Honest Doubt

Zusatztext "ONE OF CROSS'S BEST BOOKS IN YEARS." -- The Providence Journal "AS SHOCKING AS IT IS PLAUSIBLE." -- The Washington Post Book World Informationen zum Autor Amanda Cross is the pseudonymous author of the bestselling Kate Fansler mysteries, of which Honest Doubt is the thirteenth. As Carolyn G. Heilbrun, she is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities Emerita at Columbia University. She has served as president of the Modern Language Association as well as vice president of the Authors Guild. Dr. Heilbrun is also the author of Writing a Woman's Life , Hamlet's Mother and Other Women , The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem , and, most recently, the New York Times Notable Book The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty . Klappentext 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 College English Department. The list of suspects is longer than the freshman survey reading list. And as the women defuse the host of literary landmines set out for them, Woody suspects they're only scratching the surface of a very large and sinister plot. . . . "Some work of noble note, may yet be done." --Tennyson, "Ulysses" When I had finished writing up my report, covering everything in the investigation as it then stood, I leaned back in my chair and gave myself up to facing facts. So far, so good, but only so far and no further. I knew the moment had come to call upon Kate Fansler. She had been recommended to me as the logical, perhaps the only person who could be of help at the current impasse. As a private investigator of some reputation and accomplishment, I never shy away from consulting anyone who can offer me a shove, however minimal, in the right direction, but Kate Fansler gave me pause. She was a detective herself, if strictly amateur, and a professor into the bargain. I don't mind asking experts for explanations in any abstruse field--I'm ready to admit what's beyond my powers--but I couldn't help fearing that the air that lady breathed was a little too rarefied for my earthly self. And then of course there was the fact that she was said to be slender. I, being fat, dislike thin women--I'm more open-minded about men--and in the end I admitted this to my client, the one who had suggested Fansler. I was guaranteed that though she was undoubtedly skinny--that term, being vaguely insulting, appeals to me--Fansler never worried about her weight or threatened to go on a diet. If there is one thing more revolting than another, it is thin women complaining about their fat and screaming about their need to lose weight. Not Fansler, I was assured. With her it's a matter of metabolism--genes, really. She eats what she wants and hates health food and any form of low-fat diet, my client told me. Well, blessings are unevenly distributed in this world, though Hindus think we all earned our fate by our actions in a previous life. I probably was starving, skeletal, and yearning for food every minute of the day and night. Hence my current figure. I'd gone to many doctors and diet specialists, all of whom tried to determine why I was fat, and how I might get thin. It was always assumed it was some problem with my psyche. One day I happened to meet up with a doctor who explained that there was such a thing as an inherited tendency to largeness. He held to this view even under my vigorous cross-...

Product details

• Authors: Amanda Cross
• Publisher: Fawcett Book Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 27.11.2001
• EAN: 9780449007044
• ISBN: 978-0-449-00704-4
• No. of pages: 241
• Dimensions: 107 mm x 175 mm x 18 mm
• Series: Kate Fansler; Kate Fansler
• Subject: Fiction > Suspense