Customer Reviews

Grave Circle: An Ivory Tower Mystery (Ivory Tower Mysteries)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Grave Circle by David D. Nolta is an "Ivory Tower Mystery" featuring Hiawatha Musing and Antigone Musing, two perceptive, eccentric, and sibling college professors who apply their mutually complementary gifts of reason and intuition to solve a quite puzzling murder mystery. Set in a simple college town in Massachusetts, Virginia Vanderlyn was an infamously adulterous wife who turns up dead. Its falls to "Hi" and "Tig" to ferret out the deviously ruthless killer amidst the victim's many rivals and enemies. A superbly crafted novel of hidden secrets and bloodthirsty vendettas cloaked in the veil of academia and dotted with a remarkable cast of characters, Grave Circle showcases David Nolta as a literary master of the Mystery/Suspense genre and will leave readers looking eagerly toward their next encounter with these unique and memorable sibling professorial sleuths!

If you like a slow & erudite read, explaining the nooks & crannies of professorial minds, & drawing elegant portraits of ivy-covered minor colleges, GRAVE CIRCLE is going to appeal to you...a lot. It has ambience, a little humor, a lot of narrative &, eventually, a mystery.

I just finished this book, and admittedly, I wish I had read it before I read Nolta's second book, Lostlindens although I was able to enjoy both. Both are very easy reads and provide a great balance of mystery and humor. Having attended Yale, Grave Circle is an especially good read since it is obvious many of the places in the book were inspired by Yale. With all due respect, I am not sure what books the previous reviewer read and I am certainly not sure what her motivation is.

I picked this up on the new book shelf at my local library on a hunch that it might be worth a read. I couldn't put it down. The good professor is a great mystery writer! I loved the characters.
PS. I've ordered several copies to give as gifts to friends.

This is a great book! If Jane Austen wrote a mystery, this would be it! Like any good mystery it is a page turner that the reader cannot put down. However, unlike the typical mystery novel, this book is a wonderfully written, well-crafted work of literature. I especially loved the dialogues between Tig and Hi (Antigone and Hiawatha), the story's protagonists. Nolta is especially successful at melding juicy tidbits of life on a small college campus and beautifully written art historical anecdotes into the narrative. I cannot wait for the next book from the Ivory Tower Mystery Series!

I am not generally a mystery reader, but this one may have changed my life!

This is one of the best books I've read in years- a perfect autumn read. One can feel the New England Autumn in every page! This will surely end up as an A & E mystery of the week. I look forward to meeting Hiawatha in future books!!

This book is a fine work of art - beautifully crafted and pure pleasure at every level! Everyone will appreciate its wicked, though absolutely honest, view of Academic life. I laughed out loud and wept within. Grave Circle is truly an original masterpiece, and it is sure to delight every reader. I look forward to following the main characters for many years to come!

I read Grave Circle with anticipation and finished it hoping that Hi will reappear in future novels. His hilarious stint as a journalist tickled me as much as his Thanksgiving trip home grieved me.

With Tig off in the sunset with Cornelius, I expect her role in subsequent books will be peripheral; meanwhile readers will get to rejoin Hi as he noses his way through troubles on his home campus.

Not a bad cozy, but more emphasis on character development and more interaction between characters would make this a more enjoyable book. Some of the sentences were almost unreadable due to their length and the number of parenthetical remarks included! That may impress some people, but I read for enjoyment, not to marvel at 60-70 word sentences!