Dangerous Admissions: Secrets of a Closet Sleuth

By Jane O'Connor

Miranda "Rannie" Bookman--43, divorced mother of two, with a recent love life consisting of a long string of embarrassingly brief encounters--is beginning to feel like a dangling participle: connected to nothing. Her career as a copyeditor is down the toilet (she makes one little slip--a missing "l" from the last word in the title of the Nancy Drew classic The Secret of the Old Clock--and suddenly she's Publishing Enemy #1 ), so she's been forced to take any gig she can get. And that means giving tours at the Chapel School, the ultra-exclusive, ultra-expensive, private academy that her children attend. Certainly not the most interesting of employments . . . at least until someone stumbles across the dead body of the Director of College Admissions.

Investigating a murder was never in her job description, but with her soon-to-be-college-bound boy Nate a prime suspect, Rannie has little choice. Besides, who better to dot all the "i"s and cross all the "t"s than a self-proclaimed "language cop"? Her diligence might even lead her to a brand-new love. Or to a killer. Or to another corpse--hopefully not her own.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061240869
• ISBN13: 9780061240867
• Release Date: July 2007
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Clever, fast-paced, and funny

This book kept me reading far too late one night, but I couldn't stop. The humor is dead-on, the pace is brisk, and O'Connor's insights into the publishing industry and the world of prep schools lend a welcome authenticity. I can guess the resolution of the mystery in a book or film about half the time, but I didn't guess the ending of this one. If you're a reader like me who enjoys clever dialog, twists and turns, and a solid mystery plot, don't miss this book. Highly recommended!

Dangerously Entertaining

Terrific fun! A witty and grammatically correct mystery. The author certainly knows the New York private school scene, the Upper West Side and the voice of teenage angst. I look forward to Rannie's next outing

Outstanding academic achievement

A forcibly unemployed copy editor is working at a fancy Manhattan school where the parents are so focused on getting their children into the right colleges that they will kill for it. The influential college advisor is murdered. It's so full of wonderful laugh-out-loud one liners that I though it was going to be simply played for laughs but there's an engrossing page-turning classical whodunit that obeys the conventions while satirizing them. Even the climactic attractive-heroine-in-peril scene brings in a joke about copy-editing. I refrain from repeating the wonderful Nancy Drew joke.

Delightful!

This was the perfect book to read on a lazy and humid Sunday afternoon. I read it straight through. The plot was a little predictable but O'Connor writes so well from the perspectives of the different characters it didn't matter. She paced her action well by interspersing text messages and emails. Very enjoyable -- hope she will write more adult fiction.

amusing Manhattan murder mystery

Forty-three years Miranda "Rannie" Bookman is a divorced mother of two. Her love life consists of imaginary numbers and her work as a copyeditor with a sharpened blue pencil went down the tubes due to an honest error of omitting the letter l in the re-release of the Nancy Drew thriller The Secret of the Old Clock. Until the publishing world forgives her blunder, which may be in the next millennium, Rannie works where she can; for instance she embarrasses her children by giving tours at Manhattan's exclusive Chapel School private academy they attend. When someone murders the director of college admissions at "Chaps", A. Lawrence Tutwiler, her son Nate and other seniors and their parents including her are prime suspects. Unable to accept the NYPD narrow focus targeting the Upper West Side Chaps community, Rannie thinks she would like to kill authors whose books are one big run on sentence, but never did. Instead she investigates whether anyone would kill to get into their college of first choice or is some other motive the cause. Eccentric Rannie is a charmer as she holds this amusing Manhattan murder mystery together as she cringes at fractured sentence structure or insuring the world is grammatically and punctuality correct while investigating who is killing Chaps. The breezy story line pokes fun at elitist schools, publishing companies, and amateur sleuths. The support cast, mostly the Chaps, add depth to Rannie's running amok as the investigative grammar queen of New York. Harriet Klausner