Leaving New York to teach at a state university in the Midwest, Maggie Bell, a young philosophy professor, expects to spend a quiet year leading an ordinary academic life. While learning more about the behind-the-scenes workings in the academic world than she wanted to know, she quickly finds that a small university town can harbor as many quirky characters and strange events as any big city. When she gets involved in helping a colleague deal with sexual harassment, the last thing she expects is to find her colleague dead. Is it simply a tragic accident, as everyone is saying, or is it murder? What she had hoped would be a calm, uneventful year turns into a frantic search for answers.