Subsequently, the corrosive Corbin is shot to death in his office on Thanksgiving Day. Karen has an airtight alibi, but other suspects abound -- from the head of the women's studies program, who also pined for the Palaver Chair, to Visiting Poet Jane Birdwort, to the perpetually disgruntled department secretary, to any one of the students who had been complaining about Corbin.

Then Karen's office is ransacked, and a number of the Emmeline Foster journals are stolen, so it looks more and more as if Corbin's death may be inextricably entwined with the muse of his life -- poet of the macabre Edgar Allan Poe.

As she did in her first two novels, Joanne Dobson uses a savvy insider's knowledge of college politics and a considerable talent for complex plotting to produce a witty and eminently satisfying entertainment.