The Professor
A Novel
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3.9 • 7 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“The Professor is a thoroughly gripping mystery about power, ambition, and the lengths we will go to in order to succeed. Pacey and full of tension, this one will stick with you long after THE END.” –New York Times and #1 International Bestselling author, Karin Slaughter
For fans of Tana French, The Professor investigates the darkest corners of academic life: ambition, lies, and obsession.
On a spring afternoon in Athens, Georgia, Ethan Haddock is discovered in his apartment, dead, apparently by his own hand. His fatality immediately garners media attention: not because his death reflects the troubling increase of depression and mental health issues among college students, but because the media has caught the whiff of a scandal. His professor, Dr. Verena Sobek, has been taken in for questioning, and there are rumors his death is the result of a bad romance. A Title IX investigation is opened, the professor is suspended, and social media crusaders and trolls alike are out for blood.
Marlitt Kaplan never investigated love affairs. A former detective turned research assistant, she misses the excitement of her old job, but most of all the friendship of her partner, Teddy. When her mother, a professor at the university and colleague of the accused professor, asks for her help, she finds herself in the impossible position of proving something didn't happen. Without the credentials to interview suspects or access phone records, she will have to get closer to a victim's life than ever before. And she quickly finds herself in his apartment, having dinner with his roommates, even sleeping in his bed. But is she too close to see the truth?
In her relentless pursuit to uncover the mystery behind Ethan’s death, Marlitt will be forced to confront the power structures ingrained in the classroom against the backdrop of a historic campus and an institution that sometimes fails its most vulnerable members.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former Athens, Ga., police detective Marlitt Kaplan is just beginning to recover from the case that cost her her job—and almost her life—when she gets sucked into another slippery investigation in Nossett's impressive sequel to 2020's The Resemblance. The new case hits close to home: Marlitt's old colleagues have teamed up with officials at the University of Georgia, where her mother teaches in the German department, to look into the apparent suicide of undergrad Ethan Haddock and the potential involvement of his German professor, Verena Sobek, who has been accused on social media of pursuing an improper relationship with Ethan. As a civilian asking questions (at her mother's behest, in hopes of uncovering evidence to clear Verena's name), Marlitt has no official standing—a fact she turns to her advantage when she sees a sign in Ethan's former apartment advertising a vacant room and opts to move in, disguised as an academic researcher. Nossett gradually rachets tension through the use of multiple narrators, primarily Marlitt and Verena, who's a vulnerable German-Turkish immigrant slowly crumbling under the pressures of academia (unsparingly rendered by Nossett, a former professor of German literature). Though a couple of climactic bombshells strain credibility, this is an emotionally resonant page-turner from a writer worth watching.
