Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION LAV | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | FICTION LAV | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"With superb confidence, Lavender constructs a brilliant fictional web of lies, inventively warping the psychological thriller to fit the confines of a scholarly investigation." --Kirkus Reviews
When the students in Winchester University's Logic and Reasoning 204 arrive for their first day of class, they are greeted not with a syllabus or texts, but with a startling assignment from Professor Williams: Find a hypothetical missing girl named Polly. If after being given a series of clues and details the class has not found her before the end of the term in six weeks, she will be murdered.
At first the students are as intrigued by the premise of their puzzle as they are wary of the strange and slightly creepy Professor Williams. But as they delve deeper into the mystery, they begin to wonder: Is the Polly story simply a logic exercise, designed to teach them rational thinking skills, or could it be something more sinister and dangerous?
The mystery soon takes over the lives of three students as they find disturbing connections between Polly and themselves. Characters that were supposedly fictitious begin to emerge in reality. Soon, the boundary between the classroom assignment and the real world becomes blurred--and the students wonder if it is their own lives they are being asked to save.
Author Notes
WILL LAVENDER is a writing and literature professor and holds an MFA in creative writing from Bard College. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife and children and is currently working on a second novel.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A complex conspiracy involving the writing of a book drives Lavender's compelling debut, a thriller that will strike some as a mix of John Fowles's The Magus and Stephen King's The Shining. At Indiana's Winchester University, three students--Brian House, Dennis Flaherty and Mary Butler--are taking Logic and Reasoning 204, taught by enigmatic Professor Williams. They quickly learn this is a course like no other. Their single assignment is to find a missing 18-year-old girl, Polly, in six weeks time--or else, Williams asserts, she will be murdered. Is this merely an academic exercise? As Williams produces clues, including photographs of Polly and her associates, the students begin to wonder where homework ends and actual homicide begins. Together with Brian and Dennis, Mary ventures off campus in search of Polly into a world of crumbling towns, decrepit trailers and hints at crimes old and new. A rapid-fire plot offsets thin characterization, though the conspiracy becomes so all-encompassing, so elaborate, that readers may feel a bit like Mary when baffled by her quest: "This is what she felt like: led, played, not in control of anything she did." (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
On the first day of class, the 15 students in Logic and Reasoning 204 receive a challenge from creepy Professor Williams: use logic to find a missing girl named Polly or she will be murdered. They have six weeks. For three of the students Mary, Brian, and Dennis the academic challenge quickly becomes personal, as the professor's assignment begins invading their real lives in ways that are both baffling and terrifying. First novelist Lavender has sprinkled his text with enough red herrings to feed the Biblical 5,000 but uses them to build page-turning suspense. The problem, though, with currently fashionable puzzle mysteries like this one is that characters become nothing more than pawns in an elaborate game, leaving readers with nobody to identify with or care about. That said, Lavender's invocation of the notorious Milgram experiment conducted at Yale on obedience to authority adds an additional and salutary layer of psychological meaning to his elaborate plot.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Denise Mina's bold, brave crime novels make up for all the indignities women suffer in genre fiction - especially the notion that a female protagonist is better off being likable than being real. Mina smashed that false article of faith with her dead-grim Garnethill trilogy, featuring a hard-bitten heroine who fights the social conditions that lead to the abuse of women, children and the elderly in a Glasgow slum. "Field of Blood" began a second series, not nearly as gritty but just as truthful, about Patricia Meehan, known as Paddy, a Glasgow newspaper "copyboy" ("so inconsequential she could have hanged herself at her desk without exciting comment") who develops into a first-rate crime reporter by investigating a series of child murders in her working-class neighborhood. By the time SLIP OF THE KNIFE (Little, Brown, $24.99) opens, in 1990, Paddy, now a newspaper columnist, is something of a local celebrity: "She had stumbled on a talent for articulating nationwide annoyances." But Paddy is still an investigative journalist at heart, and when someone murders Terry Hewitt, her first love, she's all over the case. That takes some courage, given the police theory that the killing was an I.R.A. hit and Paddy's own suspicion that Terry and a photographer who becomes the next victim were murdered because of the book they were working on. Paddy's potty mouth and irreverent attitude are good defenses in the rough-and-tumble world of cutthroat journalism. (One of the book's lowdown pleasures is watching a pack of story-hunting jackals terrorize a killer after his release from prison.) But despite her tough exterior, Paddy can't hide the essential decency she brings to a dirty job. Mina's realistic style gives her urban settings a smudged beauty as distinctive as the roaring wit of Glasgow's colorful citizens. Close characterization is another forte, and sizing people up at a glance is a specialty. "He was a small, bald man and as such didn't like to be seen doing small, bald things" pretty much takes care of a petty-minded editor. To grasp the sense of dislocation felt by a man fresh out of prison, all you need to know is that "the last time he was in a car his feet hardly touched the floor." And Mina's scenes of violence, rough enough by genre standards, feel more intense because she relates them from the victim's point of view. That's real guts for you. OBEDIENCE (Shaye Areheart/Crown, $24), a first novel by Will Lavender, is so slithery it ends up eating its own tail - which is not a bad thing for an academic mystery posing a puzzle so tricky that even the main characters wonder if the whole thing is a hoax. Don't expect any easy plot summary here, but it should help to know that the college students running around rural Indiana, trying to rescue a kidnapped girl in the six-week grace period before she's due to die, have been assigned their task in Logic and Reasoning 204. The creepy Professor Williams strongly hints that "Polly" is a real person and that her fate is indeed in their hands, but you can't help wondering why the college campus boasts a statue of Stanley Milgram, the behavioral psychologist who conducted infamous experiments in blind obedience when he taught at Yale in the 1960s. Authentic puzzle mysteries are an endangered species in these hectic times, so it's a genuine, if slightly perverse, kick to follow every byzantine clue in this bizarre game. Yes, the characterizations are thin, and yes, there are times when you want to yell, "Hey, kids - if X is so, and Y is also so, then. ..." But the author always jumps in to cast doubt on some initial premise in the mental equation. If you solve this one without peeking at the last chapter, it's an automatic A. We're so accustomed to finding Victorian-era mysteries set in gaslight London (or, if we're lucky, gloomier Edinburgh) that the initial surprise of THE ANATOMY OF DECEPTION (Delacorte, $24), a first novel by Lawrence Goldstone, is its Philadelphia locale. Although members of high society figure in the plot, this is no refined mystery of manners. Rather, it's a grimly faithful account of the state of medical research in the late 1800s. As seen through the eyes of a young doctor studying under William Osier, a real-life pioneer in modern medicine, the anatomy room of the Blockley Dead House is the most exciting place in the city - until a more sophisticated student introduces him to the delights and dangers on the shady side of town. Vivid period setting and amazing medical detail duly noted, if Goldstone's hero were any more naïve he'd be institutionalized. Robert B. Parker's crime novels about Jesse Stone, the chief of police in Paradise, Mass., never really hit their stride until Crow came to town. A hired killer whose real name is Wilson Cromartie and whose Apache ancestry seems dubious, Crow returns in STRANGER IN PARADISE (Putnam's, $25.95), a story about the usual small-town troubles that's involving without being exciting. But who cares, as long as it teams up two action heroes who were born to fight on the same side. Crow is Hawk, the enforcer in Parker's better-known Spenser series, before he was housebroken - which allows Jesse to be Spenser, before he got old. Jesse and Crow take target practice together ("We're good. ... "We are") and discuss their careers ("No point being a warrior if you can't find a war"). But mainly they talk the guy talk that is music to our ears. Denise Mina's novel features a journalist with 'a talent for articulating nationwide annoyances.'
Kirkus Review
Kentucky resident and writing teacher Lavender plumbs his vocation for material and gets his hooks in deep with this arresting debut set on a generic Midwestern campus. On the first day of Logic and Reasoning 204, sphinx-like Professor Williams assigns his students the most sinister of logic problems. "There's been a murder," he tells them. "A hypothetical. A potential murder"--or so he claims. Their homework is to prevent the killing, in six weeks, of an invented victim called Polly by correlating the slim leads, facts and photographs provided piecemeal by Williams. Our reluctant detectives are a trio of students, superficially drawn but effective in propelling the narrative forward. Hot-tempered Brian House is given to violent rages after receiving the assignment. Dennis Flaherty, an arrogant frat boy on the surface, is treading emotional water in a clandestine affair with the dean's wife. Inquisitive but prone to crushes, Mary Butler hides her unrequited affection for Dennis by burying her nose in books. The three soon discover secrets behind Williams's assignment. As the multifaceted deception begins to unravel, real danger comes to light. Mary is threatened by the professor's assistant. A police detective recalls the disappearance of an actual young woman whose plight was disturbingly similar to Polly's. At a party at Williams's house, Mary is handed a note that warns, "None of this is real." With superb confidence, Lavender constructs a brilliant fictional web of lies, inventively warping the psychological thriller to fit the confines of a scholarly investigation. An inspired thriller about cognitive dissonance, conjectural misdirection and the conspicuous dichotomy between academia and the real world. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
On the first day of class, the students of Winchester University's Logic and Reasoning course are stymied by their assignment. Their enigmatic instructor, Professor Williams, gives them six weeks to solve the hypothetical murder of a townie named Polly. He prompts them to use rational thinking to figure out strange, sometimes rather bizarre clues. But as the days go by, some students become convinced that the assignment is not simply a logic exercise meant to sharpen their reasoning skills, but that the clues the professor feeds them are real. If they don't solve his mystery, will an actual girl die? As random students and faculty members start to crop up in his clues, two students become obsessed with Williams and are determined to save Polly at almost any cost. First-time novelist Lavender has a knack for creepy characters and red herrings, but readers looking for more mainstream suspense may find that the intriguing premise gets slowed down by a lack of pacing and too many literary references to Paul Auster's City of Glass. For larger suspense collections.--Rebecca Vnuk, Glen Ellyn P.L., Forest Park, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 The strange thing about Williams was that nobody had ever seen him. The faculty guidebook showed a gray box labeled not pictured; group photos in the Winchester yearbooks only showed Williams's hand or arm, even though the captions advertised his presence. The college's website gave a brief curriculum vitae but no photographic evidence. By that Monday afternoon, the first day of classes for the fall term at Winchester University, the search for Williams had, for some of his students, become almost compulsive. It was as if Williams were hiding himself from them, as if he were teasing them somehow. It had become a tradition at Winchester for students to find a picture of their professors before classes began; in this way, it was commonly believed, they could allay some of the anxiety when the man or woman strode into the room. It was a method of one-upping the faculty, of stealing some of their precious authority. And so this thing with Williams had become a big deal. Some of the students of Logic and Reasoning 204 were so incensed over Williams's invisibility that they were convinced they were being tricked. One student, a Young Republican who carried a briefcase to each class, brought out his battered and veined Code of Conduct, and much of the class hovered over him while he searched the index for words like Deception and Faculty Misconduct. It was as they were doing this that Williams himself walked into the room. He was wearing faded blue jeans, which was highly unusual for a professor at Winchester. He was also carrying nothing, which was even more curious than his dress. No papers, no manila envelopes, no coffee mug. He was wearing a flannel shirt that he had tucked in. No belt. Nikes. The professor was clean-shaven, another anomaly on campus, and his face was youthful (for a man clearly in his early sixties) and pitted with acne scars on the left side that brought to mind, both in their color and shape, pennies flattened on a railroad track. Yet he was handsome in a certain light, and he moved so softly and quietly that he gave the impression of extreme gentleness, his hands sometimes out before him as if he were feeling his way into the dark or perhaps gesturing, Don't be scared; I'm right behind you. Professor Williams took his place at the podium at the front of the room. There were fifteen students in the class. Eight female, seven male. They were all white, which was the rule rather than the exception in a Winchester classroom. They were all sharply dressed in clothes their parents had bought them over the summer. Many of them were upperclassmen, as this course was a prerequisite for third-year seminars in philosophy and English. Because the students were mostly philosophy and lit majors, the room had an air of uncertainty. These were students who did not know where they were going in life but were generally accomplished. "Smart kids," a Winchester professor once wryly said of his philosophy students, "who were all seduced by Descartes' brain-in-a-vat theory in Philo 101." Williams opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say a word, someone's cell phone chirped. He waited while the student shamefully dug in her bag to find the offending object. In fact, the professor seemed more anxious than the girl: he looked down, red-faced, at his podium while the girl furiously mashed buttons. Some professors would embarrass the girl further, make her hum the ring tone or have the conversation while standing in front of the class or something just as discomforting. But Williams simply waited. And when the phone had been silenced he said, in a voice that was soft and commanding at the same time, "There's been a murder." No one knew how to take this announcement. A young man in the back row laughed aloud. Williams smiled. He stared down at his podium again and brushed something off the surface. "Not a real murder," he said. "No. This is a murder that may happen in the future. A . . ." The man paused, looked up at the class, waved his hand in the air as if he were trying to come up with the word by catching it in his palm. "A hypothetical," said a girl in the front row. "Yes!" said Williams. He was pleased with the word, as it suited the conditions of his story quite well. "A hypothetical. A potential murder. Murder in the future tense. Because, you see, many things have to happen before this murder is to occur. Many things that you, if you are clever enough, can keep from happening." He fell silent. They met in the Seminary Building, the oldest of Winchester's classroom buildings. Sunlight poured in through the high, bare windows and a few students were shielding their eyes from it. This was a bane of this particular classroom, Seminary East. The sun thing, as it was referred to, had become such a problem that afternoon classes, as Logic and Reasoning 204 was, were often canceled because the fierce light would give the lecturer or the students migraine headaches. "What kinds of things?" someone finally said. Williams turned toward the dry erase board and searched the tray for something to write with, but because it was the first day of classes and professors were hoarding their supplies, no one had left a marker there. Sighing, he turned back to the class. "Time, for instance," he said. "There is the variable of time. If the victim and her killer or killers--" "Potential killer," said the girl who had offered hypothetical. She was into it now. She was tapping notes on her laptop and nodding feverishly as Williams spoke. "Yes. If the victim and her potential killer or killers are not found in a certain amount of time, then she will die." "How long?" someone asked. "Six weeks from Wednesday," the professor said, and everyone noted that the fall term was exactly six weeks long. The fall term was followed by what students referred to as Winchester term, an eight- week session when many students studied abroad. Logic and Reasoning 204--and all the classes during the fall term--promised to be highly competitive, because so many students would be trying to impress the Europe and South America Committees to win a coveted spot on a foreign campus. "The other variables," Williams went on, "are these: place, motive, and circumstance." It was obvious that Williams would have written these four words on the board if he'd had the means. The girl in front put each word on the screen of her laptop: time, place, motive, circumstance. Bolded them all. "So," he said then. "I'll see you Wednesday." The professor turned to walk out the door of Seminary East, which was still standing open. Class had lasted just ten minutes. Almost imperceptibly, a moment of panic passed over the students. They were trapped between wanting to get out and enjoy the rest of the day (Williams's class, so late in the afternoon, would be their last) and finding out what Williams and his missing girl were really about. "Wait," the girl with the laptop finally said. Williams was almost out the door, but he spun in the threshold and said, "Yes?" "How are we supposed to stop it?" she asked. Williams came back into the room. He had a cautious expression on his face, as if he were wary about his students, so young and innocent, getting involved in such a mess. "What kinds of questions are pertinent?" he asked. The girl seemed confused. She looked at Williams over the top of her computer. She knew that she needed to tread lightly here. She was caught, as she often was, between the impulse to dominate the action in the classroom and remaining so silent that the teacher forgot her presence. Thus the laptop; she had found that the sound of her fingers on the keys made her noticeable. She didn't need to talk, didn't need to fear getting on the other students' nerves with her theories and ideas. She could peck at the keyboard during lectures and the professor would know she was engaged. And it had worked. She passed all her classes with high marks and remained well liked on campus, not a bookish nerd at all but rather as popular as a firmly middle-glass girl with frizzy, stubborn hair and square-lens glasses (the kind she saw Joan Didion wearing on C-Span) who read Willa Cather in her free time could possibly be. She was most definitely in, as the Delta sisters she hung around with might say. She and her friend Summer McCoy referred to themselves as Betweeners--those girls who were comfortable enough to refuse to rush a sorority but connected enough to party at sorority and fraternity houses. Between worlds: it was, the girl felt, the best place to be at Winchester. Yet here was Williams asking, What kinds of questions are pertinent?-- a question that begged other, deeper questions, and she was stumped. If she answered, whole philosophies might open up and the class might run down an irrelevant current that would take up the full hour. If she remained silent, Williams might take her for a passive-aggressive brownnoser who hollowly pecked on computer keys. "Who is she?" asked a boy in the back row, saving the girl from having to make her decision. He was the student who had laughed earlier, his normal classroom gesture. So many things seemed, for some reason, ridiculously absurd to him. Meaningless. Logic, for instance. He had signed up for Williams's class and had immediately wondered why he would waste his time. There was no logic, he knew. There were only vague choices to be made, problems to be contemplated but not solved, areas of the strictest gray to subjectively drone on about (because if you solved those questions, what would future classes have to talk about?). Yet after those choices were made and the problems considered, the world stayed pretty much how it was: maddeningly off-kilter. His name was Brian House. Like a lot of people, Brian had learned to act at Winchester, to be someone he wasn't. No one knew, for instance, of the secret pain he had been suffering for the past ten months. No one knew that he didn't listen to those bands--Built to Spill, Spoon, the Shins--that he wore on his T-shirts. He went about his business--the fraternities, the intramurals, the study sessions--as if he cared, but really he loathed the whole process. He had thought about not returning to Winchester after the summer, but how could he tell his parents that? After the void that his older brother's death had left in their lives, there was no way they could understand why he, the one who had been spared, would squander his opportunities. His mother had even begun wearing Winchester U sweatshirts; she had slapped a my child is a winchester colonel bumper sticker on her Volvo. Brian knew that he couldn't disappoint her by letting her in on his dirty secret: that it had all become, after Marcus, pitifully insignificant to him. Brian was tall, nearly lanky, and he been shaving his head because that's what his brother had done. The girls at Winchester took Brian's apathy for a sort of sexy rebellion, and they were often eager to share ideas with him in his dorm room late at night. And that was another thing. He had a girlfriend back home in New York, and shouldn't he feel bad about deceiving her? He did and he didn't. On one hand, what he was doing was clearly a kind of betrayal. He knew what that felt like. Yet a part of him, that uncaring and atrophied part of his soul, could not bring himself to feel sorry for his actions. In the end it wouldn't amount to anything but a girl being hurt. It was, like all things, illogical. It wasn't life and death. "That is the first question," said Williams now. He was becoming more engaged. It appeared that he wanted to give answers to certain questions, but the right questions had to be asked first. "Who is she? Her name is Polly." Some of the students laughed. "Funny name," said someone. "Yes, it is funny," agreed Williams. " 'Polly wants a cracker,' " said Brian, " 'but I think I should get off her first.' It's a Kurt Cobain song." The boy frowned. He did not like artifice, especially artifice that had been stolen from popular culture, perhaps because his own artificialness--his own insistence to put on a face and conform--was what he most disliked about himself. He decided that he was not going to like this class, no matter what happened from this point forward. "That's right," Williams said. "But there are other questions." "How old is she?" called a student from the back. "She is eighteen years old." The average age of the class when they first came to Winchester. "What does she look like?" asked another student. "She's petite. She wears a lot of jewelry. She has various piercings: high on her ears, in her earlobes, in her navel. She has a tattoo of a Chinese symbol on her lower back. She has auburn streaks in her hair and is self-conscious about her height. She wishes she were taller." In short, she looked just like many of them. "Where is she?" asked Brian. "Place," said Williams. "How did she get there?" wondered the boy. "Circumstance." The last of the underscored ideas. Translation: we aren't that far along yet. "Bullshit," Brian muttered. "Maybe," said Williams. "Maybe it is all bullshit. But Polly is in danger, and if you do not find her before your six weeks are up, then she will be murdered." The class was silent once again. Seminary East's internal clock ticked further forward, the light touching the face of Williams's podium. "What does all this have to do with logic?" asked the boy with the briefcase. He was the most practical of the bunch. He was the only student in the class taking Logic and Reasoning 204 as an elective-- that is, as a chosen punishment. He was a liberal arts major, a throwback at Winchester. In the education reform-obsessed 1980s, Winchester had become a university. This small college in the central Indiana town of DeLane would always be overshadowed by the famous Catholic school 150 miles to the northwest, which was unfortunate, considering, as the brochures gladly pointed out, Winchester graduated more Rhodes and Fulbright scholars than Notre Dame and IU Bloomington combined. When Winchester became a university, the curriculum predictably became more technical. More specific. Almost twenty years later there was still a rift among the faculty, and on some of the old guard's letterhead the seal still read Winchester College. The father of the boy with the briefcase had gone to the old Winchester and was now a professor at Temple in mathematics. His son was not nearly as brilliant with numbers, but he was always the one to take the straightest and least difficult line to the end of the maze. Excerpted from Obedience by Will Lavender All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
