A Slow Cold Death

Fiction. Lori Barrow was a Wunderkind, the youngest person ever to enroll in America's most prestigious science university, the Superior Technological Institute of Pasadena, CA. Now, twenty years later, she's a lonely, socially awkward Luddite whose career is all over the map because she refuses to grow up. She knows that her alma mater has brought her back as a professor not because of any great achievements, but because they hope her wide range of skills will resuscitate the dying physics department. She learns very quickly that the "dying" is all too literal. Mysterious deaths and accidents have plagued the department for at least two years, linked somehow to experiments at the South Pole and the happenings at the rocket lab. Afraid of making too many waves too early, Lori says nothing...until the department's only female graduate student is found frozen to death in the cold room.