Little Miss Evil: A Nick Hoffman Mystery

There is trouble in the State University of Michigan EAR (English, American Studies, and Rhetoric) department and Nick Hoffman, a non-tenured professor who always seems to find himself surrounded by murder, is in the middle of it. Someone is stalking him, everyone is upset about a new endowed chair, and murder is once again in the air.Using a professor who teaches a class in mystery allows Lev Raphael (the author) to have Nick name-drop all of the latest mystery authors, along with Virginia Wolfe, Edith Warton, Dark Passages, and Titanic with equal humor. I found myself laughing out loud when Nick (after spending too long on Janet Evanovich) wondered if he should simplify his diet (his partner, Stephan set him straight--Stephanie Plum is no role model).The academic setting is brutally realistic. Unlike business, the University really is a zero sum game and professors play to win--not that there is much joy even in the winning. Still, Nick keeps his sense of humor and deepens his relationships with Stephan, his cousin Sharon, and the strangely attractive Professor Juno Dromgoole (is there a certain Dickensian quality to Raphael's naming?).

There are no dead bodies until well into Lev Raphael's latest academia mystery, but you won't miss them at all as you are taken along for a ride through backstabbing murderous university scenery. This is Raphael's best yet, in his Nick Hoffman series. Nick's partner is suffering from midlist writer's angst; the English Department at the university has been invaded by a best-selling harridan; and Nick is (horrors) finding that he's attracted to, of all things, a woman. Spicing it up is the usual cast of outrageous professorial and administrative characters that Raphael does so well. Hang on to your funnybone and enjoy LITTLE MISS EVIL.

As a rule, I give academic mysteries a wide berth, but I make a happy exception for Lev Raphael's Nick Hoffman series -- the sophisticated skewering of the self-important is one of my favorite spectator sports, and Lev wields one of the deftest skewers around.Little Miss Evil is Lev in top form, with the refreshing addition that this time out, Nick gets to experience a a little ambiguity of his own.I look forward to more in this series, but it is high time they stop talking about it and get that dog.

Anyone expecting standard, run-of-the-mill mystery will be disappointed in Lev Raphael's witty academic satires that go beyond the genre's tired conventions. Like Robert Barnard and other masters, his new book experiments with a late murder--though there's a parallel mystery from early on involving stalking. What a joy to see an author do something different than he did in his last book, where the murder took place in the opening chapter.The writing is eloquent and funny, the characters unforgettable, and best of all, in this fourth Nick Hoffman mystery we see an unexpected mid-life crisis for Nick that will doubtless raise the ire of the Political Correctness Police who don't know how to read fiction. This is a novel, not an inspirational pamphlet. In its own way, LITTLE MISS EVIL is as daring as Binnie Kaufman's magnificent PURE POETRY.Over four books of the series, we've seen the stresses and strains of a couple living together for 15 years: jealousy, career anxieties, a medical emergency and now something completely different. Bravo to Lev Raphael, whose collection DANCING ON TISHA B'AV broke new ground in 1990, for this finely inventive novel.

If I ever visited Lansing, Michigan (the obvious model for the fictional town of Michiganapolis), I would not be a bit surprised to run into Nick Hoffman and his boyfriend Stefan. Perhaps if I was really lucky, they'd invite me back to their house and cook something wonderful. Now, I realize these characters are fictional creations, but they have grown to seem quite real to me after reading Lev Raphael's wonderful series! It's always a pleasure to encounter Nick, Stefan, Nick's cousin Sharon, and the wacky faculty and staff at the State University of Michigan (SUM). In this latest book, a new professor named Camille Cypriani joins the SUM faculty -- she's a Pulitzer Prize-winner who has achieved great critical AND commercial success. So, needless to say, everyone else at SUM hates her. And at SUM, that inevitably leads to murder...The Nick Hoffman mysteries are laugh-out-loud funny, and this one has a deeper element as well (Sharon is suffering from a brain tumor and Stefan's career as a novelist has gone WAY downhill -- his agent can't even sell his latest book). This is another fantastic book in one of the best mystery series around.