The Edith Wharton Murders Nick Hoffman Mysteries Book 2 edition by Lev Raphael Literature Fiction eBooks
Download As PDF : The Edith Wharton Murders Nick Hoffman Mysteries Book 2 edition by Lev Raphael Literature Fiction eBooks 
College + Crime + Conference = Comedy
Chaos hits the State University of Michigan when two bitterly rival Edith Wharton societies are brought together for a joint conference. Its reluctant organizer, assistant professor Nick Hoffman, is desperate to get tenure, but things go from bad to worse to murder.
There's never been an academic satire quite like this one or a sleuth like Nick Hoffman.
The Edith Wharton Murders Nick Hoffman Mysteries Book 2 edition by Lev Raphael Literature Fiction eBooks
Lev Raphael published his Nick Hoffman mysteries back in the 1990s, and has recently reintroduced them as e-books. These books do something that is hugely important to me: they offer murder mysteries with interesting characters and superior writing, and feature a longtime gay couple as the centerpiece of the stories. There are other couples and other relationships swirling about in the atmosphere around Nick and Stephan, but these two men are at the core of the story.“The Edith Wharton Murders” is the second of eight Nick Hoffman books, and takes place in the fictionalized Michigan university town where Nick is a writing professor and Stephan is the writer in residence. There are sly little joking references to Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher in the story, but there is also a strong overlay of the English writer David Lodge, whose best known novels revolve around the internecine politics of university life in the UK.
Surely there is a conscious reflection of Raphael’s own life in academe here, but his portrayal of the absurdity and tragic pettiness of the world of Edith Wharton scholars (an author whose work I personally love, to a point) is delicious. As Nick desperately tries to control the Wharton conference he has been forced to organize, and as he continues to manage the hurt he feels from Stephan’s emotional betrayal in the previous (first) book, we feel alternating waves of sympathy, disbelief and comic giddiness as the entire procedure begins to spin off its axis.
And, as I said, at the hub of this swirl of personalities and college life, are these two men, in their mid-thirties, settled, happy in their life together in spite of the inevitable pain and hurt that longtime relationships often embrace. There is no overt sex in this book, and there doesn’t need to be. There is nothing in this book to make the straight world queasy-except, of course, the sharp focus on the gay men themselves. This intense visibility, Nick and Stephan’s motivating force at the core of this novel, is probably enough to ensure that a large part of the mystery-reading audience won’t touch it. For all the advances in politics in the world – right up to universal recognition of same-gender marriage this year – our visibility still makes the other 95% squirm.
So, for all their charm and their readability, Lev Raphael’s Nick Hoffman books are important to me for this reason. How lucky I am that they’re so good.
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The Edith Wharton Murders Nick Hoffman Mysteries Book 2 edition by Lev Raphael Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
As a fan of both academic mysteries and Edith Wharton, I enjoyed this book immensely. It was my introduction to Raphael's protagonist Nick Hoffman, a composition teacher and Wharton bibliographer who finds himself in the position of amateur detective time and again. What I most enjoyed was how Raphael gets so many academic types spot-on--I identified (and identified with!) so many of the characters. And yet, there's no mean-spiritedness, nor do the in-jokes get in the way of the story. I've since gone on to read the other Nick Hoffman mysteries, and have enjoyed them all.
This is the most fun I've had on campus since David Lodge -- and I work at a university. I've often thought that the academy is a natural setting for murder mysteries, since the tenure system means there's no other way to get rid of people. Plus it's such a tempestuous teapot that there's never a shortage of motives. Lev Raphael manages to capture the absurdity of campus politics even as they revolve around a fully human protagonist. There's enough snarkiness and ego here to make the story utterly realistic, given the setting. But there's also real feeling, including the deep loathing of evil that characterized the best mysteries from the golden age.
This is a delightful read poisonously funny, true to the setting, and obviously written by one who knows this world from the inside. I read it during a particularly stressful time, and it was a great escape. Thank goodness it's a series, as I was sorry when it ended.
This was a fun read. Normally I don't go in for mysteries, but this one has a novel, academic twist. I'll need to check out some of the other Nick Hoffman mysteries. This is an amusing, languid spoof of the academic environment and its preoccupation with trivia--while life, with its gory details, comes crashing down. The protagonist bumbles his way through two murders, not really solving them, but bringing the reader along with the plot until the mystery is solved (perhaps too neatly), partly with the help of an enthusiastic student.
As a former Michigander, I also enjoyed the parody of the climate and culture of one of our country's virtually unknown backwaters.
This is my third Lev Raphael mystery (though I did not read them in order). I have liked them more and more with each one I have read, I think because I am growing to understand and also growing more and more fond of Raphael's protagonist, Nick Hoffman, intrepid detective but also modest Edith Wharton bibliographer and sympathetic lover of creature comforts (especially the fine wines and foods his guilty partner Stefan serves up to him).
Nick is drawn into the various murders that occur on his surprisingly violent upper midwestern campus in spite of himself but with uncomfortable enthusiasm that bemuses the detective actually in charge of the cases, the stolid Inspector Valley. My favorite moment in this novel is when Valley discovers Nick having trespassed onto the terrain of the investigation by breaking and entering the house of a suspect. Nick hears the noises that let him know someone else has entered the house ("No. I hear footsteps."); he swivels in his chair "terrified" but determined to confront the interloper directly no matter what the danger (Nick wants to have the courage of his convictions even if he cannot always manage it). But there "Detective Valley appeared in the doorway, shaking his head."
Raphael has a perfect sense of timing here and captures the comic deflation of the scene with the same unerring instinct he also brings to the novel's often witty and sophisticated dialogue.
The books are not perfect. Sometimes the plots become too wildly implausible, and I wouldn't be truthful if I said the quality of the dialogue was at a uniformly high standard. But for the most part Lev Raphael really does get it right, and he has created a very memorable and likeable series detective.
Lev Raphael published his Nick Hoffman mysteries back in the 1990s, and has recently reintroduced them as e-books. These books do something that is hugely important to me they offer murder mysteries with interesting characters and superior writing, and feature a longtime gay couple as the centerpiece of the stories. There are other couples and other relationships swirling about in the atmosphere around Nick and Stephan, but these two men are at the core of the story.
“The Edith Wharton Murders” is the second of eight Nick Hoffman books, and takes place in the fictionalized Michigan university town where Nick is a writing professor and Stephan is the writer in residence. There are sly little joking references to Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher in the story, but there is also a strong overlay of the English writer David Lodge, whose best known novels revolve around the internecine politics of university life in the UK.
Surely there is a conscious reflection of Raphael’s own life in academe here, but his portrayal of the absurdity and tragic pettiness of the world of Edith Wharton scholars (an author whose work I personally love, to a point) is delicious. As Nick desperately tries to control the Wharton conference he has been forced to organize, and as he continues to manage the hurt he feels from Stephan’s emotional betrayal in the previous (first) book, we feel alternating waves of sympathy, disbelief and comic giddiness as the entire procedure begins to spin off its axis.
And, as I said, at the hub of this swirl of personalities and college life, are these two men, in their mid-thirties, settled, happy in their life together in spite of the inevitable pain and hurt that longtime relationships often embrace. There is no overt sex in this book, and there doesn’t need to be. There is nothing in this book to make the straight world queasy-except, of course, the sharp focus on the gay men themselves. This intense visibility, Nick and Stephan’s motivating force at the core of this novel, is probably enough to ensure that a large part of the mystery-reading audience won’t touch it. For all the advances in politics in the world – right up to universal recognition of same-gender marriage this year – our visibility still makes the other 95% squirm.
So, for all their charm and their readability, Lev Raphael’s Nick Hoffman books are important to me for this reason. How lucky I am that they’re so good.
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