Starred review from May 20, 2013
With the lightheartedness and strong themes that characterize a cozy series with staying power, Simon delivers her winning combination of academic rivalries, student relationship drama, and kitty wisdom in the sixth Dulcie Schwartz mystery (after 2012’s True Grey). A student who closely resembles Dulcie is discovered, alive but with multiple throat wounds, in the same area of the Harvard campus where Dulcie heard howling and saw her harried thesis adviser, Martin Thorpe, looking strangely wild the night before. The gothic romance The Ravages of Umbria—a dark, cryptic novel that Dulcie is studying in hopes of attributing it to the anonymous author who is the subject of her thesis—frightens her even more, as do warning messages from her ghostly cat adviser Mr. Grey, as Dulcie tries to determine whether Martin is actually a dangerous werewolf. Excerpts from Dulcie’s melodramatic research project offer a delightful homage to 18th-century gothic fiction that also binds this whodunit to its historical predecessors. Agent: Colleen Mohyde, Doe Coover Agency.