Murder at the B-School

Thanks to an assertive, go-getting administration, life at the Harvard Business School has never been better for the faculty members who teach there. Professors' salaries and the student quality are high. Creature comforts abound. Then tragedy strikes. Eric Maclnnes was the school's golden boy-until a misfortune in a campus hot tub leaves him a beautiful corpse. Dealing with this apparently freak accident, Harvard's administrators desperately need somebody to placate both the victim's parents and the Boston police. As Eric's former teacher, a struggling assistant professor at the bottom end of the exalted "B-School'"s tenure track, Wim Vermeer is the natural choice for the assignment. But Wim is shocked when the drowning begins to look like an ingenious murder. For Eric floated through a rarefied world where everybody has money and power and absolutely nothing to kill for...or so it appears. Now determined to uncover the truth, Wim begins a quest that will take him from the swank hotels of old Boston to the mountain hamlets of upstate New York to the lush beaches of Puerto Rico. Applying his professorial research skills to the gritty real world of high chicanery and low crime, he unearths dark secrets that have been zealously hidden by forces unknown. When further bloodshed suddenly places Wim himself at the top of the suspect list, he seeks out a strategic ally and conceives a daring game plan. The ally is Boston Police Captain Barbara Brouillard, a cop's cop with tangled brown curls and a penchant for making up her own rules. The game plan is to wade straight into the camp of the people who most want him dead-and cut a deal that might just save his life.

Jeffrey Cruikshank is principal, Winthrop Group, Inc., and former senior editor at the Harvard School of Business Administration.