Frozen Assets

A winter storm traps everyone on campus when the college's fundraising director is found murdered in the locked rare books vault.

Diana Foster was looking forward to a quiet winter session at Moonridge College, working on manuscript authentication with development director Victoria Sterling. But when a blizzard hits and Victoria is found dead in the climate-controlled rare books vault, Diana realizes someone was willing to kill to protect deadly secrets about institutional fraud.

Victoria had been investigating systematic over-valuation of donated manuscripts—authentication fraud that inflated tax deductions for donors while boosting the college's reported assets. When her comprehensive investigation threatened to expose years of financial irregularities, someone decided murder was preferable to accountability.

Trapped on campus by the storm with Detective Scott Erickson and student assistant Emma, Diana discovers that the locked-room murder required intimate knowledge of both the rare books collection and the building's climate control systems. The killer sabotaged the vault's heating to ensure Victoria's death, then tried to make it look like an accident.

As suspects emerge from the small winter session community—including a college president hiding unauthorized borrowing, a medieval studies professor whose career depended on questionable authentications, and a facilities manager under financial pressure—Diana must use her research skills to uncover a conspiracy that reaches into the highest levels of college administration.

But when Diana realizes the authentication fraud was enabled by institutional culture that rewarded fundraising success over scholarly integrity, she discovers that multiple people had motives for silencing Victoria's investigation. In a case where academic fraud escalates to murder, Diana must navigate the dangerous intersection of intellectual passion and criminal desperation.

The fourth installment in the Moonridge Library Mysteries proves that even in the ivory tower, the deadliest secrets are often hidden in plain sight among the most precious treasures.