Author Gillian Roberts would have us accept that an English teacher's speculations and interviews with a classroom full of dissident students hiding their complicity in a private plot against another teacher rises to the level of an investigative mystery. That teacher is Amanda Pepper, pegged as an amateur sleuth, and Roberts is careful to not challenge her skills too far beyond her pay grade. The dramatic level is contained within a Sunday School context and is suitable for all ages and sensibilities. Among readers who like their mysteries safe, they can read this author with no danger of an alarm bell going off.

But we do have a bomb going off. After hearing complaints about the chemistry teacher, Juan Reyes, Amanda meets him and immediately understands why he's considered a strict authoritarian without a compromising bone in his body. He may well be the focus of student enmity that has been affecting her, as well, in peculiar instances of her papers and personal belongings disappearing and reappearing.

But pettiness rises several notches when Reyes is the victim of an accidental bombing in his lab. But, not to worry. In the Roberts narrative, we're protected from literally "seeing" this and having such things as blood and bodily destruction described. Roberts puts it out of sight, in the next room, when the explosion that puts Reyes in the ICU goes off. And, once he's removed to Intesive Care, the poor disciplinarian isn't to be seen again.

Amanda suspects that it was caused by this secret cabal of resentful students and, in that sense, no accident at all. The "mystery" remaining is who was involved and what was the motive, as if those questions aren't fairly evident by this point in the "case." What's also evident is Roberts "Home Companion" version of Columbine, a world in which evil and desperation isn't expressed in intentionally violent terms, but as undesired consequences of petty criminal behavior, held safe in the arms of a protective author.

The rest of the book is Amanda's personal home life, a sub plot with no clue as to its dramatic value, and other padding.

Tensions are, for the most part, as limp as a Dali timepiece, and the biggest mystery to me is how I managed to read "A Hole In Juan" to the end, where the resolution is as gripping as an oven glove. I do not wonder, however, at the success of Robert's series, designed for an entirely different class of reader than I. Give me the likes of Jack Reacher, anyday.