Lee is a math professor at a second-tier university in the Midwest. When a mail bomb goes off in the office of the star computer scientist next door, Lee is slow to realize that students and colleagues have begun to suspect that he's the Brain Bomber, an elusive terrorist whose primary targets appear to be academic hotshots.

Recovering from being shot by a student she'd never met, Chicago sociology professor Amelia Emmet, desperate to know why she was targeted, gets some investigative help from her teaching assistant and together they must live through the darkest hours of their lives to find the truth.

"A dedicated Anglophile and Janeite, Elizabeth Parker is hoping the trip to the Jane Austen Festival in Bath will distract her from her lack of a job and her uncertain future with her boyfriend. On the plane ride, she and Aunt Winnie meet Professor Zackary Baines, a self-proclaimed expert on all things Austen. He claims that within each Austen novel there is another darker secondary story, usually involving sordid behavior. He claims to know the true...

On Lansdown Hill, near Bath, a battle between Roundheads and Cavaliers that took place over 350 years ago is annually reenacted. Two of the participants discover a skeleton that turns out to be female, headless, and only about twenty years old. Two weeks later, the body of one of them, a professor who played a Cavalier, is found nearby, at Beckford's Tower, a local folly. He has been murdered. This turns out to be one of the most puzzling cases...