"FASCINATING . . . The dialogue is, as always, elegant and polished."
—Los Angeles Times
While 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 Carré'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...

Professor Charles Haycock is dead from a hearty dose of his own heart medication. The mystery is not why Haycock was murdered—very few could stomach the woman-hating prof—but who did the deed.
Estelle "Woody" Woodhaven, a private investigator hired to find the killer, naturally enlists the help of that indefatigable amateur sleuth, Kate Fansler. Together, they start to pull at the loose ends of the very tangled Clifton...

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,...