St Rumwold’s College, Oxford, is holding a reception to celebrate their tutor-cum-best selling author Jason Verdoodt. Verdoodt has hit the big time with his first novel, but not everyone is ecstatic about his success. His publishing company are concerned about him leaving them for a bigger company, his various girlfriends are worried that he might leave them for one of his other girlfriends, and generally speaking, he’s a bit of a git. So it’s not a massive surprise that before the reception really gets going, Verdoodt is found dead at the foot of a flight of stairs.

DCI Arthur St Just, in town with his fiancée, crime writer Portia De’Ath (honestly, that’s her name) and finds himself drawn into the investigation. But with many motives and a lot of suspects, can St Just find the killer?

This is the fifth St Just title from G M Malliet, who I’ve encountered a good while ago when I reviewed Wicked Autumn many moons ago. No idea why I didn’t return to the author as I did rather enjoy that book, and, as ever, I said that I’d return to the author and then promptly never did. No idea why – I was a young, edgy blogger at the time, so was probably sulking because the publisher didn’t send me a copy of the next book. Ah, my mis-spent youth…

Well, just as I enjoyed that one, I enjoyed this one too, for the most part. It’s a danger to set books in my old stomping ground of Oxford University, so I would point out a) yes, Tolkien was at Merton, but the College doesn’t boast about it and b) a bigger niggle, it’s not exactly a magical mystery tour from St Helen’s Passage to the Turf Tavern – you just follow the passage, you can’t get lost with a single right turn. Oh, and c) plenty of Fellows can say the word “Cambridge” without resorting to “the other place”. Trust me, I’ve been at plenty of college dinners…

Right, that’s got that off my chest. On to the book, which is a well-constructed mystery, with nicely paced reveals throughout and while I was never quite sure why the useless Oxford police were so willing to allow the competent Cambridge police DCI to join in the investigation, it does, thankfully, not bother with trying to pad pages with an unnecessary rivalry. The reader is kept guessing as to which of the victim’s sins have caught up with him and some nice concepts come into play as the book progresses.

It stumbles a bit at the end, with the murderer caught trying to murder someone – there’s some justification as to why St Just should have spotted them, but I’d rather the sleuth actually did this before arresting the killer. Also, there was quite a lot of the killer’s backstory that only comes out after the fact, as well as making them something of a psychopath at the end of the day.

All in all, I did enjoy this one despite my niggles above – sorry, but read a lot of books on holiday recently and it’s the niggles that tend to stick in my memory – and will definitely keep an eye out for more from the author.

Death In Print is out on August 1^st from Severn House Publishing. Many thanks for the review e-book.