The high stakes game of university recruiting and a scandal involving athletes form the centerpiece of Ron Lovell's new Thomas Martindale mystery, "Lights, Camera, MURDER."

Martindale is acting as the liaison between the university and a video production company to prepare a series of television advertisements to attract new students. When one of his young students is murdered, Martindale goes on the trail of her killer. Along the way, he uncovers a scandal involving the recruitment of black football players. He also encounters the wife of a coach who will stop at nothing to get young men into her bed and keep her exploits secret.

More campus-oriented than the two previous novels in the Martindale series, "Murder at Yaquina Head" and "Dead Whales Tell No Tales," "Lights, Camera, MURDER" also skewers the committee system that dominates most universities and reveals the amusing--and often tedious--day-to-day world of the classroom. As always, Martindale's search for the killer puts him in danger in some unlikely places: the steam tunnels running under campus, an isolated covered bridge, and the high cliffs behind an isolated inn above the churning Pacific Ocean.