For professional academic and amateur sleuth Alison Bergeron, staying out of trouble is never on the syllabus...

She thought that dating a good-looking cop would be exciting and involve lots of riding around in cruisers and putting away sleazy crooks. So why hasn't NYPD officer Bobby Crawford ever invited English professor Alison on any high-speed cc, chases or stakeouts?

Life on the sleepy college campus just north of Manhattan may not have changed all that much with Alison's new romance. But things are about to heat up when a man named Hernan Escalante asks Alison for a favor: Can she help locate his nephew, an illegal Ecuadorian immigrant named Jose, who has mysteriously gone missing? Always up for a challenge, Alison agrees to help Hernan -- and begins her investigation by asking Bobby for some expert advice. Turns out Bobby already knows about what happened to Jose, since he's the one who pulled his corpse out of the Hudson River a few days earlier. With this case, it seems Alison's still got a lot to learn...