August 24, 2020
Orenduff’s agreeable ninth novel featuring potter Hubert Schuze (after 2018’s The Pot Thief Who Studied Edward Abbey) offers a winning blend of humor and character development. Schuze, an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, supports himself as a pot thief, “digging up and selling ancient pottery.” He also has a knack for stumbling across dead bodies, as shown when he finds that of an unknown man near his pottery shop. The corpse has a puncture wound in the back, but a tourist’s chance videoing of the scene at the time the man suddenly collapsed shows no one near enough to him to stab him. Initially, Schuze spends some time digging into the murder, which takes on added relevance when he learns that he might actually be related to the victim, but the focus shifts to skewering academic politics and bureaucracies after he becomes the new interim head of the university’s art department. The anticlimactic resolution matches the lesser role the crime plays in the book. Readers content with the mystery being secondary will be amused.