Professor Jasper Tempest and the team untangle a series of knotty crimes ranging from an unexplained fire in a student block to the mystery of an entire family found dead in their home.

"A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speak out from a pulsing metropolis. Tunde, the man at the center of this novel, reflects on the places and times of his life, from his West African upbringing to his current work as a teacher of photography on a renowned New...

"Paul Auster's brilliant eighteenth novel opens with a scorched pot of water, which Sy Baumgartner--phenomenologist, noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor--has just forgotten on the stove. Baumgartner's life had been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals...

Danny, Professor Bullfinch, Dr. Grimes and Joe wreck their plane on a desert island, and in twentieth-century Robinson Crusoe style survive ten adventurous days. "I challenge you to a duel of desert islands!" Dr. Grimes cries, when Professor Bulfinch accuses him of not being practical. Grimes plans to go ashore on an uninhabited desert island, and the Professor on another. After a month they will see who has survived the best!Danny and his best friend...

"An outcast her entire life, Corvina Clemm is left adrift after losing her mother. When she receives the admission letter from the mysterious University of Verenmore, she accepts it as a sign from the universe. The last thing she expects though is an old, secluded castle on top of a mountain riddled with secrets, deceit, and death. An enigma his entire life, Vad Deverell likes being a closed book but knowing exactly everything that happens in the...

"Cameron Winter is known for having a sense about crime. His background as a spy trained his mind--and his body--for action, and his current role as an English professor gives him a sharp understanding of human nature. But beyond that, he was born with a "strange habit of mind"--the ability to recreate detailed crime scenes in his imagination and dissect the motives and encounters that produced them. And after reading a puzzling news story about a...