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reviewed by John Murphy

Some folks think the Catholic devotion to Our Lady (Notre Dame) is near-sacrilegious. Who knows what they would make of the Catholic devotion to Notre Dame football. Ralph McInerny’s new Knight Brothers mystery, The Green Revolution, takes place on the Notre Dame campus during the football team’s worst season in recorded history (or recent memory, which might as well be the same thing). Under those circumstances, someone is bound to get murdered. For the sake of this plot, someone obligingly does. “The corpse on the putting green,” a hostess observes. “That sounds like Agathie Christie.”

Indeed it does. The Green Revolution is marketed as a cozy mystery, but the mystery seems an afterthought. It is more a comedy of manners, and McInerny (author also of the popular Father Dowling Mysteries) is at his best indulging in light, elbow-ribbing satire of Notre Dame’s eccentric faculty. He is in a unique position to do so, having taught at the university for over fifty years, and he even manages to slip in some pointed commentary about the school’s increasing secularization. Sprinklings of Latin and references to Shakespeare and Baron Corvo elevate the proceedings, but McInerny wears his erudition lightly. He may have titled his book The Green Revolution, but his style is comfortingly orthodox.