College professor/newspaper journalist/murder mystery investigator McLeod Dulaney returns to campus for Ann Waldron’s new mystery UNHOLY DEATH IN PRINCETON.  This foray into murder leads her this time to the university’s seminary, where she is researching a newspaperman of the early 1800s. Elijah P. Lovejoy attended Princeton ’s seminary and become a Presbyterian minister.  Sometime afterwards, he started an abolitionist newspaper that brought on his death by hanging when pro-slavery forces in Illinois refused to accept his point of view.

In an ironic twist of fate, McLeod stumbles onto the dead body of a contentious seminary student, who espoused a virulent religious message against the seminary’s people and policies that he interpreted as contrary to Biblical Scripture.  She heard the student's sermon that was preached the Sunday before his death, without any knowledge of who he was at the time, learning of his history through her talks with the police, old friends Angus McKay (who taught medieval church history at the school) and his wife Fiona; as well as new friends, Henry Fairfield Worthington, former teacher and administrator, Ernst von Kemp, current professor of Biblical antiquities, students Willy Cameron, an openly gay student, and Roscoe Kelly, a snake handler – among others.

McLeod’s penchant for asking questions draws the ire of Dean Ted Tilley, who wants her to leave the Princeton campus.  He views her inquiring mind as the potential for trouble, much like the man, Lovejoy, she is seeking to research.

And yet she is not leaving, as her research is not finished; and the police, giving her an authoritative reason to stay, instructed her not to leave town.  She is a material witness – not to mention, a suspect – to the murder.

When a second murder occurs, with the same cause of death, McLeod is not going anywhere at all before this mystery is solved.  Are the two murders connected?  Maybe with Fiona’s help, she can talk to the people involved, ask all the right question in employing the means of detection, avoid getting killed herself, and expose the killer – or killers.

The religious aspect involved here with UNHOLY DEATH IN PRINCETON, I must say I do applaud.  Religion is one of those taboo subjects everyone is warned as a child to steer clear.  You will always offend somebody, which is what happens here, but Waldron takes the chance to try something new, which I say is a plus in her favor.  Unfortunately, the religious views espoused by the main characters here lie in contrast to much of the Bible-believing public; hence, turning away many of the very people who might otherwise read this well-crafted mystery.

I say to those who might find statements rendered by the characters blasphemous, you should hold on until the end.  There is no attempt to promote a new view of Bible belief.  What the characters state is merely a means to establish an environment within which the seminarian can be murdered.  Just as the man McLeod is researching for a book, Elijah P. Lovejoy, was murdered for promoting freedom for the slaves, a seminary student at Princeton can be murdered for promoting a doctrinal view of the Bible in bitter ‘hellfire and brimstone’ contrast to the university’s unofficial seminary position.  Such establishes an ambience through which the first murder, as well as the second (a professor who has made an ‘amazing’ archaeological discovery) can be accepted as possible.

This setting up of the environment also develops a wide array of suspects.  There are flurries of characters that McLeod and Fiona cull information from to try and solve this crime.  I enjoyed how Waldron managed to give all these characters identities separate from the other.  Reading the exchanges between them and McLeod, I got very distinct images of what they looked like, how they acted, even, to a degree, how they would sound. 

While I cannot recommend UNHOLY DEATH IN PRINCETON as a source for sound Biblical research and study, I do say it is a good mystery one can dive into and emerge from satisfied.  All the elements are present: two victims, an array of suspects, solid detective work, and a likeable main character.