Professor Neil Kelly is passionate about language, about his scholarly work on John Donne, about teaching at his venerable New England college. But with his wife long dead, he's resigned himself to the belief that his chance for more personal passions...has passed. He's reckoned, however, without his prize student, the vibrant, brilliant Priscilla Lacey. Incredibly, Priscilla has fallen wildly in love with him, and with a mixture of joy and terror Kelly has begun allowing her ardor to thaw his emotional frost. When Priscilla is murdered, Kelly roars to life, turning his ferocious intellect to the task of tracking down her killer.

Having solved the murder of his vibrant young fiancé, Professor Neil Kelly is preparing to leave for a desperately needed sabbatical. But Kelly's plans are cut short by a terrible attack on two of his oldest friends. Nearly as shocking is the information that his friends had, in fact, spent years working for the CIA. Nor is the CIA the only outfit trying to find the attackers. To Kelly's horror, his friends' tragedy becomes the focus of an obscure battle among various government agencies, each jockeying for jurisdiction. And once again, it is up to Kelly to bring the grim bureaucracy of crime-solving back to the all-too-human level.

The murder of a friend's infant son propels Professor Neil Kelly into a mystery involving international intrigue and a trip through Kelly's memories of his childhood in pre-revolutionary China

Neil Kelly searches for a killer who used a letter bomb to dispose of the owner of a rare sixteenth-century manuscript

Murder, mayhem, lust, jealousy, and ambition erupt in a quiet academic town, and the urbane Professor Neil Kelly finds himself at the center of the mystery