Amanda Cross

When beautiful Janet Harrison asks English professor Kate Fansler to recommend a Manhattan psychoanalyst, Kate immediately sends the girl to her dear friend and former lover, Dr. Emanuel Bauer. Seven weeks later, the girl is stabbed to death on Emanuel's couch--with incriminating fingerprints on the murder weapon. To Kate, the idea of her brilliant friend killing anyone is preposterous, but proving it seems an impossible task. For Janet had no friends, no lover, no family. Why, then, should someone feel compelled to kill her? Kate's analytic techniques leave no stone unturned--not even the one under which a venomous killer once again lies coiled and ready to strike. . . . KATE FANSLER IS "AN AMATEUR DETECTIVE IN THE FINEST TRADITION." --The New York Times "YOU'LL BE ENTERTAINED RIGHT UP TO THE TIME YOU FIND OUT WHO MADE THE FREUDIAN SLIP." --Buffalo Evening News "YOU'LL LOVE IT ALL AND BEG FOR MORE." --Saturday Review

Student riots have ravaged the distinguished New York City university where Kate Fansler teaches.In the ensuing disarray, the survival of the university's plebeian stepchild, University College, seems doubtful. President Jeremiah Cudlipp is snobbishly determined to ax it; and as sycophantic professors fall in line behind him, the rally of Kate and few rebellious colleagues seems doomed. It is a fight to the death, and only a miracle--or perhaps a murder--can save their beloved institution. . . ."

Amanda Cross is master of the American literary whodunit. In her delicately menacing short fiction, assembled here in one volume, dangerous impulses seize the most unlikely individuals, and everyday existence is fast eclipsed by the bizarre. Among the compelling intrigues: The cold-blooded murder of Mrs. Byron Lloyd, shot dead during a writers' panel discussion . . . the enigma of the nameless toddler who walks out of the bushes one New England summer afternoon . . . the reappearance of a missing Constable drawing just where it can cause the most trouble . . . and other wonderful mysteries, many of which star the incomparable amateur sleuth Kate Fansler.

"FASCINATING . . . The dialogue is, as always, elegant and polished."--Los Angeles TimesWhile guest-teaching a semester at Schuyler Law School, Kate Fansler gets to know an extraordinary secretary named Harriet, who patterns her life after John le Carr 's character George Smiley. Harriet reveals that Schuyler has some serious skeletons swinging in its perfectly appointed closets, including the fate of Schuyler's only tenured female professor and a faculty wife who has killed her husband. As if Kate doesn't have enough to tackle, she is also up against the men who comprise the faculty of Schuyler itself--a thoroughly unapologetic bastion of white male power, mediocrity, and misogyny. Although she has only a few months on campus, Kate refuses to let Schuyler's rigid ideals and insistence on secrecy suppress her indefatigable curiosity--or her obsession with the truth. . . ."Cross manages to keep this book as lighthearted and witty as any of the Kate Fansler mysteries, while depicting an institution as lethal as any cold war."--Marilyn French"A funny, snappish polemic on political correctitude that takes great relish in Kate's sardonic views."--The New York Times Book Review

"If by some cruel oversight you haven't discovered Amanda Cross, you have an uncommon pleasure in store for you."THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWWhen Clare College's resident eccentric Patrice Umphelby is found drowned in the campus lake, it's called a suicide. But the college president grows suspicious and calls in noted professor/detective Kate Fansler to research the matter. Ingratiating herself with her academic colleagues to learn more about Patrice's life, Kate digs up the evidence she needs to understand her death....

"If by some cruel oversight you haven't discovered Amanda Cross, you have an uncommon pleasure in store for you." THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWKate Fansler is vacationing in the sweet and harmless Berkshires, sorting through the letters of Henry James. But when her next-door neighbor is murdered, and all her houseguests are prime suspects, her idyll turns prosaic, indeed....