A Masculine Ending - Softcover

Loretta Lawson, English professor at London University, is annoyed when she discovers a sleeping stranger in the supposedly empty Paris flat she has borrowed. When she returns from a feminist literary conference to find the stranger gone but his bed sheets bloody, Loretta doesn't need an encyclopedia to figure out her mysterious roommate has been murdered.
With urgent business calling her home, Loretta heads back for the start of the term with one precious clue -- a book that must have belonged to the victim -- and more than an academic interest in discovering exactly what happened to a corpse with a penchant for literary criticism.
"A charming combination of sophistication, wit and unpretentious learning." -- The Washington Post Book World

In her accomplished first novel, Smith immediately envelops the reader in an intriguing mystery that never loosens its grip. Loretta Lawson, a wonderfully erudite feminist academician who has borrowed a flat in Paris for a weekend conference, discovers firm evidence that while she was asleep there, a bloody murder was committed in the room next to hers. The corpse vanishes. Unwilling to involve herself with the unpredictable French police, Loretta returns to London, but not before she notices and takes with her a review copy of a work of literature so arcane that it is easy to track down the reviewer, Dr. Hugh Puddephat, who is, indeed, missing. When Puddephat's body is discovered in Paris, Loretta, propelled by guilt, decides to probe further. She enlists the aid of her estranged but still companionable journalist husband John Tracey, who provides invaluable background material on Puddephat and discovers that his checkered background includes a messy scandal involving the suicide of one of his students. The novel bristles with wit and is punctuated with wry barbs at the convoluted nature of academic and feminist politics. One can only hope that Loretta, an uneasy but determined sleuth with a razor-sharp mind and an unquenchable investigative spirit, will return in further adventures.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.