Two hundred years after Thomas Jefferson's inauguration, a serial killer stalks Monticello Thomas Jefferson is in trouble. Two centuries after he became America's third President, the nation's historians have ganged up on him, intent on shattering the reputation of a man they once idolized. It's Fern Fisher's job to set the record straight. A hotshot young historian, she has been hired by the people at Monticello to repair Jefferson's tattered reputation. If she isn't careful, she could get her throat slit for her troubles.   In the run-up to the celebration of Jefferson's bicentennial, a killer prowls the area around the President's historic home, brutally murdering any young women he can find. Harvard professor and casual sleuth Homer Kelly is in Monticello for the festivities, and is eager to reconnect with Fern, a former student. While Fern fights Jefferson's character assassination, Homer tries to keep her safe from murder of a more literal kind.

After a new pipe organ is installed at a Boston church, an organist vanishes An infant crawls in the dark, up the cold stone steps of Boston's Church of the Commonwealth. It is a miracle that Alan Starr notices the child, so focused is he on the church's new organ, whose pipes he is about to hear for the first time. He takes the baby in his arms and goes inside to inspect the magnificent new instrument, designed to the specifications of the church's master organist, mentor to Alan and to Rosalind, the baby's mother. When Alan takes the child to his neighboring home, he finds blood on the floor and no trace of Rosalind. In what should be the church's finest hour, tragedy has struck.   With the help of Homer Kelly, Harvard professor and casual sleuth, Alan combs the city for the missing mother. Together they learn that even God's house can be a haven for the devil.

Homer investigates the violent deaths of a beautiful stage manager's admirers Each year, the beautiful Sarah Bailey marks the winter solstice by organizing a pageant of drama and song for the citizens of Harvard University. Last year, the star of the show was Henry Shady, an Appalachian folk singer whose homespun charm won the eye of every young woman in Cambridge. On the eve of this year's Revels, the singer is struck down in the street by an SUV driven by Sarah's husband. The police dismiss it as a freak accident, but Mary Kelly, who witnessed the singer's death, is not so sure.   Her husband, Harvard professor and sometime sleuth Homer, dismisses her suspicion. But when more of the revelers suffer untimely deaths, Homer sees a pattern. Winter has gripped Cambridge,  and Sarah's husband may have been seized with murderous jealousy.

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's 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 *

Drugs, murder, and the Catholic Church confound Homer's trip to FlorenceWhen the Pope issues a sweeping edict calling for a yearlong war on drugs, no one is more surprised than the Vatican to find the campaign a success. In every Catholic corner of the world, young people throw down their needles to pick up crosses. In Florence, thousands of them converge on the Duomo to thank Christ for their newfound commitment to sobriety. Nearly everyone is relieved by this development—save for Leonardo Bindo, banker and druglord. To get his business back on track, he seizes upon a simple plan: Kill the Pope.Standing in his way is Homer Kelly, transcendentalist scholar and occasional detective. In Florence to teach at a new international university, Homer stumbles on Bindo's scheme while investigating the disappearance of a beautiful young student. His Italian may be lousy, but Homer is the only man who can save Italy from itself.