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“Sex, silence and sin”, this is what newly appointed professor, Dee P. Scrutari, writes in her notebook as she turns her anthropological gaze on the tribe of “non-reproducing males” who dominate St Jude's, a prestigious Catholic liberal arts college. Evil is in the air. Something is awry.

What happened to the previous occupant of her newly-painted office? Professor Scrutari's fieldwork begins. Her notebooks fill. And the mystery mounts: disturbing odours that no air cleanser will disperse, turbulent faculty meetings, tenure politics, intrigue around women's bodies, and a strange ginger cat. The mix is complicated by secret student alliances, predatory priests, the end of a marriage and new love, an imperious college president, a lumbering dean, a faction-ridden Religious Studies Department, a radical mass and a dissident feminist liturgy.

The determined anthropologist doodles and decodes the symbols and signs of evil as she teams up with a band of colleagues marginalised by the department - a liberation theology nun, a gay priest, and a Jew - and three feisty women students. They strategise and sleuth as they attempt to solve a number of campus mysteries.

"Evil," Dee declares, "is visceral, pervasive, subtle, not an abstract concept at all." Evil is about now. Evil is a novel full of vivid characters you know, or want to know. It is at once funny, witty, sobering, profound and provocative; full of affection for the academic world Diane Bell so lovingly describes; and is concerned to nurture against the darker forces she seeks to identify and expose.