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    Matricide at St. Martha's
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    Matricide at St. Martha's
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    Matricide at St. Martha's
    Ebook274 pages4 hours

    Matricide at St. Martha's

    By Ruth Dudley Edwards

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "The clever plot takes second place to the ebullience of the writing and spot-on inventiveness of the satire."—The Times

    St. Martha's College, Cambridge, had been staggering along on a shoestring for decades. Then alumna Alice Toon leaves her old school a huge fortune. The dons immediately fall to fighting over the spoils. The Virgins, led by Dame Maud Theodosia Buckbarrow, believe the bequests should be spent on scholarships. The Dykes—fewer in number but better street fighters—want to raise a center of Gender and Ethnic Studies. The Old Women (mostly men) dream of fine vintages to be laid down in a decent new wine cellar. Impasse!

    They've reckoned without the Bursar, Jack Troutbeck. She elects to infiltrate this maelstrom of politics with her own agent, Robert Amiss, a former civil servant with a talent for sorting things out. No sooner does he arrive on the scene where the Virgins are getting the upper hand than Dame Maud is murdered, leading into what Mike Ripley of The Daily Telegraph described as: "An acidly funny romp... Superbly bitchy on the none-too-fragrant groves of academe."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSourcebooks
    Release dateSep 30, 2011
    ISBN9781615950614
    Unavailable
    Matricide at St. Martha's
    Author

    Ruth Dudley Edwards

    Ruth Dudley Edwards was born in Dublin and now lives in London. A historian and prize-winning biographer, her most recent non-fiction includes the authorized history of The Economist, a portrait of the British Foreign Office, written with its co-operation, and ‘The Faithful Tribe’, a portrait of the Orange Order. Three of her satirical crime novels featuring Baroness Troutbeck have been short-listed for awards from the Crime Writers’ Association.

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    Reviews for Matricide at St. Martha's

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Ruth Dudley Edwards worked as a civil servant for a long time, and her forte is to poke fun at the establishment, by exploiting all the ridiculousness of any system. My favourite RDE is this one. As usual, she aims to show the pettiness and stupidity of our age, by focusing on overzealous political correctness and hypocrisy, this time in an Cambridge college. As usual a clever and funny book with highly entertaining characters. In this book the very memorable Jack Troutback makes her entry and she does it with a stamina that is entirely her own. After the Matricide, she is on of the main characters of the series, and it is obvious as to why. Anybody who has ever encountered fanatics, what ever field it may be, and people who drive a cause for their own cause, but pretend otherwise, will recognise and enjoy themselves.
    • 3/5
      If for some reason you want to read this book, don't expect a British cozy. This one is far from it. It is set at St. Martha's College, and the matricide refers to the death of the College's mistress. Set against a backdrop of warring factions on campus, the mystery, of course, is who killed the Mistress?I didn't exactly love this book, but it was okay. I'm not really sure I'd recommend it except to really diehard British mystery fans. At times it was very long winded and I just wanted to get through it; the scenes of politics and the move to extreme political correctness were kind of funny.