Molly Barda is a junior, untenured professor at Hawaii's (apparently fictional) Mahina State University, in the College of Commerce. She just wants to teach, publish, and keep out of trouble until she gets tenure.

Instead, she attends a breakfast honoring the college's largest benefactor, ever. The guest of honor, Jimmy Tanaka, doesn't show up, but a skull does show up, in a fruit plate. This isn't how anyone wanted the breakfast enlivened.

But the strange events have only begun. Molly has to cope with students who don't want to do their assignments, a dean and a "student retention office" who don't want academic rigor driving away the paying customers, and, oh yes, the skull turns out not to be a theater department stage prop, but the skull of the missing Jimmy Tanaka.

Tanaka was, it's fair to say, widely disliked, but who would benefit from murdering him? And then go to the trouble of completely cleaning the skull and putting it in the fruit plate? How is it even possible to do that between the time Tanaka was last seen and the time his skull was found the next morning?

It turns out an awful lot of people Molly knows have butchering experience, although mostly with goats and pigs.

Two of them are students. One is a friend. another is her new boyfriend, Donny Gonzales, founder and owner of fast food chain Donny's Drive-Ins--and Tanaka was suing him for violating a non-compete agreement signed when Donny worked for Tanaka. It's all a little crazy, and Molly soon becomes convinced that he knows the murderer.

There's noting serious or substantial here, but Bow keeps the reader turning the pages to see what happens next and who really did it. It's light but fun, with just enough plot and character development to keep the reader entertained.

Recommended for light reading.

I bought this audiobook. ( )

I love a cosy mystery, especial when I'm after some holiday reading. This is the first in the Professor Molly series written by Frankie Bow. I have read two others in the series (yes, they are written so that you don't need to read them in order) but have wanted to read the first for some time. The stories are set in a fictional low-rent Hawaiian university. In this outing, Professor Molly must deal with cheating students, ineffectual colleagues, a drug addicted ex, a new love interest and the murder of a major college beneficiary. Easy read and great fun. ( )

I received this free audiobook in exchange for an honest review. I found this book to be an okay read. I feel that the characters needed further development. The setting was a college campus in Hawaii and I found it somewhat unusual that the author tells us very little about the beauty of Hawaii and its unique culture. The professors seemed to be very immature and not very professor-like and the students seemed to act more like high school students. The story seemed to be shallow and the dialogue and characters at times seemed artificial and awkward. ( )

This is the first mystery I've read where the main characters didn't realise someone was dead until a third of the way through. That's not a criticism; there's a laid back small town style to this story that really works, and where it makes perfect sense for murder to be the last thing on anyone's mind. It also really captures, with a great sense of humour, the bureaucracies of modern academia (good to know it's the same the world over!) and though some of the Hawaiian slang passed me by at first, I started to pick it up through context as the novel went on. I'd like to see more mysteries like this. ( )

This was a very fun book. It is a murder mystery and you get to see how things spread in a small town. It takes place in Hawaii but the same sequence of events could really be any small town. The characters are really well developed. I really enjoyed reading this! ( )