Kate Fansler
9 primary works • 17 total works
Book 1
Book 2
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Kate Fansler is vacationing in the sweet and harmless Berkshires, sorting through the letters of Henry James. But when her next-door neighbor is murdered, and all her houseguests are prime suspects, her idyll turns prosaic, indeed....
Book 3
Book 4
Book 7
When Clare College's resident eccentric Patrice Umphelby is found drowned in the campus lake, it's called a suicide. But the college president grows suspicious and calls in noted professor/detective Kate Fansler to research the matter. Ingratiating herself with her academic colleagues to learn more about Patrice's life, Kate digs up the evidence she needs to understand her death....
Book 8
Book 11
--Los Angeles Times
While guest-teaching a semester at Schuyler Law School, Kate Fansler gets to know an extraordinary secretary named Harriet, who patterns her life after John le Carré's character George Smiley. Harriet reveals that Schuyler has some serious skeletons swinging in its perfectly appointed closets, including the fate of Schuyler's only tenured female professor and a faculty wife who has killed her husband. As if Kate doesn't have enough to tackle, she is also up against the men who comprise the faculty of Schuyler itself--a thoroughly unapologetic bastion of white male power, mediocrity, and misogyny. Although she has only a few months on campus, Kate refuses to let Schuyler's rigid ideals and insistence on secrecy suppress her indefatigable curiosity--or her obsession with the truth. . . .
"Cross manages to keep this book as lighthearted and witty as any of the Kate Fansler mysteries, while depicting an institution as lethal as any cold war."
--Marilyn French
"A funny, snappish polemic on political correctitude that takes great relish in Kate's sardonic views."
--The New York Times Book Review
Book 12
Book 14
Just when Kate Fansler thinks life couldn’t possibly hold any more surprises, she receives a phone call from Laurence, the eldest of her imperious brothers. But a woman as sharp as Kate knows that the moment one stops believing in life’s little bends in the road is the time when it has more twists in store.
Kate has always been different from the other Fanslers–a free and independent thinker in a family where propriety and decorum are prized above all. She has always assumed it was because she was the youngest and the only girl in the family. But over a drink with Laurence, Kate’s whole understanding of herself is thrown into question as he calmly tells her that a strange man came to his office claiming to be Kate’s father–and it’s quite possible that she is not a Fansler after all.
There are even more dangerous curves in the road for Kate Fansler, especially after she meets the man who calls himself her father. When more life-threatening secrets and lies emerge, Kate and the Fansler family are suddenly pitched perilously close to the edge of doom
When the body of Canfield Adams, a professor of Middle Eastern culture, is found on the pavement seven stories below his open office window, the police see no evidence of foul play. But university officials know that Adams was not one to have jumped out of a window, and there were numerous people - on campus and off - who would have relished pushing him. If the mystery is not resolved, the school may face a hefty lawsuit from the grieving widow.
And so they have asked Kate Fansler to investigate.
The trouble is Kate suspects that the administration is setting her up to fail, and she herself is not sure she wants to succeed. For the murderer may well be a student she cares about . . . or a colleague . . . or even a friend.
Kate Fansler, literary professor, feminist and occasional amateur sleuth has retreated to her secluded cottage. When her eccentric friend Maximillian Reston appears and proposes that she drive him to the home of a recently deceased family friend, she can't resist the opportunity to learn more about of one of her literary heroes, Cecily Hutchins.
But what starts as a light-hearted trip to the coast of Maine ends with Kate discovering a body on the rocky shore. Having identified the dead girl as one of her students the death is later ruled an unfortunate accident but ever curious, Kate sets out to answer her own questions: can her own presence at the scene just be a coincidence? And how much can she really trust Max?
What could be more idyllic for Kate Fansler, Professor of Literature, than a summer in the country sorting through James Joyce's letters to his publisher? But with a rumbustious young nephew and two graduate students in residence, life is less peaceful than Kate might have hoped.
The idyll is further shattered when an unpleasant next-door neighbour is found murdered. Although the murder appears not to have the remotest connection to literature, even the very unliterary police inspector, Stratton, has a strong hunch that the killing is somehow linked to James Joyce.
Amateur sleuth Kate, finding herself and her house guests as prime suspects, sets out to solve the mystery. But the solution turns out to be almost as extraordinary as the murder itself.
Amanda Cross examines relationships and human nature in The Players Come Again, a thought-provoking novel about literature, feminism and ageing.
The 80s are coming to a close and Kate Fansler is using this time to tie up loose ends. Having completed a work of literary criticism – and vowing it will be her last – Kate enjoys lunch with editor Simon Pearlstine, indulging in her usual vodka martini.
There is no rest for the wicked as he commissions her to write a biography of reclusive Gabrielle Foxx, the quiet wife of a famous modernist author. Kate discovers there is more to Gabrielle than meets the eye, and in order to trace the Foxx family’s complicated history she must track down three important women from Gabrielle’s past: Anne, Dorinda and Nellie.
But the further Kate probes into Gabrielle’s history the darker the secrets she uncovers . . .
‘I salute this latest work as being among the best she has written, if not the best’ - Antonia Fraser