Karen Pelletier abandoned her life in New York for a professorship at Massachusetts's elite Enfield College. But she quickly learns that New England is not the peaceful enclave she had imagined--and that not even the privileged world of academia is immune to murder....

Professor Karen Pelletier's prime literary passion is poet Emily Dickinson--a passion she shares with her hotshot colleague Randy Astin-Berger. Heir apparent to the head of Enfield's English department, the pompous Randy is the campus Casanova. That is, he was--until he was found strangled with his own flashy necktie.

The last person to see Randy alive--and the first to find him dead--Karen knows she must solve the case before she becomes the prime suspect. But to do that, she must first discover the truth behind Randy's final Dickinsonian discovery--a literary bombshell that may well have been to die for....

Karen Pelletier is the kind of person who, driving through a snowstorm, chants Emily Dickinson to herself as a talisman--"It sifts from Leaden Sieves, / It powders all the Wood. / It fills with Alabaster Wool / The Wrinkles of the Road." And Joanne Dobson has done such a good job making Karen a real and complex character that we happily go along for the ride. In her first novel, Dobson (who teaches English at Fordham University and has written a book about Dickinson) adds new life to the academic mystery by making her lead character as tough as she is smart: a working-class single mother suddenly offered a chance to teach at the very posh Enfield College in Massachusetts. Professor Pelletier, who left behind a longtime lover in New York to take the job, now has to cope with men as diverse as Randy Astin-Berger (a trendy, Mick Jagger look-alike trying to live up to his first name), a patrician college president sending out mixed messages, and--after Karen finds Randy strangled by his necktie in a closet--a comfortable old cop called Piotrowski. The reality of academic hysteria is perfectly captured; the crime and detection are carefully plotted; and Dobson fully fleshes out Karen, her daughter Amanda, and all the rest of her female characters so that they live with the reader long after the book is finished. --Dick Adler

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