Ropedancer's Fall

WINSTON MARLOWE SHERMAN...
By day, he's a bulky, suede-elbowed Shakespeare professor with subversively nontraditional notions. By night, he hunches over his trusty, rusty old Underwood typewriter and secretly becomes Henrietta Slocum--a mystery novelist renowned for her swanky Gilded Age snooper, G. Winchester Hyde.

Sharp-edged wit cuts deep, and Winston has been trading barbs with PBS talk-show host John Falkner for years. But feuds have always been a way of life for Falkner--and now they have pointed the way to death, as the abrasive Pulitzer prize winner may have rubbed the wrong person the wrong way and gotten rubbed out in the process.

The police would prefer that Winston leave the crime solving to them, but when Falkner's son, Mickey, disappears, Winston is determined to go after him. He looks for answers inside the billion-dollar Danson Foundation--the power behind Falkner's program--and plunge deep into a Byzantine world of cutthroat competition, greed, and blackmail behind the worthy facade of public broadcasting. The deeper Winston digs, the more skeletons he uncovers, but he refuses to back off. Winston is going to find Mickey, even if it kills him.