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“Loretta is a professor in London, and she has a friend called Bridget, who lives in Oxford. Loretta goes to Paris for a conference and borrows someone’s apartment. She gets there the first night, quite late, and realises there’s a man in one of the other bedrooms. She thinks, ‘Christ, I didn’t realise there was going to be anyone else here!’ and goes into the other room and locks the door. In the morning, he’s gone, but she’s shocked to find there’s a huge bloodstain in the bed. There’s also a critical theory journal in the man’s room, which Loretta takes back with her and it proves to be a big clue, which is brilliant—the idea of a journal about how one interprets literary texts becoming a clue in its own right.The dead person turns out to be an Oxford professor, so a big chunk of the book is set in the Oxford academic environment, during the 1980s equivalent of the culture wars, when the structuralist and deconstructionist spat was going on in English faculties. That was fun for me because I was here at Oxford at that time.” Read more...
The Best Crime Novels Set in Oxford
Cara Hunter, Novelist
