Customer Reviews

Little Miss Evil: A Nick Hoffman Mystery

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

If I ever visited Lansing, Michigan (the obvious model for the fictional town of Michiganapolis), I would not be a bit surprised to run into Nick Hoffman and his boyfriend Stefan. Perhaps if I was really lucky, they'd invite me back to their house and cook something wonderful. Now, I realize these characters are fictional creations, but they have grown to seem quite real to me after reading Lev Raphael's wonderful series!

It's always a pleasure to encounter Nick, Stefan, Nick's cousin Sharon, and the wacky faculty and staff at the State University of Michigan (SUM). In this latest book, a new professor named Camille Cypriani joins the SUM faculty -- she's a Pulitzer Prize-winner who has achieved great critical AND commercial success. So, needless to say, everyone else at SUM hates her. And at SUM, that inevitably leads to murder...

The Nick Hoffman mysteries are laugh-out-loud funny, and this one has a deeper element as well (Sharon is suffering from a brain tumor and Stefan's career as a novelist has gone WAY downhill -- his agent can't even sell his latest book). This is another fantastic book in one of the best mystery series around.

Anyone expecting standard, run-of-the-mill mystery will be disappointed in Lev Raphael's witty academic satires that go beyond the genre's tired conventions. Like Robert Barnard and other masters, his new book experiments with a late murder--though there's a parallel mystery from early on involving stalking. What a joy to see an author do something different than he did in his last book, where the murder took place in the opening chapter.

The writing is eloquent and funny, the characters unforgettable, and best of all, in this fourth Nick Hoffman mystery we see an unexpected mid-life crisis for Nick that will doubtless raise the ire of the Political Correctness Police who don't know how to read fiction. This is a novel, not an inspirational pamphlet. In its own way, LITTLE MISS EVIL is as daring as Binnie Kaufman's magnificent PURE POETRY.

Over four books of the series, we've seen the stresses and strains of a couple living together for 15 years: jealousy, career anxieties, a medical emergency and now something completely different. Bravo to Lev Raphael, whose collection DANCING ON TISHA B'AV broke new ground in 1990, for this finely inventive novel.

There is trouble in the State University of Michigan EAR (English, American Studies, and Rhetoric) department and Nick Hoffman, a non-tenured professor who always seems to find himself surrounded by murder, is in the middle of it. Someone is stalking him, everyone is upset about a new endowed chair, and murder is once again in the air.

Using a professor who teaches a class in mystery allows Lev Raphael (the author) to have Nick name-drop all of the latest mystery authors, along with Virginia Wolfe, Edith Warton, Dark Passages, and Titanic with equal humor. I found myself laughing out loud when Nick (after spending too long on Janet Evanovich) wondered if he should simplify his diet (his partner, Stephan set him straight--Stephanie Plum is no role model).

The academic setting is brutally realistic. Unlike business, the University really is a zero sum game and professors play to win--not that there is much joy even in the winning. Still, Nick keeps his sense of humor and deepens his relationships with Stephan, his cousin Sharon, and the strangely attractive Professor Juno Dromgoole (is there a certain Dickensian quality to Raphael's naming?).

There are no dead bodies until well into Lev Raphael's latest academia mystery, but you won't miss them at all as you are taken along for a ride through backstabbing murderous university scenery. This is Raphael's best yet, in his Nick Hoffman series. Nick's partner is suffering from midlist writer's angst; the English Department at the university has been invaded by a best-selling harridan; and Nick is (horrors) finding that he's attracted to, of all things, a woman. Spicing it up is the usual cast of outrageous professorial and administrative characters that Raphael does so well. Hang on to your funnybone and enjoy LITTLE MISS EVIL.

About ten pages from the end of "Little Miss Evil" our intrepid sleuth Nick Hoffman says something like, "If only I'd listened to what people were saying".

So I went back and reread the entire book from the brilliant opening sentence, and I still didn't pick it. Obviously my mistake was not hunting out "All About Eve" (the book's leitmotiv and source of the title) from the video store.

This is the third Hoffman mystery I've read. I love the realistic depiction of academia (of course it's really like that), the food, the structure, the dialogue, even the descriptive bits which I normally skip in fiction. The four-and-a-half star Edith Wharton Murders suffered from a very slow opening 20-30 pages and Constant Lover had that implausible bridge scene. Little Miss Evil is just pluperfect.

As a rule, I give academic mysteries a wide berth, but I make a happy exception for Lev Raphael's Nick Hoffman series -- the sophisticated skewering of the self-important is one of my favorite spectator sports, and Lev wields one of the deftest skewers around.

Little Miss Evil is Lev in top form, with the refreshing addition that this time out, Nick gets to experience a a little ambiguity of his own.

I look forward to more in this series, but it is high time they stop talking about it and get that dog.

Lev Raphael's stories I find delightfully entertaining. I read "Little Miss Evil" back to back with "Death of a Constant Lover" which is probably the recommended course of reading. Alas, I've missed Lev's publications since "Let's Get Criminal," but I have added those overlooked to my wish list.

There are enough reviews giving away the plot or criticizing a variation from correct mystery/crime line. Raphael is unconventional, an academic who is suppose to broaden us, so I enjoyed the reading-ride. I openly chuckled on the bus and in a restaurant, and wiped my eyes too with other emotions stirred.

The Nick Hoffman series should have a wide appeal and including anyone connected with academia or those educated higher ups that can enjoy laughing at themselves. I've been recommending Raphael to client's and friends connected with the University of Chicago, as I'm sure not everything is just Ravelstein in Hyde Park.

I like the character's Nick and Stefan, they remind me of people I know; my medical doctor and his boyfriend who recently found out about his own Madeline Albright-esque Jewish roots. These characters set standards for a burgeoning gay community, one that is looking for icons. A community so youth-oriented in an age of steroids and viagra, and that hereto sadly seems to be mostly fodder to hypnotizing Leni Riefenstahl-like advertisements. I prefer broader American Dream icons, even if they are characters in a novel like Stefan and Nick, who aspire for higher plateaus, teaching our young, making a home, and a creating lasting relationships. These two just happen to be even more enlightening for readers as they are also a Jewish couple living in the American Midwest.
Hence, The Nick Hoffman series belongs in every Temple library too.

Some of my favorite things to find in mystery fiction are wit and heart, and LITTLE MISS EVIL has both. When the State University of Michigan brings on board Camille Cypriani, a vituperative best-selling author, offering her an exorbitant salary for virtually no work, there isn't an unruffled feather left in the department. Nick Hoffman, the series sleuth who slogs away teaching composition at SUM, has to sort through university politics, department egos, a creepy campaign of intimidation against himself -- and murder. Lev Raphael has an exceptionally fine, droll style he applies with real insight into life both on and off the college campus.

Lev Raphael's mystery, set in the contentious politics of a state university, will keep you grinning - OK, almost laughing - for much of it as he deftly skewers the faculty pretensions.

His descriptions of even minor characters come alive. With carefully chosen brush strokes, the canvas pulsates with their emotions and actions.

He does the same with the setting -- the cooking smells seem so real that you will find yourself heading for the pantry.

Because of all this, the suspense is real. So is the enjoyment. Read this one!

I like the Nick Hoffman series and anxiously await each new episode. I wasn't disappointed this time. I didn't figure out 'who dun it' until the book revealed it. The pace is slow in places but I liked that. It's the journey that's interesting to me -- not the destination.

If you are looking for non-stop blood, guts and gore, this isn't the book for you. If you are looking for people to get to know and care about, read the series -- but start at the beginning (LET'S GET CRIMINAL) so you can see the way that Nick and Stefan's relationship grows.