A Lecture to Die For

Mid-winter in Upstate New York . . . the usual cold and mounds of snow at Tennyson College, but now over-shadowed by the unexpected death of an in-your-face professor of religious studies who insists that humans created God. The small-town police detective thinks it's murder, and his prime suspect is Henry Carey, a political science professor at the college. Henry's world suddenly careens from class-rooms discussion of George Bush's recent election to frantic efforts to conjure up explanations for how Stanley Hoard came to die. Explanations that make someone else the murderer. Henry is good at hypothesizing, but the detective seems to make a fetish out of hard evidence. Henry's wife Gerri tires to keep Henry grounded in reality. To make him understand that nominating others for police scrutiny is sure to alienate the innocent and compel the guilty to strike back. But she, too, becomes caught up in his mania--to the peril of both.

P R Beckman lives outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a refugee from Upstate New York winters. In between fighting a running battle with the deer that raid the garden and flower beds, he chases Henry Carey through his imagination. Both admit to being professional students of politics. Both have experience in the college classroom, although Henry seems far more successful. Neither can resist trying to solve puzzles, but Henry is far more willing to step on toes to do so. And both are married to saucy women who more than once have helped their husbands see beyond the tips of their noses.