Schooled in Murder is a sharp and smartly crafted cozy mystery series opener by Victoria Gilbert (A Killer Clue), author of several other cozy mystery series.
The novel's narrator is 32-year-old Jennifer Dalton, who works as the director of the campus writing center at a university in Virginia. Jenn is also the pseudonymous author of a series of mystery novels about "a retired female detective teaming up with a younger woman to solve crimes in their small town." Life imitates art when Jenn discovers the body of someone who fell from the mezzanine on the top floor of the university's library.
Jenn is shocked when the corpse is identified as Doug Barth, a popular but elitist English professor who'd been known to belittle students interested in writing genre fiction. Rumors arise that pages by Mia Jackson, a talented student who had a run-in with Doug earlier that day, were found at the scene. This sets up Mia, an aspiring romance writer who's suddenly nowhere to be found, as the prime suspect in Doug's murder.
Determined to clear Mia's name, Jenn sets out to deconstruct the events leading up to the murder by employing strategies used by her fictional sleuths. With the help from the university's reference librarian, a local psychologist, and the manager of the school's main cafeteria, Jenn cleverly roots out the killer, who has dangerous designs to silence Jenn.
A perceptive supersleuth, red herrings, and fatal secrets are the ingredients in what proves to be another winning formula for the prolific Gilbert. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines