Gaudy Night

When mystery novelist Harriet Vane returns to her alma mater, the fictional Shrewsbury College at Oxford, for a reunion dinner—a "Gaudy"—she finds herself drawn back into academic life and the unresolved question of her relationship with the aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey, who has proposed marriage repeatedly since helping clear her of a murder charge. But the dreaming spires hold darker secrets: someone is terrorizing the college with poison-pen letters, obscene drawings, and acts of escalating malice that threaten to destroy the scholarly community. Asked to investigate discreetly, Harriet must navigate the closed world of women's academia while confronting her deepest fears about love, work, independence, and whether a woman can have both intellectual fulfillment and romantic happiness. When the persecution turns potentially murderous, she summons Peter to help—and their investigation forces both to examine what they truly want from life and from each other. Often called Dorothy L. Sayers's masterpiece, Gaudy Night transcends the mystery genre to become a profound meditation on integrity, the life of the mind, the nature of love between equals, and what it means to do one's proper job. Elegantly written, intellectually rich, and emotionally devastating, this is detective fiction elevated to high art—and one of the great love stories in English literature.