When the lecherous Kent Lovely, Mahina State's one-man hostile work environment, collapses face-first into his haupia cheesecake, the faculty retreat goes from dull to disastrous. Now Professor Molly Barda has to fight to keep an innocent out of prison--and herself off the unemployment line.
When the lecherous Kent Lovely, Mahina State's one-man hostile work environment, collapses face-first into his haupia cheesecake, the faculty retreat goes from dull to disastrous. Now Professor Molly Barda has to fight to keep an innocent out of prison--and herself off the unemployment line. If you like Dorothy Parker, Sarah Caudwell, P.G. Wodehouse, or E.F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia stories, you'll enjoy this tale of passion, pilferage, and petty politics.
Excerpt
The round tables of the Lehua Inn’s banquet room were filling up with Mahina State faculty. The men wore subdued aloha shirts and khaki trousers. The women dressed by discipline. Colorful Guatemalan bags, gauze skirts, and flowing gray hair marked the social sciences. Humanities favored bold eyeglasses and hair colors not found in nature. My few female colleagues in the College of Commerce sported a nonthreatening business-y look that might be described as “Beverly Hills real estate agent.” T-shirts and shapeless jeans indicated the natural sciences.
Emma Nakamura was an accomplished biologist, and looked it. Her wavy black hair was pulled back into an indifferent ponytail. Her face, browned and lightly freckled from hours of canoe paddling, was bare. Her idea of dressing up for our offsite retreat was to wear a seed company t-shirt she’d picked up for free at a conference.
I didn’t fit in anywhere.
Not surprising, I suppose, for a literature Ph.D. teaching in a business school. At some point I’d have to modify my vintage wardrobe if I was going to survive in humid Mahina. I imagined my heatstroke-reddened corpse, stylish in a vermillion wool Lilli-Ann coatdress and opaque tights.
Professional Reviews
If you like your cozy mysteries with humor and a satisfying dose of sarcasm, Frankie Bow is your go-to author.
Put Molly Barda and best friend Emma Nakamura together and you never know what can happen next...While the summer is dangerous and uncomfortable for Molly and Emma, I am greatly entertained by Buzzword Bingo, Molly's students and the seemingly impossible yet quite believable situations they find themselves in.
Great read
Great read with knowing descriptions of campus and island life.
Frankie Bow is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.
Musubi Murder is this author's first novel, and after reading Musubi, I was really looking forward to what she'd publish next. Defunct Adjunct fulfilled my expectations. As with Musubi, the characters, their quirks, their interactions and dialog are highly entertaining, from beginning to end. Frankie Bow is gifted with an amazing deftness for language, local dialect, and turns of phrase. As with reading early Agatha Christie or Sarah Caudwell, reading Frankie Bow is a purely diverting and very amusing experience. And I always get at least one out-loud laugh. A big plus in my book.
All Carson Reno Mystery Series Books are standalone novels. It is not necessary to read them in any particular order.
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