Barely average as a murder mystery. Antonia Fraser might be a decent biographer, but she's clearly better at analysing historical characters and events than creating her own. Oxford Blood takes place, rather obviously, at an Oxford college, where there's mystery about the true parentage of an aristocratic undergrad and people around him are being bumped off. All the characters in this are shallow (though not in the way she's intending) and two-dimensional, while the lead character, Jemima Shore, just isn't particularly believable. She's a bright, brittle TV reporter-cum-private investigator who has it all (... or does she? *ominous drum roll*) I guessed most of the plot except for whodunnit, and failed in that only because I didn't think it was psychologically plausible. There is also the added factor—which can't be laid at Antonia Fraser's feet—that this novel, written in 1985, needs to age for another twenty years or so. At that point, references to cassette players, answering machines and having to buy a copy of Debrett's Peerage in order to look someone up will feel cosily quaint, like an Agatha Christie novel, rather than jarringly dated.
