Double Negative

Dedicated to the study of toddlers and their development of verbal skills, the Wabash Institute should be staffed by kind, gentle scholars. Instead, the center 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 this novel'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, the author-a professor of linguistics himself-also provides a spectacularly ingenious puzzle.