The Dean

The Dean When Richard “Dick” Burnette, Dean of the Stockman School of Music, near Chicago, is murdered at a gala school costume party, everyone saw who did it—Renato Ancari—a celebrated conductor who many thought to be the victim’s best friend. But the Dean has been carrying on an illicit affair with Emily Ancari, his friend’s wife. Rich and talented, the Dean had but one weakness—women. And this time he took up with the wrong woman. Emily had tried to break off her romance with the Dean, and had even consulted with a fortune teller to cast a spell on her to root out her forbidden passion. But the fortune teller did not have such powers and referred the woman to another spiritualist in Arizona. When the fortune teller is mysteriously murdered, and the Dean’s daughter, Leah, is found at the scene of the crime in possession of the murder weapon, it falls to the Dean’s private secretary and confidant, Oscar Paige, to solve the grisly puzzle. Even veteran homicide detectives, Gene Loretto and Sam Montgomery do not completely buy the official conclusion about the daughter’s guilt. Perhaps the secret lay with a grizzled gun dealer in Waycross, Georgia, or with Leah’s husband, Scott, or on a tiny Greek island with the Dean’s estranged wife, Diane. It is not until the very last page of the novel that everything comes to light.