Carl Burns Mysteries

Hartley Gorman College, in Pecan City, Texas, is hardly a bastion of serious scholarship. The little Baptist school is more interested in shielding its students from the evil influence of The World, The Flesh, and The Devil than in turning out future Nobelists. When the Dean is found bludgeoned to death at his desk, things get interesting.

Pecan City, Texas, is a quiet, uneventful town. Hartley Gorman is a sedate, fundamentalist college. English professor Carl Burns is about to begin yet another year in such a place, with only the eccentricities of his fellow teachers to entertain him. Even Burns, perpetual worrier that he is, envisions the worst of his problems to be the pigeons that have roosted in the attic above his office.

Professor Carl Burns knew the new dean wasn't going to work out when she bought the two goats. And that was the least of the problems. Hartley Gorman College was being attacked - with a vengeance - by the forces of political correctness, and the new dean was an unreconstructed hippie. Tom Henderson's fatal fall through a window definitely wasn't part of the planned curriculum.

Someone has stolen several valuable toy soldiers from the collection of the dean of a small liberal arts school. The dean asks Carl Burns, Chair of the English Department, to look into things. Then a college board member is killed, and one of the stolen soldiers is found at the scene.