A Spark of Death: The First Professor Bradshaw Mystery

Bernadette Pajer
Poisoned Pen Press (2011)
ISBN 9781590589076
Reviewed by Carol Hoyer, PhD, for Reader Views (8/11)


At the University of Washington, Seattle, two professors couldn’t be more different than Professor Bradshaw and Professor Oglethorpe. Professor Benjamin Bradshaw was caring and wanted to see his students succeed. Professor Oglethorpe was egotistic and verbally abusive to his students. Clearly neither liked each other. Sparks fly whenever the two are in close proximity; the sparks are what killed Professor Oglethorpe.

In a time when electricity was just coming into its own, the University and students were working on a project called the Faraday Cage of the Electrical machine. The students and school hoped that the project would be completed by the time President McKinley visited. But that was not to be as the authorities and the school decided to shut the project down, much to Bradshaw’s dismay. The police accused Bradshaw of killing Oglethorpe and he had to find out who or what killed his colleague.

“A Spark of Death” is Bernadette Pajer’s first novel in the Professor Bradshaw Mystery Series. Although the plot of the book was good and the storyline had a lot of mysteries, I got bogged down by so many characters. It was hard to keep up with whom and how they played into the plot.

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