Kate Fansler is an enjoyable sleuth what with her knowledge of English literature and academic politics. She and her fiancee, the DA, investiage the murder of an English professor, who is one of Kate's arch enemies.
Kate Fansler reaches Victorian literature and has a passion for the poetry of W. H. Auden -- poetry that takes on new meaning when death strikes suddenly within the hallowed halls of a great New York university. The tragedy occurs at a party celebrating Kate's engagement to assistant D. A. Reed Amhearst. It is Reed who must investigate the "accident" that looks more and more like murder -- while a suspicious amount of evidence points directly at Kate.