Double negative (felony & mayhem mysteries)

Dedicated to the study of toddlers and their development of verbal skills, the Wabash Institute should be staffed by kinder, gentler scholars, but instead is home to a nest of supremely cranky academics. When one of them is bludgeoned to death, Jeremy Cook-the Institute’s premier scholar and the book’s socially clueless hero-becomes the prime suspect. To clear his name, Cook resolves to solve the case, even if it means taking time off from his hobby of teaching imaginary words to the Institute’s tiny subjects. While gleefully skewering academia, Carkeet-himself a professor of linguistics-also provides a spectacularly ingenious puzzle. Mystery stories that have a really original solution to the crime are very rare, said the New York Times Book Review. but Dr. Carkeet has found one.

Publishers Weekly

Dr. Jeremy Cook becomes the prime suspect in a double murder at the linguistic development institute where he works in Double Negative , a debut novel PW called «a first-rate thriller.» Cook appears again in The Full Catastrophe , this time as a marriage counselor assigned to move in with his patients: according to PW , «Laugh-out- loud scenes and swift, convincing dialogue mark this lunatic look at serious issues.» (May)