Amy Gallup seemed to have such promise. Her first novels were published when she was in her 20s, and met with great critical success. The lack of corresponding commercial success, though, meant that the market for her work dried up. Now, 30 years later, she's become a misanthropic recluse, supporting herself by teaching night school writing classes at the local community college.
The new class looks promising. Most of the students seem brighter than her average group, and some of them can not only write, they can offer intelligent critiques of their classmates' work. But one of her new students is causing problems. It starts with mean-spirited practical jokes -- insulting parodies of another student's writing, obscene caricatures -- and gradually escalates to the point where Amy and her class need to figure out which of them is responsible.
There are a lot of characters here, and Willett does a fine job of quickly sketching them and giving each one a distinct personality. Imitating bad writing is a difficult thing to do, and Willett's writing samples are delightful to read; each one feels exactly like what that person would have written.
Since this is a writing class, Willett also gets to have a lot of fun by giving us class discussions of the very tools that she's using to misdirect us as we work through her mystery plot -- red herrings, unreliable narrator, distorted perception -- all of which only makes us even more suspicious of everything we're told by anyone.
The mystery is secondary here, and I'm not sure whether there are really enough clues along the way for the reader to have a fair shot at figuring out who the villain is. But the character sketches and the storytelling are great fun, and the interaction among Amy and her students is often very funny. Think of it as a comedy with a few mystery elements thrown in, and you won't be disappointed.
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