"With her bookstore, the Book Depot, being run by a competent graduate student, Claire Malloy is at loose ends. Her attempt to learn French cooking meets with dismay, so when her daughter, Caron, and Caron's friend Inez sign up to tutor English-as-a-second-language students to beef up their college applications, Claire offers to help tutor. After being turned down as a tutor since she missed the training session, Claire is roped into becoming a board member of the Farberville Literacy Council. She soon learns there are problems with the council's books, and then an elderly Polish student, Ludmilla, is murdered at the council's office. The unpleasant Ludmilla's death is not even mourned by her own grandson, so there are plenty of suspects. As Claire investigates, she uncovers other nefarious deeds that have transpired among the employees of the literacy council, and she becomes a target." --

The Language of Murder Cases describes fifteen court cases for which Roger W. Shuy served as an expert language witness. Investigations and trials in murder cases are guided by the important legal terms describing the mental states of defendants: intentionality, predisposition, and voluntariness. Unfortunately, statutes and dictionaries can provide only loose definitions, largely because mental states are virtually impossible to define. The meaning of these terms, therefore, must be adduced either by inferences and assumptions, or by any available language evidence-often the best window into a speaker's mind. Fortunately, this window of evidence exists primarily in electronically recorded undercover conversations, police interviews, and legal hearings and trials, all of which are subject to linguistic analysis before and during trial. In this book, Shuy explains how vague legal terminology can be clarified by analysis of the language used by suspects, defendants, law enforcement officers, and attorneys. He examines speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, conversational strategies, as well as smaller language units such as syntax, lexicon, and phonology, and discusses how these can play a major role in deciding murder cases. In his analysis, Shuy draws on his personal experience testifying at fifteen fascinating murder trials, focusing on the role that language played in each. He concludes with a summary of how his analyses were regarded by the juries as they struggled with the equally vague concept of reasonable doubt.

A witty, heartfelt novel that brilliantly evokes the confusions of adolescence and marks the arrival of an extraordinary young talent. Isidore Mazal is eleven years old, the youngest of six siblings living in a small French town. He doesn't quite fit in. Berenice, Aurore, and Leonard are on track to have doctorates by age twenty-four. Jeremie performs with a symphony, and Simone, older than Isidore by eighteen months, expects a great career as a novelist—she's already put Isidore to work on her biography. The only time they leave their rooms is to gather on the old, stained couch and dissect prime-time television dramas in light of Aristotle's Poetics. Isidore has never skipped a grade or written a dissertation. But he notices things the others don't, and asks questions they fear to ask. So when tragedy strikes the Mazal family, Isidore is the only one to recognize how everyone is struggling with their grief, and perhaps the only one who can help them—if he doesn't run away from home first. Isidore’s unstinting empathy, combined with his simmering anger, makes for a complex character study, in which the elegiac and comedic build toward a heartbreaking conclusion. With How to Behave in a Crowd, Camille Bordas immerses readers in the interior life of a boy puzzled by adulthood and beginning to realize that the adults around him are just as lost.

Adam Dalgluish is called to the elegant Steen Psychiatric Clinic to investigate why the head of the clinic, Enid Bolan was found with a chisel through her heart.

"The first book to examine murder through written words. A criminologist and an anthropologist explore the motives for murder by analyzing the writings of convicted killers as well as depictions of murder in literature and the media"--