Robert Amiss, awarded a one-year fellowship at St Martha's College, Cambridge, is immediately plunged into a maelstrom of academic politics. The recent recipient of a huge bequest, St Martha's is being torn apart by the demands of rival factions. The ascetics, led by Dame Maud Buckbarrow, believe the bequest should be spent on fellowships in the most austere areas of scholarship; the sybarites feel it should promote more worldly pleasures; the politically correct want the college turned into a center for ethnic and gender studies.Just as it seems the ascetics are in the ascendant, Dame Maud is killed. The local police, baffled, turn to Robert's old friend Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Milton of Scotland Yard ... and once again Amiss finds himself at the sharp end of a murder investigation. Read Less