The Edith Wharton Murders: A Nick Hoffman Mystery

Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

Bright, breezy, and laugh-aloud funny.

Chicago Sun-Times

Lev Raphael skewers academic pretensions with wicked glee [and] Dickensian flair. Few writers are as adept at lampooning academic inanity.

Drood Review of Mystery

Marvelous humor and satisfying mystery...wickedly funny.

Marilyn Stasio

Is vulgar literary taste sufficient motive for murder? Actually, killing is too kind for the vindictive scholars in Lev Raphael's maliciously funny campus mystery The Edith Wharton Murders, which makes clever use of a conference on Wharton ("a popular but bland and uncontentious woman writer") to satirize the intellectual jealousies and political rivalries that poison the air in academic communities.

"These Wharton folks are just like gang-bangers, only they dress marginally better and they don't have drive-by shootings," according to Nick Hoffman, a Wharton bibliographer who has the unenviable job of moderating the hostilities at the State University of Michigan. After the initial skirmishes between opposing literary camps who invoke the battle spirit of Conan the Barbarian ("To crush your enemies, drive them before you, and hear the lamentation of their women"), the mayhem begins in earnest with the arrival of two celebrated and ardently loathed authors- one of whom winds up dead.

For an amateur, Nick does a credible job of sorting out the victim's enemies while reserving his sympathy for those who merely despised the woman because her books had "no real stylem no sense of irony, no vision." And for "an escaped academic," as the publisher describes him, Raphael has marvelous recall of the entertaining world he left behind.
— The New York Times

The Denver Post

The groves of academe have never been bitchier.

Kirkus Reviews

As if the State University of Michigan weren't already full enough of misfits and malcontents, a conference on Edith Wharton promises to pipe more in from across the country. Reluctant conference organizer Nick Hoffman is sure that the invited guests—rival Wharton scholars Van Deegan Jones (of the offensively insular old guard) and Verity Gallup (of the offensively irresponsible new), trendy punk novelist Chloe DeVore and her current lover Vivianne Fresnel, bestselling trashy romancer/aspiring Wharton biographer Grace-Dawn Vaughan and her professor-baiting editor Devon Davenport—will mix so well with the home-grown cargo of covetous academics, spineless administrators, and born-again trustees that they'll all be delighted when the conference is history. But even Nick is surprised when Chloe DeVore is bashed to death with one of the attractive new granite tiles being installed at the conference site, and a throng of new suspects (a lesbian colleague hoping to break up Chloe's on-again affair with Vivianne! a novelist prostrated by Chloe's dismissive review! a fortuitous ex-husband!) come leaping into the spotlight with all the spontaneity and emotional expressiveness of the Rockettes. As in Nick's debut (Let's Get Criminal), criminal investigation takes a backseat to catty gossip as the narrator outdoes the characters by trashing authors as diverse as David Baldacci and Eve K. Sedgwick. Except for the murders, the conference turns out pretty well.