Academic Affairs: A Poisoned Apple

WHODUNIT?! “Jerry, you can’t do this, you can’t!”—Beaufort Prendergast, president of Chickamin Christian College, had gasped these words just before dropping dead of an apparent heart attack outside the office door of Executive Dean for Academic Affairs Jerry Pilkington just a day before Pilkington himself had been murdered in that office. The murder weapon? A poisoned apple brought to him by the pretty young college girl he’d been tutoring, Mary Belle. There’d been whispers of an affair. But wasn’t she too obvious a suspect? So it seemed to the small town’s sheriff , Jake Muffett . Along with his son and daughter, Muffett comprised the entire law enforcement community of the sleepy Alabama town of Sparta in the 1930s—and now, for the first time in his tenure, there was a murder to solve. Or maybe two murders if President Prendergast’s death was connected to Pilkington’s. At first the investigation looks simple: just follow the apple. Whoever touched it before it reached Pilkington could have laced it with the strychnine. But as Sheriff Muffett and aspiring young journalist Katy O’Halleran interview the short list of suspects, a more complicated and far darker picture emerges—a tale of sex, power, and blackmail lying just underneath the veneer of Southern respectability.