The Charles Dickens Murders

Midwestern University English prof Beth Austin takes her third crack at solving a murder case (after The George Eliot Murders, 1995), again mining a literary classic for clues. This time, her mother's collegiate past and two Dickens tales, Bleak House and the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood, provide the murder and the template respectively. Beth's mother, Laurie, discloses that, during her college stay at the same university in the late 1940s, there was a scandalous love triangle and an unsolved murder. Her account takes Beth--and readers--back to Dall Hall, a girl's dorm, and the friends there known as the Fourth Floor Gang. The girls' camaraderie is fractured by suspicions rising from some petty thefts; it is then destroyed when one of them is shot to death. Beth is fascinated enough by the story and her mother's observation that ""the murder was never solved--and it never will be"" to try her hand at unraveling the puzzle, tracking down the women the girls have become and resurrecting the past. Beth learns of the recent death in Manhattan of a Fourth Floor Gang member, which starts her on another, more immediate investigation. In a final scene, Beth assembles the friends and some of their associates to lead them to the answers of a number of questions that have infiltrated their present lives from their shared past. (Nov.)