Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Rabbi David Small, after 25 years at the Barnard's Crossing Temple, resigns in order to launch a Judaic studies department at Windermere College in Boston. Happily, Kemelman hasn't resigned from his engaging, skillfully plotted mysteries (Friday the Rabbi Slept Late; Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry). In this one, the temple board duly hires a new rabbi. He jogs! In shorts! His wife is a lawyer! And he eventually becomes a suspect in a murder that links village and city as surely as do the snowy Boston and state roads. A fierce Thanksgiving storm figures heavily here-affecting people's movements and their cars, and delivering up a corpse in a snowbank. The victim's identity is not a surprise; nor is the killer's, but reasoning out the intricate means and motive calls for the rabbi's trademark pilpul. Vintage Kemelman-clean prose, quiet wit, absorbing characters and revealing conversations, with David's discourses on Judaism as fascinating as ever. (Mar.)
Library Journal
Kemelman began his "Rabbi" series with Friday the Rabbi Slept Late (1964). Now, with seven million books in the series in print, comes this latest installment in which the venerable Rabbi Small investigates the death of an English professor.
Kirkus Reviews
The big news is that since leaving his suburban congregation (The Day the Rabbi Resigned, 1992, etc.), Rabbi David Small has landed another job. His new post as Professor of Judaica at Boston's Windermere College gives Kemelman license to indulge his disdain (never far beneath the surface in his Nicky Welt stories and elsewhere) for the most obvious types of academic snobbery and vacuity. Here, the main beneficiary of his satiric gaze is Prof. Malcolm Kent (né Mike Canty), médiocrité grise of Windermere's English department. Besides not knowing his right hand from his left, Kent is a groper (of his junior colleague Sarah McBride), a platonic adulterer (with his longtime manicurist, Lorraine Bixby), a Peeping Tom (on Susan Selig, Esq.), and, once dead, a confounded nuisance: His corpse has the temerity to get found in almost exactly the spot that Dana Selig, the new rabbi, had promised to toss him after his wife caught the savant at her window. It's this last twist, of course, that brings Rabbi Small into the case, where he operates as colorlessly and effectively as you'd expect.
A feast of understatement—though Windermere College, where an unlettered dolt can wangle tenure for a colleague with a few well- placed words, seems to be operating out of a time warp.
