The Homer Kelly Mysteries Series

Scholar and former detective Homer Kelly defends a poet accused of committing murder during an eclipse—from the “delightful and always beguiling” author (The Boston Globe).  For all her life, poet Kitty Clark has waited to see a total eclipse of the sun. News of an impending eclipse thrills her until she learns it will be visible only from Nantucket, where one year ago her ex-lover Joe Green moved with his new wife. Unable to resist the astronomical lure, she flies in from Boston, and makes her way to an isolated lighthouse, hoping to avoid seeing Joe. The eclipse itself is overwhelming; Kitty screams when the sun vanishes behind the dark blot of the moon. When the sun returns a few minutes later, Kitty stands over the bloodied body of Mrs. Joe Green, claiming “the moon did it.” Transcendentalist scholar and former detective Homer Kelly agrees to defend the troubled young poet, but the more Kitty insists she is innocent, the crazier she appears. To clear her name he must discover who set her up, and what happened during the two minutes when the Nantucket sun disappeared.

Visiting Oxford, the Harvard professor/sleuth gets a crash course in Darwin’s survival of the fittest in a high-spirited whodunit that’s “vintage Langton” (Booklist).  William Dubchick is too keen a student of the writings of Charles Darwin to not see that the world of biology has evolved past him. Decades ago, he was the foremost mind in Oxford University’s department of natural sciences, but as the field’s focus narrowed to the microscopic level he became nothing more than a gray-haired, cantankerous relic. He has a small fiefdom, manned by Helen Farfrae, a committed disciple who, Dubchick is annoyed to learn, someone is trying to kill. It is into this world that Homer Kelly, Emersonian scholar and part-time sleuth, comes to spend a semester lecturing. Though expecting a vacation, he finds Oxford to be a swamp of theft, fraud, and murder. Besides the attempts on Farfrae’s life, he must reckon with a murdered priest, the theft of a dodo’s portrait, and suspicious claims that long-lost Darwinian artifacts have been found. With an academic climate like this, it’s amazing that any of the Oxford dons live to see tenure.

Edgar Award Finalist: Murder strikes the Massachusetts hometown of a literary icon, and a scholarly sleuth investigates, in a “remarkable” mystery series (Booklist). Although she spent her life withdrawn from the people of Amherst, Massachusetts, every man, woman, and English professor in this small university town claims ownership of poet Emily Dickinson. They give tours in her house, lay flowers on her grave, and now, as the hundredth anniversary of her death approaches, they organize festivals in her name. Dickinson scholar Owen Kraznik has just been railroaded into organizing the festival when Amherst starts to burn. As the fire consumes a fourteen-story university dormitory, transcendentalist scholar and occasional sleuth Homer Kelly considers that it may have been set on purpose. Two students die in the blaze, but neither was the arsonist’s target. Emily Dickinson wrote countless poems on the nature of mortality, but before Amherst can celebrate her words, death will leap off the page.

When an organist vanishes, the ex-cop turned Harvard professor is on the case with a “clever plot and [an] oversupply of lively, interesting characters” (Kirkus Reviews).  An infant crawls in the dark, up the cold stone steps of Boston’s Church of the Commonwealth. It is a miracle that Alan Starr notices the child, so focused is he on the church’s new organ, whose pipes he is about to hear for the first time. He takes the baby in his arms and goes inside to inspect the magnificent new instrument, designed to the specifications of the church’s master organist, mentor to Alan and to Rosalind, the baby’s mother. When Alan takes the child to his neighboring home, he finds blood on the floor and no trace of Rosalind. In what should be the church’s finest hour, tragedy has struck. With the help of Homer Kelly, Harvard professor and casual sleuth, Alan combs the city for the missing mother. Together they learn that even God’s house can be a haven for the devil.

In Florence, scholar/sleuth Homer Kelly must foil a plot to kill the Pope in a “voluptuously detailed” mystery in which Langton’s “exuberant wit runs riot” (The New York Times Book Review).  When the Pope issues a sweeping edict calling for a yearlong war on drugs, no one is more surprised than the Vatican to find the campaign a success. In every Catholic corner of the world, young people throw down their needles to pick up crosses. In Florence, thousands of them converge on the Duomo to thank Christ for their newfound commitment to sobriety. Nearly everyone is relieved by this development—save for Leonardo Bindo, banker and druglord. To get his business back on track, he seizes upon a simple plan: Kill the Pope. Standing in his way is Homer Kelly, transcendentalist scholar and occasional detective. In Florence to teach at a new international university, Homer stumbles on Bindo’s scheme while investigating the disappearance of a beautiful young student. His Italian may be lousy, but Homer is the only man who can save Italy from itself.

The award-winning author’s “rare gift of genius” is on display as her scholar/sleuth investigates a suspicious death from asthma and yellow jackets (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).  John Hand visits the Heron house looking for a summer job. What he finds is a family in mourning. A few minutes after he is hired by Mrs. Heron and her daughter, Virginia, a neighbor, Buddy, finds Mr. Heron lying dead in the orchard, choked to death by asthma and bee stings. As Buddy comforts the grieving family, John feels out of place. But as he begins to suspect that Buddy knows more about Mr. Heron’s death than he’s letting on, he goes to the only person who can help: his uncle, Professor Homer Kelly. After years teaching students about Thoreau’s famous sojourn at nearby Walden Pond, the famed transcendentalist scholar feels his memory beginning to slip. But nothing sharpens the mind better than murder, and Homer’s nephew has stumbled on a fine one.

“Langton brings back the Golden Age Murder with style, wit, and charm” as scholar/sleuth Homer Kelly finds Boston’s famous museum has become a crime scene (Tony Hillerman).  There are frogs in the pond at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. A balloon has been tied to one of the sculptures in the small museum’s hallowed halls. And, worst of all, someone has moved paintings while no one was looking. At most museums these pranks would be an annoyance, but at the Gardner—whose founder stipulated that the museum be disbanded if the original collection is ever disturbed—they could spell disaster. The Gardner’s board hires Harvard professor and former police lieutenant Homer Kelly to investigate the mischief. Hardly an art lover, Kelly has trouble taking the threat seriously at first. But when a museum patron is found dead after catching the prankster in the act, Homer springs into action. He may know nothing about art, but murder is something he understands all too well.

Walden Pond is not so tranquil when murder strikes, and it’s up to scholar/sleuth Homer Kelly to restore balance in an “unflaggingly entertaining” mystery (Kirkus Reviews).  Alice Snow is the first to die. In the morning, she and her friends at the Pond View Trailer Park watchsoap operas, worrying about the lives of TV’s rich and powerful. A few hours later, a hiking Homer Kelly finds Alice lying outside her trailer, head smashed and heart stopped. Though her fellow Pond View residents do not realize it, their lives are in danger too. The state-owned park sits on Walden Pond, just north of the replica of Thoreau’s log cabin. Where the philosopher once retreated to find nature is now a hive of humanity—hemmed in by a highway, a landfill, and the planned site of a new mini-mall. The trailer park stands in the developers’ way, and when more Pond View residents die, Homer suspects murder. The developers have no qualms about killing Concord’s past—might they murder its present too?

When Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia home becomes a crime scene, scholar/sleuth Homer Kelly must stop a serial killer in this “surefire winner” (Booklist, starred review).   Thomas Jefferson is in trouble. Two centuries after he became America’s third President, the nation’s historians have ganged up on him, intent on shattering the reputation of a man they once idolized. It’s Fern Fisher’s job to set the record straight. A hotshot young historian, she has been hired by the people at Monticello to repair Jefferson’s tattered reputation. If she isn’t careful, she could get her throat slit for her troubles. In the run-up to the celebration of Jefferson’s bicentennial, a killer prowls the area around the President’s historic home, brutally murdering any young women he can find. Harvard professor and casual sleuth Homer Kelly is in Monticello for the festivities, and is eager to reconnect with Fern, a former student. While Fern fights Jefferson’s character assassination, Homer tries to keep her safe from murder of a more literal kind.

The scholar/sleuth investigates a series of deaths in a church congregation in an “agreeably malevolent” mystery that “comes to a spirited conclusion” (Publishers Weekly).  The Baptists of Nashoba are healthy. So are the Quakers, Lutherans, and Methodists. Every religious sect in this small New England town is in ruddy good health, save for the congregation at the Old West Church, whose members are dying like flies. As a rash of heart failure claims victim after victim, what first seemed like tragic coincidence begins to look a lot like murder. And in the small hamlets of Massachusetts, there is no better authority on bloodshed than Homer Kelly. A transcendentalist scholar who dabbles in the unraveling of violent crimes, Homer is just a township away when the plague of heart failure strikes Nashoba. As he attempts to separate natural deaths from the unnatural, Homer sees that beneath the piety of Old West Church lurks at least one parishioner who missed Sunday school the day they explained that thou shalt not kill.

Gettysburg deserter or Civil War hero? Scholar/sleuth Homer Kelly and his wife, Mary, solve the mystery of her great-great-grandfather in this “clever” novel (Booklist).  Homer and Mary Kelly have wandered through Harvard University’s Memorial Hall dozens of times, but never have they lingered over the long list of alumni who died for the Union during the Civil War. One afternoon, the setting sun casts its light on the name of Seth Morgan, Mary’s disgraced great-great-grandfather. She knows little of her ancestor’s life, for family lore holds that he was a deserter, and a blight on the Morgan name. But as she and her husband dig into the dead man’s story, they find something astonishing. The mystery deepens as the story shifts from past to present. Even in 1863 it was difficult to know just what happened on the blood-soaked fields of Gettysburg, but no matter what it takes, Homer and Mary will find truth, and restore the honor of a man who died fighting for his country.

With her sense of “abandon and play,” Langton sends her scholar/sleuth Homer Kelly up the down staircase on a labyrinthine search for a missing art lover (Eudora Welty).  Leonard Sheldrake knows little about Frieda except that he loves her. A Harvard professor and admirer of the bizarre engravings of M. C. Escher, Leonard is visiting a Cambridge exhibition of the artist’s work when he meets Frieda and falls instantly in love. As they trade remarks about the artwork, he learns a few brief things about her. Though young, she is a widow, an orphan, and has a terrible secret in her past. It is only after she vanishes that he realizes he didn’t even learn her last name. Leonard enlists fellow professor Homer Kelly, the amateur sleuth, to help find this beguiling young widow. But as they comb Cambridge for the woman in the green coat, Homer and his friend find themselves slipping into a mysterious labyrinth, whose treacherous dimensions are as impossible to grasp as anything dreamed up by the late, great M. C. Escher himself.

Scholar/sleuth Homer Kelly comes to the aid of his artist niece, who’s implicated in a death, in this “taut, suspenseful, and absorbing” whodunit (Kirkus Reviews).  Life has not always been fair to Annie Swann. A bad marriage sullied her youth, but since her divorce she has made enough money illustrating children’s books to add a wing to her house. The new addition’s focal point will be a thirty-five-foot blank wall, where Annie plans an elaborate mural of the fairy tale characters who pay her bills. But as she paints, mysterious markings appear on the mural: first splotches, then a woman’s face, ringed with blond hair and covered in blood. It seems to point to the disappearance of Pearl Small, a Harvard student who took classes from Annie’s aunt Mary. As Mary and her husband, professor and ex-cop Homer Kelly, look for Pearl, Annie continues painting, unaware that with each brushstroke, she marks her wall with another layer of evil.

With “ebullience and good humor,” the award-winning author brings back former detective Homer Kelly, now a Harvard professor, to solve a killing on campus (Eudora Welty).  An explosion rocks the foundations of Harvard University’s stately Memorial Hall. Built a century ago to honor alumni who died defending the Union in the Civil War, the hall is a focal point of the campus. Now it is a crime scene. A corpulent body is found inside, decapitated by the blast. The dead man is Hamilton Dow, conductor of the school orchestra and one of the most beloved men on campus. The university’s president, James Cheever, couldn’t be more pleased. Dow had opposed every one of Cheever’s attempts to improve and enlarge Harvard, and this terrible accident means that Cheever’s path to complete domination of the campus is clear. But was it an accident? Homer Kelly, Harvard professor and occasional sleuth, is not so sure. Cheever was not the only man on campus who wanted Dow dead, and as Homer looks for the culprit he finds a terrible secret behind the bombing that turned the Civil War memorial into a tomb.

With her usual “sparkling prose and inimitable wit,” the award-wining author follows her scholar/sleuth and his wife as they investigate a death in Venice (Publishers Weekly).  Four-month summer holidays, spring break, and regular sabbaticals mean that Harvard professors Mary and Homer Kelly never have trouble finding time to vacation. Unfortunately, Homer’s sideline as an amateur sleuth means that they rarely get to relax during their time off. And so, when Homer begs Mary to let them visit Venice to attend a conference in the famed rare book library of Cardinal Bessarion, Mary agrees on condition that Homer avoid any dead bodies. When they arrive in Venice, it is Mary, not Homer, who stumbles upon a murder. An intent sightseer, she combs the city with her camera, snapping pictures of anything that catches her eye. But when one of her snapshots captures something it shouldn’t, Mary is sucked into a decades-old mystery that stretches back to the darkest moments of World War II.

With “clever storytelling” shifting between past and present, the final Homer Kelly mystery has the scholar/sleuth solving the puzzle of a missing church (Booklist).  Somehow, against all odds, Homer Kelly has become famous. After decades toiling in academic obscurity, the Harvard professor has a book on the bestseller list. To capitalize on his sudden fame, Homer’s editor demands another book, and fast. Homer is working on Steeplechase, a tour of churches in and around his little patch of Massachusetts, and at his editor’s request he goes searching for some ancient gossip to spice up his new work. What he finds is a baffling Reconstruction-era mystery. Hot-air balloons, nursery rhymes, and the great chestnut tree in the village of Nashoba all form part of Homer’s ancestors’ thrilling story. As the tale shifts between 1868 and the present day, a picture emerges of a small-town Massachusetts that’s hardly changed, and a secret which, if it weren’t for Homer, may have stayed buried for all time.

Prompted by his wife, Mary, Harvard scholar/sleuth Homer Kelly looks into the suspicious death of a folk singer in this “enormously appealing” mystery (Publishers Weekly). Each year, the beautiful Sarah Bailey marks the winter solstice by organizing a pageant of drama and song for the citizens of Harvard University. Last year, the star of the show was Henry Shady, an Appalachian folk singer whose homespun charm won the eye of every young woman in Cambridge. On the eve of this year’s Revels, the singer is struck down in the street by an SUV driven by Sarah’s husband. The police dismiss it as a freak accident, but Mary Kelly, who witnessed the singer’s death, is not so sure. Her husband, Harvard professor and sometime sleuth Homer, dismisses her suspicion. But when more of the revelers suffer untimely deaths, Homer sees a pattern. Winter has gripped Cambridge,  and Sarah’s husband may have been seized with murderous jealousy.

This first book in the beloved series featuring New England cop/Emerson enthusiast Homer Kelly is “a delight . . . [a] most enjoyable murder mystery” (Eudora Welty).  The citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, never tire of their heritage. For decades, the intellectuals of this little hamlet have continued endless debates about Concord’s favorite sons: Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and their contemporaries. Concord’s latter-day transcendental scholars are a strange bunch, but none is more peculiar than Homer Kelly, an expert on Emerson and on homicide. An old-fashioned murder is about to put both skills to the test. At a meeting of the town’s intellectuals, Ernest Goss produces a cache of saucy love letters written by the men and women of the transcendentalist sect. Although Homer chortles at the idea that Louisa May Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson might have had a fling, Goss insists the letters are real. He never gets a chance to prove it. Soon after he is found killed by a musket ball. The past may not be dead, but Goss certainly is.