Long before she will achieve fame as the author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott is writing stories of a more dark and mysterious nature. But nothing prepares her for the role of amateur detective she assumes when the body of her dear friend, wealthy newlywed Dorothy Wortham, is found floating in Boston's harbor. It's well known that Dorothy's family didn't approve of her husband, a confirmed fortune hunter, but Louisa suspects that some deeper secret lies behind her friend's tragic murder...

A young Louisa May Alcott accompanies her friend Sylvia to visit Boston's most famous spiritual medium, Mrs. Agatha D. Percy, to contact Sylvia's long-dead father. Louisa isn't one to believe such foolishness-until one of the seer's predictions comes true. Louisa and Sylvia visit the seer again, but Mrs. Percy's days of divination have been cut brutally short by a killer. Now, Louisa must solve the mystery of the crystal gazer's untimely death by uncovering the shocking truth about her life.

This collection of essays examines how college professors teach the genre of detective fiction and provides insight into how the reader may apply such strategies to his or her own courses. Multi-disciplinary in scope, the essays cover teaching in the areas of literature, law, history, sociology, anthropology, architecture, gender studies, cultural studies, and literary theory. Also included are sample syllabi, writing assignments, questions for further discussion, reading lists, and further aids for course instruction.

A volume in the Cultural Studies Series edited by Samir Dayal An innovative and entertaining look at genre, popular culture, enjoyment, and psychoanalysis. Detective fiction, a category that, broadly defined, runs the gamut from Oedipus Rex to "The Purloined Letter," continues to draw a range of fans and scholars, and to play a pivotal role in popular entertainment, contemporary literature, and psychoanalytic theory. But how do we derive pleasure from reading about or watching a detective’s exploits? Is our enjoyment in the vicarious experience of genius? Or in witnessing the commission of a crime, an equally vicarious experience of violence? Resisting Arrest looks at the detective genre in its many different cultural manifestations, from popular fiction (Christie) to high literature (Eco), from art films (Antonioni) to popular television series (Monk). In each case, Rushing finds that detective stories have less to do with fulfilling our hidden desires, as psychoanalytic explanations have traditionally asserted, than with purposively thwarting them. He argues that the genre is in fact constituted principally by the promises on which it fails to deliver, including the vicarious experience of both genius (readers expecting to play Sherlock Holmes are almost always cast as Watson) and antisocial violence, so that our pleasure is based on what Slavoj Zizek has called "the endless circulation around the always-missed object." Organized around the key ideas that structure the detective genre ("Desire," "Repetition," "Violence"), Resisting Arrest offers a thoroughly new interpretation that will appeal to scholars interested in questions about genre and cinema studies, popular culture, and psychoanalysis.

IT'S a big thing," said Loveday Brooke, addressing Ebenezer Dyer, chief of the well-known detective agency in Lynch Court, Fleet Street; "Lady Cathrow has lost £30,000 worth of jewellery, if the newspaper accounts are to be trusted." "They are fairly accurate this time. The robbery differs in few respects from the usual run of country-house robberies. The time chosen, of course, was the dinner-hour, when the family and guests were at table and the servants not on duty were amusing themselves in their own quarters. The fact of its being Christmas Eve would also of necessity add to the business and consequent distraction of the household.

Even a fortune forged in railroads and steel can't buy entrance into the upper echelons of Victorian high society--for that you need a marriage of convenience. American heiress August Crenshaw has aspirations. But unlike her peers, it isn't some stuffy British Lord she wants wrapped around her finger--it's Crenshaw Iron Works, the family business. When it's clear that August's outrageously progressive ways render her unsuitable for a respectable match, her parents offer up her younger sister to the highest entitled bidder instead. This simply will not do. August refuses to leave her sister to the mercy of a loveless marriage. Evan Sterling, the Duke of Rothschild, has no intention of walking away from the marriage. He's recently inherited the title only to find his coffers empty, and with countless lives depending on him, he can't walk away from the fortune a Crenshaw heiress would bring him. But after meeting her fiery sister, he realizes Violet isn't the heiress he wants. He wants August, and he always gets what he wants. But August won't go peacefully to her fate. She decides to show Rothschild that she's no typical London wallflower. Little does she realize that every stunt she pulls to make him call off the wedding only makes him like her even more.