Stephen Budiansky

Murder, by the Book Stephen Budiansky

The Evander Lawless College of North Ohio has two problems. One is the arrival of a new vice president determined to "make the college more businesslike." Drawing on his years of executive experience in a multinational breakfast cereal company (where he earned the nickname "The Frosted Flake"), the vice president has launched a "branding initiative" and a plan to sell naming rights to individual courses. The other problem is that members of the faculty keep turning up dead. It falls to Ted Gilpin, earnest professor of Cognitive and Deconstructivist Studies, to follow a trail of clues that bizarrely begin to echo not only the classic plots of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers murder mysteries, but also his own impenetrable papers on the "deconstruction" of texts. Gilpin finds himself involved with a cool blonde physicist, a yellow-highlighter-wielding cop, a mysterious missing manuscript--and enough venom-fueled jealousies among his fellow academics to fill a cemetery.