What a silly book! An aging museum Director has another murder near his museum grounds, but this time he is a suspect for the detectives on the case, while his prime suspect had an affair with the woman that he will sleep with, which his wife accepts because she slept with the murder victim! And there is a signing monkey whose life narrative is interespersed as the Director reads the memoir that the Chimpanzee signs to a typist.
A lovely send up of academic and museum bureaucracies, mid-life crises, old men with women barely half their age as wives and lovers, and our bizarre and entirely unexplainable self-satisfaction as a species. This is a series written by the former director of travel at Harvard's Museum of Natural History, so Alcorn's hilarious dialogue among academic bureaucrats about various theorretical fads, and the pretensions of those who take them seriously, his descriptions of the endless complexities of museum paperwork, and the characters who believe their cubicle defines the universe (or at least university). A perfect read when you need a reminder that it's only life after all.
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