Leaving New York to teach at a state university in the Midwest Maggie Bell a young philosophy professor expects to spend a quiet year leading an ordinary academic life. While learning more about the behind-the-scenes workings in the academic world than she wanted to know she quickly finds that a small university town can harbor as many quirky characters and strange events as any big city. When she gets involved in helping a colleague deal with sexual harassment the last thing she expects is to find her colleague dead. Is it simply a tragic accident as everyone is saying or is it murder? What she had hoped would be a calm uneventful year turns into a frantic search for answers.