Campus Crime Novels

For Chicago sociology professor Amelia Emmet, violence was a research topic--until a student she'd never met shot her. He also shot himself. Now he's dead and she's back on campus, trying to keep up with her class schedule, a growing problem with painkillers, and a question she can't let go: Why? All she wants is for life to get back to normal, but normal is looking hard to come by. She's thirty-eight and hobbles with a cane. Her first student interaction ends in tears (hers). Her fellow faculty members seem uncomfortable with her, and her ex--whom she may or may not still love--has moved on. Enter Nathaniel Barber, a graduate student obsessed with Chicago's violent history. Nath is a serious scholar, but also a serious mess about his first heartbreak, his mother's death, and his father's disapproval. Assigned as Amelia's teaching assistant, Nath also takes on the investigative legwork that Amelia can't do. And meanwhile, he's hoping she'll approve his dissertation topic, the reason he came to grad school in the first place: the student attack on Amelia Emmet. Together and at cross-purposes, Amelia and Nathaniel stumble toward a truth that will explain the attack and take them both through the darkest hours of their lives.

A philandering professor on the faculty of an Ivy League school is found murdered, setting off ripple effects of anxiety, suspicion, and panic in this Edgar Award-winning classic from 1946.

The Horizontal Man was Helen Eustis's only crime novel, and she won an Edgar Award for it, combining a wildly disparate set of elements into an enduringly fascinating work. In its way it is a classical whodunit that stands comparison with old-school practitioners such as Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. This mystery transpires in the rarefied precincts of the English department of a venerable New England college, one very much of the restless postwar moment, echoing with references to Freud and Kafka. Eustis finds comedy high and low in a cavalcade of characters bursting at the seams with repressed sexual longings and simmering malice. Beyond the satire, she stirs up--with a narrative whose multiple viewpoints give the book a striking modernistic edge--a troubling sense of the mental chaos lurking just beneath the civilized surfaces of her academic setting.

Graduate student Monica Bauer is working in a lab where a new drug to treat brain tumors is being tested. She is also visiting a young man who was shot in the head in Vietnam, searching for ways to connect with him. When lab rats are slaughtered and the custodian is murdered, statistician Maggie Ryan teams up with actor Nick O'Connor to hunt down the killer, as both Monica and Maggie struggle to deal with the men in their lives.

Inheritance becomes deadly in this gripping literary puzzle--the second installment of the Hilary Tamar mysteries that began with Thus Was Adonis Murdered.

"Sarah Caudwell is one of my very favorite mystery writers."--A. J. Finn, New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window

Die first, pay later.

It seemed the perfect way to avoid three million in taxes on a five-million-pound estate: change the trust arrangement. Everyone in the family agreed to support the heiress, the ravishing raven-haired Camilla Galloway, in her court petition--except dreary Cousin Deirdre, who suddenly demanded a small fortune for her signature.

Then Deirdre had a terrible accident. That was when the young London barristers handling the trust--Cantrip, Selena, Timothy, Ragwort, and Julia--summoned their Oxford friend Professor Hilary Tamar to Lincoln's Inn. Julia thinks it's murder. Hilary demurs. Why didn't the heiress die? But when the accidents escalate and they learn of the naked lunch at Uncle Rupert's, Hilary the Scholar embarks on the most perilous quest of all: the truth.

Don't miss any of Sarah Caudwell's riveting Hilary Tamar mysteries:
THUS WAS ADONIS MURDERED - THE SHORTEST WAY TO HADES - THE SIRENS SANG OF MURDER - THE SIBYL IN HER GRAVE