Praise for The Dean’s Murders: A Four Corners Mystery

Setting a murder mystery on a university campus, and making the protagonist a member of the faculty—a Dean, no less—risks tipping any novel into in-jokes and well-trod clichés. The Dean’s Murders, however, manages to stay fresh and lively, with Hal Weathers being a fine protagonist. Another fine twist is embodying the love interest in the form of Lieutenant Annette Trieri, who is directly attached to Weathers’s story rather than being merely a gratuitous subplot—and then Hanson ratchets up the suspense by making the couple a target for Bortle and company. And it’s all delivered through prose that is clean and fluid. (Thanks for that.)

What impressed me most about The Dean’s Murders is how deftly the author took familiar tropes and a comfortable-as-an-old-shoe plot structure and fashioned a crackershot story that only once or twice came close to stumbling into too-familiar territory. Frémont State University, with its own political gamesmanship and rivalries, is a fine setting well realized, and Weathers is so well characterized that he reminded me of some of my favorite professors from college. — The Writer's Digest