An Imperfect Spy

By Amanda Cross

Book Overview

"FASCINATING . . . The dialogue is, as always, elegant and polished."
--Los Angeles Times
While guest-teaching a semester at Schuyler Law School, Kate Fansler gets to know an extraordinary secretary named Harriet, who patterns her life after John le Carr 's character George Smiley. Harriet reveals that Schuyler has some serious skeletons swinging in its perfectly appointed closets, including the fate of Schuyler's only tenured female professor and a faculty wife who has killed her husband. As if Kate doesn't have enough to tackle, she is also up against the men who comprise the faculty of Schuyler itself--a thoroughly unapologetic bastion of white male power, mediocrity, and misogyny. Although she has only a few months on campus, Kate refuses to let Schuyler's rigid ideals and insistence on secrecy suppress her indefatigable curiosity--or her obsession with the truth. . . .
"Cross manages to keep this book as lighthearted and witty as any of the Kate Fansler mysteries, while depicting an institution as lethal as any cold war."
--Marilyn French
"A funny, snappish polemic on political correctitude that takes great relish in Kate's sardonic views."
--The New York Times Book Review

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345464931
• ISBN13: 9780345464934
• Release Date: March 1995
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Crossing the Line

Kate Fansler had passed the statistical point of midlife. Nostalgia may be a disabling pressure that signifies retreat. Kate addresses the parents at her old school, the Theban. At the event she is challenged by a secretary from Schuyler Law School that she has never really done anything for the dispossessed, marginal individual. Reed is to start a clinic at Schuyler Law School. The woman from the secretarial room at...

Kate teaches a course at a law school

Kate and Reed are invited to teach for a semester at a mediocre law school in the city. There are no women tenured on the faculty, the only one was hit by a truck. Another faculty member's wife is in prison for shooting her abusive husband in the chest, ending a long history of abuse. The faculty made sure she got the maximum. Reed is to start a legal clinic for the students and Kate is co teaching a course on literature...

Her Best...So Far

Her best and that's good

Law schools where "mediocrity is the norm."

The challenge of white male power in a Law School. Citations from John LeCarre. And A. N. Wilson's words: "Where mediocrity is the norm, it is not long before mediocrity becomes the ideal." And John Le Carre: "I invested my life in institutions - he thought without rancor - and all I am left with is myself."