Monday, June 10, 2013

The Dead Scholar

The Dead Scholar is the fourth in the Quin and Morgan mystery series. The first three, Still Waters, Grave Doubts, and Reluctant Dead, have been published by Dundurn Press, who will be publishing number five,"Blood Wine," in 2014.To fill in the long gap and because Dundurn won't publish a novel the length of "The Dead Scholar" (50% longer than the others), I decided to make it available as an ebook. It is an intricate "ship of fools/country house" novel that could not be cut without seriously diminishing its achievement (such as it is). The following is a description of "The Dead Scholar." Give it a try, tell all your friends, enjoy! When the corpse of an elderly professor turns up on Philosophers Walk in the heart of Toronto, fellow members of the Francis Bacon Society are not surprised he was murdered. Each of the twelve eccentrics in this unlikely group devoted to the Renaissance rogue and scholar is profoundly in the dead man’s debt, and each has reasons for wanting him dead. Detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan are drawn into their midst as the investigation moves from the university environs to a grand summer house in Muskoka, and reaches from the turn of the new millennium back into the bleakest events of the twentieth century, and even beyond, to Elizabethan England and the sordid beginnings of a new world order. "The Dead Scholar" is a drawing room thriller and a black comedy, an exquisitely paced intellectual puzzle and a complex study of quixotic characters whose lives intersect in a web of dark secrets they cannot escape. It is a world where Quin and Morgan find themselves quite at home.