Caitlin Donovan, heroine of Sands Motel and Cutting Corners, has gone through gut-wrenching adventures with her family and her best friend Carmen. All she wants now is to get on with her life, and to enjoy her appointment as a professor at Concordia University. But peace and quiet are not in the cards. One of her students tries to blackmail her into giving him answers to an exam. Soon after, another professor is stabbed to death on the street. Another is beaten. Investigator Claude Remay, familiar to readers of Cutting Corners, has a few suspects, and turns up facets of these peoples’ lives that surprise everyone.

In the meantime, Caitlin’s mother, still emotionally fragile after the death of her son, becomes the target of a lovelorn stalker, and has to extricate herself from this dangerous morass alone, while her husband is away burying his grief in work. The threads of the several stories come together in a powerful and frightening dénouement. Kindellan-Sheehan’s writing gets better and better. mRb