Sham Rock by Ralph McInerny, a Mysterious Review.

Review: The circumstances surrounding the disappearance 20 years earlier of a Notre Dame student attract the attention of Professor Roger Knight and his brother Philip, a retired private investigator, in Sham Rock, the 13th mystery in this series by the late Ralph McInerny.

At the height of the financial bubble prior to 2009, investment banker David Williams pledged millions to fund the Williams Center for Ethics on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. Now, a year later and nearly broke, he returns to the university from which he graduated to inform the officials that his donation would be delayed. Separately, a former classmate of David's and once a close friend, Patrick Pelligrino, who is now a monk at a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, donates a lifetime of papers to the university archives. Included among these papers is a cryptic note that suggests David may have been involved in the disappearance of another classmate, Timothy Quinn, the third of the so-called "trinity" of friends, who left the campus while a student and was never seen again. Roger and Philip Knight are intrigued by the puzzle presented and set out to determine if there is any truth to the allegation that David Williams may have gotten away with murder so many years ago.

Sham Rock is not a typical mystery. About three-quarters of the book, the first 200 pages, is basically a setup to a murder that finally takes place and is resolved in the final 70 pages. To be sure, there is a lot of credible misdirection in the plot, which would seem to involve whether Timothy Quinn was killed or not and whether David Williams was involved or not. But it's clear from the various subplots that something else is going on. And there is some appeal, from a mystery reader's perspective, to not knowing exactly where the story is going. Yet the resolution is not all that satisfying. One would think that given the length of time spent on setting up the murder, the outcome would have more punch. Fans of the series will no doubt enjoy what is likely to be its final entry, but newcomers expecting more of a traditional mystery may be disappointed in Sham Rock.

Stained Glass
Minotaur Books (Hardcover), October 2009
ISBN-13: 9780312582647; ISBN-10: 0312582641

Sham Rock

A University of Notre Dame Mystery by Ralph McInerny