Academy Gothic

Hardboiled noir meets academic satire in Academy Gothic. Tate Cowlishaw is late for another faculty meeting when he discovers the body of Scoot Simkins, dean of Parshall College. Cowlishaw might be legally blind but sees that a man with three bullets in his head didn't put them there himself. The police disagree. When Cowlishaw investigates, he is told his teaching contract won't be renewed. Suspects aren't hard to come by at the college annually ranked Worst Value by U.S. News & World Report. While the faculty brace for a visit from the accreditation board, Cowlishaw's investigation leads him to another colleague on eternal sabbatical. Before long, his efforts to save his job become efforts to stay alive. A farcical tale of incompetence and corruption, Academy Gothic scathingly redefines higher education as it chronicles the last days of a dying college

"Tate Cowlishaw, the droll narrator of Hill's fine first novel, may be legally blind, but he's clever enough to realize that the death of Randall "Scoot" Simkins, the dean of Parshall College in Grayford, N.C., was not suicide... [Cowlishaw's] investigation is notable for the bizarre quirks he discovers about his fellow members of the college community--and for the opportunities he finds to share mordant observations about the condition of higher education in America. The dead-on parody of academic jargon and the well-spun plot alone make this mystery worth reading." --Publishers Weekly