Best-selling novelist David G. Baldacci has delivered his latest blockbuster to fellow members of the Virginia Commonwealth University board of visitors.

Baldacci, a Richmond-area native and VCU graduate, yesterday denounced the internal investigation, led by the board, into the degree improperly awarded to former Richmond Police Chief Rodney Monroe.

The divided board is preparing today to defend its embattled investigation, which Rector Thomas G. Rosenthal describes as "very thorough, very fair, and very professional"

But Baldacci, in a scathing nine-page letter obtained yesterday by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, depicts the investigation as a horror story.

"It sounds more like a CIA torture session than a university investigation over an internal issue," he wrote in the letter, delivered to board members yesterday at the beginning of a critical two-day meeting.

In the letter, Baldacci called the scandal "without question the darkest chapter in the saga of a university that I support and love. It is also at this precise moment a university I no longer recognize."

He faulted university officials and fellow board members for over-reacting to an anonymous complaint by targeting faculty members with tactics that he compared to scare campaigns conducted by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

In the process, he says, the investigation has badly damaged VCU's reputation while failing to fairly get to the truth of how Monroe was able to receive a VCU degree after completing only six of his 122 course credits at the university.

Monroe had earned a total of 122 credits over time from various institutions. But like most colleges, VCU requires that to be awarded a degree, a student must earn a minimum number of credit hours -- in this case 30 -- at the school where the degree is conferred.

"If handled internally, it would have been a perfect opportunity to ensure everyone -- including accreditation boards and university alumni -- that VCU has in place appropriate safeguards to guarantee the integrity of its university degree," Baldacci wrote.

"Unfortunately, instead of a university matter, we have a media circus, the public condemnation of faculty and other school personnel, a full-blown public scandal, allegations of investigatory abuse, and multiple resignations of distinguished faculty," he added.

Rosenthal has become VCU's spokesman on the Monroe scandal and a key player in overseeing the internal investigation. He said the board would issue a statement today that he expected would affirm the results of the investigation.

The investigation found that Monroe had been improperly awarded a bachelor's degree because of errors in judgment by some VCU officials. Some of those officials were uncooperative with the investigation, the board concluded.

"The people who are complaining here are those who were investigated," Rosenthal said.

The board announced the findings in June but never released the report on the investigation.

Rosenthal also cited a TV news report this week in which Linda L. Spinelli, the former coordinator of the program that awarded Monroe his degree, said she regarded the investigation as fair.

Baldacci said he conducted his own investigation of the documents that detail the decision to award Monroe the degree last year and the probe begun by the board after Rosenthal received an anonymous complaint in May.

Baldacci faulted the investigation for concluding that people weren't cooperative or truthful in early interviews.

"The investigators were told to go back and be more aggressive in their questioning," he wrote. "This is where things started turning ugly and threats about tenure and the like were made."

Rosenthal denied last night that he told investigators to be more aggressive and said the only investigator he talked to about the probe was its leader, Richard O. Bunce Jr., director of assurance services at VCU.

In his letter, Baldacci said he also spoke to Bunce and said the investigator accused Robert D. Holsworth, then dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences, of pressuring another dean to approve Monroe's application and then lying about it. Baldacci said the investigator told him that S. Jon Steingass, then dean of the university college, had implicated Holsworth privately.

Baldacci defended Holsworth, whom he said he has known for nearly 30 years, and noted that Steingass had backed up Holsworth's account.

Holsworth, asked to respond yesterday, said, "I never broke any rule in the entire Rodney Monroe affair. I clearly never directed, asked, or suggested anybody else to break any rules, either."

He also said that two accusations against him had been refuted -- one that he called Spinelli to pressure her to approve Monroe's application, which she denied in a television interview this week, and the other that he pressured Steingass, who said last week that he approved Monroe's degree because the chief had done everything the university had required of him. Steingass could not be reached yesterday to respond to Baldacci's letter.

"To me, it's kind of weird that everybody I supposedly called or pressured denies it," said Holsworth, a well-known political science professor who is closely allied to Richmond Mayor L. Douglas Wilder, who hired Monroe. "What more can I say?"

Spinelli told The Times-Dispatch that she had been pressured to approve Monroe's degree but she wouldn't say who applied that pressure. She told WTVR-Channel 6 that it was not Holsworth, Wilder or VCU President Eugene P. Trani.

Holsworth said he resigned his administrative position as dean last month in protest of the handling of the investigation, which he denounced in a letter to Bunce in late June. Two other faculty members who were not connected to the investigation also protested the investigation and resigned their administrative positions.

In a statement to The Times-Dispatch last week, Steingass, who left VCU for another job, called the investigation unfair, unprofessional and prosecutorial.

Baldacci also questioned Rosenthal's public response to Steingass' comments in The Times-Dispatch. Rosenthal said then he was not familiar enough with the investigators' interviews of Steingass to respond.

Baldacci said he had a conversation with Rosenthal last month in which he "seemed intimately familiar with the interviews conducted, including the Steingass interrogations."

Rosenthal said yesterday that he had not read all of the interviews, only what was contained in the report. "I have various details from the report," he said. "I accept the report. I believe the conclusions are fair and accurate."

The rector also appears to have the support of most board members.

"We're comfortable with the results of the investigation," said one board member, former Del. Anne G. "Panny" Rhodes.

Rosenthal said discussion of Baldacci's letter occupied only about an hour of 12 hours of meetings the board held yesterday.

Most of the board's discussion concerned the process for finding a successor to Trani, who announced last week that he would step down June 30.

"That's where the board's focus is," he said.

He said the board expected to announce a timetable next week for the search, which will include town-hall meetings in the community "to discuss the characteristics and traits that we'd like in the next president of Virginia Commonwealth University."

Contact Michael Martz at (804) 649-6964 or mmartz@timesdispatch.com.

Contact Karin Kapsidelis at (804) 649-6119 or kkapsidelis@timesdispatch.com.