The Raven and the Nightingale- A Modern Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe PDF
Preview The Raven and the Nightingale- A Modern Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe
Lavish Praise for THE RAVEN AND THE NIGHTINGALE featuring Professor Karen Pelletier “As usual, Dobson delightfully skewers the pretensions and politics of academic life while respecting the importance of education.” —Booklist “College politics and savvy plotting make this new series a contender for the Amanda Cross chair which, sadly, appears vacant.” —Booknews from The Poisoned Pen “As Pelletier’s life continues to expand, so does the possibility of this series being around for a long time.” —Chicago Tribune “Will definitely be a favorite among those readers who love academic mysteries.” —The Snooper THE NORTHBURY PAPERS “Dobson has created an attractive heroine with the courage and wit to take on the toughest adversaries.” —The Dallas Morning News “Dobson moves easily between impassioned evocations of forgotten women writers and catty contemporary shafts at familiar ivory-tower targets.” —Kirkus Reviews “Few are better than Dobson at recording the minutiae of academic committee- speak, power plays in body language and jargon, and what ignites a classroom.” —Booklist “An intriguing mystery with excellent secondary characters.” —Rendezvous And Joanne Dobson’s Agatha Award– nominated debut mystery QUIETER THAN SLEEP “A white-knuckle ride through the hallowed halls of higher learning and through the dangerous rapids of personal conflicts with a delightfully funny heroine who gives as good as she gets.” —Rendezvous “A genuinely good read.” —Time Out New York “A literate and absorbing novel with an ingratiating main character and intriguing setting … a smashing debut. Don’t miss this one.” —I Love a Mystery “A superior academic mystery that reminds me of early Amanda Cross.” —Booknews from The Poisoned Pen “Deftly balancing its literary and mystery elements, Dobson’s debut sparkles with wit and insight into college politics. Readers academic and otherwise will look forward to the next adventure of the smart and scrappy Karen Pelletier.” — Publishers Weekly “A truly stunning academic mystery … You’ll be all the richer for this nineteenth-century view of a very modern murder. A literary and intricate mystery with connotative power. Watch this one.” —Mystery Lovers Bookshop News “Emily Dickinson scholar Dobson’s first novel has an appealing heroine, a nifty payoff, and a beguiling way with the extracurricular entanglements of her teaching stiffs.” —Kirkus Reviews “Anyone who thinks the word ‘academic’ is synonymous with ‘detached’ needs to read Professor Dobson’s tale of seething passions and deadly animosities within the English department of Enfield College. It’s a cutthroat world, academia, polished and elegant though the blades may be, and the author captures all the nuances of jealousy and fear that lie beneath the foundations of captures all the nuances of jealousy and fear that lie beneath the foundations of the ivory tower. Emily Dickinson, shall we say, with a stiletto in her hand.” —Laurie R. King, Edgar Award winner “A witty and fast-paced adademic mystery. Joanne Dobson has a light touch.” —Joan Hedrick, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life “An intriguing plot with a motive for murder that’s as old as human nature. Good characterizations and fast-paced action make Quieter than Sleep an entertaining novel.” —The Chattanooga Times “An engaging story … a tense confrontation … will have readers rapidly skimming pages to see how it ends. An entertaining read.” —Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph ALSO BY JOANNE DOBSON Cold & Pure & Very Dead The Northbury Papers Quieter than Sleep Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition. . NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED THE RAVEN AND THE NIGHTINGALE A Bantam Book PUBLISHING HISTORY Doubleday hardcover edition / 1999 Bantam mass market edition / September 2000 All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Poems by Emily Dickinson reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Copyright © 1999 by Joanne Dobson No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books. eISBN: 978-0-307-79691-2 Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York. v3.1 IN MEMORIAM Walter Kendrick Acknowledgments Colleagues, friends, and family have assisted in making the writing of this book possible. My thanks to Frank Boyle for his pursuit of a manageable teaching schedule, and to Connie Hassett for her always-savvy professional advice. To Phyllis Spiegel and Vicki Saunders I owe much, including good health. Sandy Zagarell and Eve Sandberg read The Raven and the Nightingale in manuscript and provided that most invaluable of reader response, confirmation of the writer’s own instincts. Frank Couvares gave me one of Piotrowski’s best lines. Kate Miciak has been a dream of an editor, and Deborah Schneider a model agent. I wish to acknowledge scholarly debts: to Cheryl Walker for her groundbreaking study The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900, which, along with Perry Miller’s classic The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene, inspired my title; to Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson for their exhaustive historical- biographical compilation The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849; to Kenneth Silverman for his biography Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance; but most of all to Edgar Allan Poe himself for a life so bizarre and fascinating he made it effortless for my imagination to take that one further, fatal, leap. Dave Dobson knows how much he has brought to this novel—and to my life and writing career—time, energy, endless encouragement, and absolutely vital contributions to the plot. Other members of my family—Lisa Dobson Kohomban, David McKinley Dobson, Rebecca Dobson, Jeremy Kohomban, Myriam Denoncourt Dobson, Bill Cosgrove, Nicky, Serena, and Shea—provide love and laughter and continual interesting developments. Thank you all.
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