Booked for Death

Displaying the inventiveness and wit that make her a favorite of mystery fans, Borgenicht presents her 15th tale of deceit and murder. Celia Sommerville is snubbed at the university where she works after she jilts her fiance, professor George Theroux, and he kills himself in a small Vermont town. Sure that the stiff, selfish man never would have committed suicide, Celia decides to prove he was murdered. With the help of her one remaining friend, Jason Bailey, she goes to the town to help retired, nearly blind Professor Ellsworth, father of George's prep-school classmate Roy, who had died years earlier. Ideas from Ellsworth's theories on child-rearing (the basis of his current book) generate Celia's suspicions about the Ellsworth family, with whom she becomes warily involved: the late Roy's managing widow, their disreputable offspring and an in-law who vanishes inexplicably. At the height of tension, Jason appears to add surprises to the solution of a crime which is anything but academic, regardless of the characters' milieu. (November 23)