Zänker: Murder Is Academic

In award-winning poet-playwright-photographer Peter Maeck's debut novel, a capital crime in academia spurs an investigative journalist's quest for truth, justice, and a spot on the New York Times Bestseller list.. When revered Ivy League college president Dr. Amos Loeb is murdered, prime suspicion falls upon an alumnus who has raged against the president's admission of women to this historically all-male institution. Loeb, as a survivor of Auschwitz, a renowned scholar, and a heroic humanitarian seemed a very unlikely target for assassination. But as his long-concealed personal misdeeds come to light, he is revealed to have been a far from perfect man, imperfect enough to suggest that several others in addition to the disgruntled alumnus could very well have wanted him dead.. The Loeb murder is baffling the local police when a journalist arrives in town to pursue his own investigation toward writing an account of the affair. This journalist, his ambition set on a Pulitzer Prize, produces the book Zänker in which he is both a focal character and narrator of events. As the former, he is less an objective reporter than an active player in the college community's combustible social life, sparking interpersonal tensions before ultimately solving the case.. Zänker engrossingly answers the question: What if Donna Tartt of The Secret History and Inspector Clouseau of The Pink Panther had co-written Truman Capote's In Cold Blood?