"Near a small college campus, a student is found strangled in an abandoned barn on the outskirts of town. She's been posed to look like a painting of Ophelia from Shakespeare's Hamlet, the scene taunting the police with a message they don't understand. Detective Ian Carter is known as a straitlaced cop, but seeing the girl's body leaves him shaken and uncertain of where to turn until a chance meeting with a charmingly awkward literature professor ends with her accidentally seeing, and solving, a clue left by the killer"-- Provided by publisher.