Karen Pelletier Books In Order
- Quieter Than Sleep (1997)
- The Northbury Papers (1998)
- The Raven and the Nightingale (1999)
- Cold and Pure and Very Dead (2000)
- The Maltese Manuscript (2003)
- Death Without Tenure (2009)
- In the Attic (2016)
Helluva War Mystery Books In Order
- Face of the Enemy (2012)
Novels
- The Kashmiri Shawl (2014)
Karen Pelletier Book Covers
Helluva War Mystery Book Covers
Novels Book Covers
Joanne Dobson Books Overview
Quieter Than Sleep
Karen Pelletier abandoned her life in New York for a professorship at Massachusetts’s elite Enfield College. But she quickly learns that New England is not the peaceful enclave she had imagined and that not even the privileged world of academia is immune to murder…
. Professor Karen Pelletier’s prime literary passion is poet Emily Dickinson a passion she shares with her hotshot colleague Randy Astin Berger. Heir apparent to the head of Enfield’s English department, the pompous Randy is the campus Casanova. That is, he was until he was found strangled with his own flashy necktie. The last person to see Randy alive and the first to find him dead Karen knows she must solve the case before she becomes the prime suspect. But to do that, she must first discover the truth behind Randy’s final Dickinsonian discovery a literary bombshell that may well have been to die for…
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The Northbury Papers
Teaching American women’s literature at New England’s prestigious Enfield College has shown Karen Pelletier just how cutthroat the world of academe can be. But nothing in her tenure has prepared her for the perils to come, as this bastion of higher learning throws open its doors to a cleverly calculating killer.A battered copy of Charlotte Bront ‘s Jane Eyre leads Professor Karen Pelletier to the long forgotten novels of an obscure writer named Serena Northbury. When she decides to pen the author’s biography, she sets off a raging controversy. Everyone, from her esteemed colleagues to her tyrannical department head, regards Northbury’s nineteenth century writings as trash. But when the intrepid researcher stumbles upon a treasure trove of Northbury’s papers including what looks very much like an unpublished novel Karen knows she cannot quit, for what could be more thrilling?Unfortunately, someone takes exception to Karen’s penchant for digging up the past. Before long, she is the unlikely suspect in a homicide and the target of an erudite killer who is poised to kill again.
The Raven and the Nightingale
An unexpected bequest sends waves of violence through the placid groves of academe in Joanne Dobson’s third mystery to feature Professor Karen Pelletier. Still untenured, and therefore on shaky academic ground, feisty young Enfield College professor Pelletier finds herself going head to head with the resident Edgar Allan Poe expert, Elliot Corbin, an academic windbag of monumental proportions who is lobbying to be appointed to the much coveted and recently vacated Palaver Chair. So when Karen receives a serendipitous bonanza in the form of never before seen manuscripts and journals by the nineteenth century poet Emmeline Foster, who is rumored to have killed herself for the love of Poe, Corbin is predictably put out. Subsequently, the corrosive Corbin is stabbed to death in his home on Thanksgiving Day. Karen has an airtight alibi, but other suspects abound from the head of the women’s studies program, who also pines for the Palaver Chair; to Visiting Poet Jane Birdwort, whose history with Corbin turns out to be far longer and closer than anyone had known; to the perpetually disgruntled department secretary; to a young female adjunct professor whose unbridled ambition will not be denied. Then Karen’s office is ransacked, and a number of the Emmeline Foster journals and poems are stolen, so it looks more and more as if Corbin’s death may be inextricably entwined with the muse of his life poet of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe. The undeniably attractive Lieutenant Piotrowski is called in, and, as in the past, he solicits Karen’s help, involving her once more in the thankless task of investigating her not always so collegial colleagues. As she did in her first two widely acclaimed novels, Joanne Dobson uses her savvy insider’s knowledge of academic politics and her considerable talent for complex plotting to produce a witty and eminently satisfying entertainment. From the Hardcover edition.
Cold and Pure and Very Dead
English professor Karen Pelletier is well known for her provocative manner and iconoclastic opinions, so it’s no surprise that she perversely cites a commercial novel from the 1950s when asked to named the greatest book of the twentieth century. The only work by Mildred Deakin, who disappeared from public view shortly after its publication, Satan Mills quickly becomes the hottest book around. It’s the center of contentious arguments in academic circles, climbs onto The New York Times bestseller list, and receives the coveted honor of being an Oprah Book Club selection. At the height of the frenzy, a reporter who discovers the reclusive author in rural upstate New York is found dead in her driveway. Could Deakin have been so protective of her privacy that she’d shoot someone to protect it?Called in to help with the investigation, Karen learns that the scandalous happenings at the heart of Satan Mills were more autobiographical than its attractive young author wanted anyone to know. The intrepid professor deploys all her literary and investigative skills in an all out effort to exonerate the embattled older woman and restore her peaceful existence. Detailed with Dobson’s lethally witty pen, Karen’s latest adventure is at once a deftly told mystery and a delightful debunking of polemical academics and pretentious intellectual windbags.
The Maltese Manuscript
In classic noir tradition, English Professor Karen Pelletier gains a client when her office door opens and a famous Private Eye novelist enters. The author is dogged by Trouble a Rottweiler and by a problem. And since Sunnye Hardcastle a Patricia Cornwell lookalike will be a featured speaker in the English Department’s upcoming conference on the murder mystery from a Feminist Perspective, Karen is intrigued. The next thing you know, one midnight someone rushes out of the Enfield library with an armload of rare books. In fact, the library is missing a truckload of its treasures. Then a suspect is found dead in the stacks, his neck broken. With a real private eye on the case, the hunt is on for the manuscript of Hammett’s famous novel, The Maltese Falcon, for the missing books, and for potential murder suspects. A sparkling fifth entry in an award nominated series by Fordham University professor Joanne Dobson riffs the hardboiled genre and several sacred icons. What is truth? What is fiction? No one seems certain. Perhaps most frustrated is Karen’s boyfriend, Massachusetts police lieutenant Charlie Piotrowski, a man having trouble dividing his personal and professional life, let alone translating modern academic speak. But then, don’t we all? Joanne Dobson is the author of Quieter Than Sleep, The Northbury Papers, The Raven and the Nightingale, and Cold and Pure and Very Dead.
Death Without Tenure
Professor Karen Pelletier is about to realize her dream; after six years in the English Department at New England’s exclusive Enfield College, she is up for tenure. Then Professor Joseph Lone Wolf, her rival for the one tenured spot in the department, whose ethnicity gives him minority preference status, is found dead from an overdose of Peyote buttons. First on the list of suspects, Karen is harassed by a homicide cop with a grudge against his colleague, the love of Karen s life, Lieutenant Charlie Piotrowski. On campus, political passions rage. Two of Karen s favorite students, Khalida Ahmed, a hijab wearing Muslim, and Hank Brody, a coal miner s son on full scholarship, are caught up in the furor. Without the presence of her beloved Charlie, now serving a tour of duty with the National Guard in Iraq, will Karen be able to survive the investigation, protect her students, and find a permanent niche in the world of academe? And what if the killer feels the need to strike again?
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