Death Of A Harvard Freshman

Lauren Adler

by Victoria Silver

Arch and charming mystery narrated by a precocious young woman from New Jersey during her first year at Harvard/Radcliffe.

Genres: Mystery

232 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published December 1, 1984

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mystery I re-read ever year since I was a teenager and never tire of!

[Réo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick, fun, and easy — just like getting into Harvard! Drink when: Lauren gloats about not being a virgin, someone makes a Jewish joke, Brian is referred to as Beef or Bouef.

Also: The term 'facebook' was originally used to refer to the freshmen registry containing names and headshots that every incoming class received. Must've missed that in The Social Network. TMYK

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Russell Bernard turns up dead, his fellow freshman classmate Lauren Adler becomes convinced that someone in their shared Russian Revolution seminar is responsible. Only hours after a presentation on Rasputin’s murder, Bernard had been killed in a similar manner – clobbered on the head, stabbed, shot, and thrown face down in the waters of the Charles River, as if the killer feared his victim might prove as difficult to finish off as the Mad Monk had been. Lauren herself has a personal interest in the case, as Russell was supposed to meet her that night for their first date. Partnering up with her new best friend Michael Hunt, the two set out to solve the mystery on their own.

Death of a Harvard Freshman is an entertaining and enjoyable little mystery, but it lacks the depth that true mystery aficionados are seeking. We’re given the profiles of our list of suspects in Chapter One, as Lauren sits in her Russian Revolution seminar describing her superficial impressions of the other students hand-picked for the class by Professor Baranova herself. Russell Bernard is clearly the star pupil. While still in high school, Russell had helped form a civil rights group and had a story published in The New Yorker. These accomplishments plus his good looks made him the apple of more than a few pairs of eyes, including Lauren’s. As Lauren makes a point of getting to know her suspects better outside of class and Michael works the angles provided by his prior knowledge of two of them back at Exeter, plenty of interesting and more than one shocking facts come to light regarding Russell’s relationships with all of Lauren’s suspects and the sequence of events preceding his murder. The author does a nice job of casting suspicion on just about everyone.

The biggest problem this novel has is the stereotypical portrayal of many of the characters. Michael isn’t just gay – he’s flamboyantly so; the class jock can barely put a sentence together; the young wife of a black South African guerilla is annoyingly radical about even the most non-political of issues; etc. It’s hard to see most of these characters as real people, including the murder victim and the amateur detective herself, and that makes for a certain disconnect for the reader. Issues of racism, Jewishness, and homosexuality make for a better mystery but do little to advance characterization (with one exception). In the end, though, I have to say that the solution to the mystery does make for quite a story.

All in all, Death of a Harvard Freshman is a rather light-hearted and relatively quick and easy mystery novel, and I quite enjoyed reading it. It’s more Nancy Drew than Agatha Christie, though.

[CLM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vivid and clever mystery set at Harvard. Editor Kate Miciak once told me that Silver was really a man, which I would not have guessed.

[Keith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Murder mystery written for high school girls who should not go to Harvard.