean is fed to beetles later in the book, and an aspiring press assistant is crushed to death during a sexual encounter with the museum's massive administrative director (who subsequently stashes her in his refrigerator). But Norman de Ratour, the prim, long-suffering, somehow rather likable recording secretary of the museum and the narrator of the book, solves the mystery of the murders in the end, quite bravely, and enjoys a perceptible resurrection of spirit in a renewed acquaintance with Elsbeth, a lady from his past.
Alcorn is at his best in the skewering of academics when he assembles them for committee meetings, which he does with welcome frequency.
~Christopher Reed