Loretta Lawson, English professor at London University, is annoyed when she discovers a sleeping stranger in the supposedly empty Paris flat she has borrowed. When she returns from a feminist literary conference to find the stranger gone but his bed sheets bloody, Loretta doesn't need an encyclopedia to figure out her mysterious roommate has been murdered.

With urgent business calling her home, Loretta heads back for the start of the term with one precious clue -- a book that must have belonged to the victim -- and more than an academic interest in discovering exactly what happened to a corpse with a penchant for literary criticism.