Bad Chemistry

Janis Svilpis is a professor of English at the University of Calgary.

This is a readable, interesting combination of the academic mystery and
the police procedural. The setting is the University of Cambridge, where
Wendy Fowler, a young chemist making a career for herself despite
resistance from the academic old boys, has been murdered. Someone has
been sabotaging her research, she has been having an affair with one of
her colleagues, and her killer evidently knows the chemistry
laboratories. The investigation moves from the university to the
community, where Wendy has worked as a volunteer at the Pregnancy
Information Service, helping a pregnant teenager who has herself been
murdered. This brings in an array of other characters, almost
exclusively women, who have been Wendy’s friends, associates, and
acquaintances.

All of this adequately satisfies the mystery reader’s need to find
out “who done it,” and at the same time raises a number of social
issues. Through the varied characters associated with the university and
the Pregnancy Information Service, Kelly surveys the general impact of
the feminist movement and reminds us that not as much has changed as
some might like to think. Perhaps predictably, the murderer turns out to
be an anti-feminist male. The book is not, however, given to
male-bashing. Its heroine, Gillian Adams, is a Cambridge-educated
historian whose professional career at a Canadian university conflicts
with her relationship with Edward Gisborne, a Scotland Yard Detective
Chief Inspector. Their cooperative solution of the mystery shows how two
decent, emotionally responsible people can work together under
circumstances that do not please either of them. The academics, the
police, and the community are for the most part similarly decent and
similarly plagued by conflicts. Kelly is working with the same sort of
material as P.D. James, Reginald Hill, and others, but her intelligence,
compassion, and cautious hopefulness are very much her own. This is a
fine book.