Jeremy Cook

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.

Linguist Jeremy Cook knows how language works, but he doesn't know how marriage works. In fact, he is strangely hostile to the institution. So Cook is naturally uneasy about his job with a St. Louis firm specializing in "the linguistically troubled marriage." His assignment is to move in with Dan and Beth Wilson, a prosperous suburban couple with an impoverished relationship, to analyze their problems with verbal communication and help them-if he can. But as Cook catalogs the Wilsons' missed signs and signals, he becomes increasingly, and unscientifically, involved . . .

In this novel two very different men cross each other's paths in St. Louis, Missouri. Ben Hudnut is an upper-middle-class entrepreneur determined to bring an affordable cashew to American consumers. When he isn't pursuing this goal, he's usually in the company of his wife and four daughters-occasionally joined for family dinner by his dull but devoted secretary. Jeremy Cook, meanwhile, is a cynical unemployed academic, a linguist who doesn't know what to do with himself-until he's pressured into studying Ben Hudnut's baby girl and her unusual speech patterns. But as different as these two men are, they will soon have one thing in common, as both of their lives begin to fall apart around them . . .