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 onfor 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.

English Professor Karen Pelletier joins the hunt for the manuscript of Dashiel Hammett's famous novel, "The Maltese Falcon," a load of missing books from the Enfield Library, and potential murder suspects.

Joanne Dobson teaches English at Fordham University. Her first Professor Karen Pelletier academic mystery, Quieter Than Sleep (1997), was an Agatha nominee, of which Publisher’s Weekly said: “Deftly balancing its literary and mystery elements, Dobson’s debut sparkles with wit and insight.” It was followed by The Northbury Papers (1998), The Raven and the Nightingale (1999), and Cold and Pure and Very Dead (2000).

In her scholarly work, Professor Dobson has concentrated on the recovery of the neglected literature of nineteenth-century American women writers. Professor Dobson is a founding editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and a general editor of the Rutgers American Women Writers reprint series.

She and her husband live in the New York City area and have three grown children.