A hunt for a missing art lover engages Homer in a perplexing mystery 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.

While lecturing in England, Homer confronts the criminal dons of Oxford 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...

Homer defends a crazed poet accused of using an eclipse as cover for murderFor 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.

In Venice, Homer's wife uncovers a decades-old conspiracy 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.

Homer suspects a rash of deaths near Walden Pond may not be accidental 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?

Scholarly infighting can get a lot more violent than most outsiders realize, but usually that violence is confined to the printed page. Not so in Concord, Mass., where the arrival of Homer Kelly, an expert on the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, has stirred up passions concerning a manuscript that may or may not have been written by Henry David Thoreau. Things come to a head during the town?s annual re-enactment of Paul Revere?s famous ride, when one of the ?Minutemen? turns up dead, still in full Revolutionary regalia. Accustomed to little more than the odd stolen bicycle, the local police are way over their head, but Kelly?in this, his first outing?proves as gifted at sleuthing as he is at scholarship.Review"I'm not sure I've ever read a mystery novel that made such evocative use of its locale...informed and delightful" -- * New York Times*"I'm not sure I've ever read a mystery novel that made such evocative use of its locale...informed and delightful" -- New York Times"The sort of old-fashioned mystery that never goes out of style" -- Denver Post"With a plot stemming from Concord's obsession with its own village history, this is fun, excitingly erudite, and inventively mystifying" -- Book WeekFrom the Publisher8 1-hour cassettes

Homer and his wife fight to restore the besmirched legacy of a long-dead relativeHomer 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.

One mystical tree. One dangerous neighbor.Strange and magical things continually occur at the Hall family's home at 40 Walden Street. Now there's a terrible sound throughout the town of Concord--the buzzing of a chain saw. Only one thing is worse for Eddy and Georgie Hall than that noise: the man who causes it, Mortimer Moon. When all the trees in town are falling to his hand and he threatens the mysterious tree sprouting in the Halls' backyard, Georgie and Eddy will do anything to stop him.In the eighth installment of the Hall Family Chronicles, secrets--all caused by the growth of a miraculous tree--will be unlocked.

When Harvard's Memorial Hall is bombed, the shattering of its huge rose windows resounds throughout the campus; but when a corpulent and headless corpse is found amid the debris, and the big, beloved chorus leader, Hamilton Dow, cannot be located, more than the peace and quiet of an illustrious university is disturbed. Is the corpse that of the missing conductor?

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...

Investigating a lighthearted prankster, Homer Kelly finds murder instead 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.

A search for a missing church leads Homer to a century-old mystery 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.

A wave of death sweeps a small congregation, puzzling Homer KellyThe 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.

While trying to start a new life, Homer's niece uncovers a murder 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.

When a family friend dies of a strange asthma attack, Homer Kelly investigates 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.