Double Negative

A linguist tries to solve a murder mystery in this Edgar Award–nominated novel: "Intelligent, unpredictable . . . and extraordinarily funny" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Dedicated to the study of toddlers and their development of verbal skills, the Wabash Institute should be staffed by kind, gentle scholars. Instead, the center is home to a nest of supremely cranky academics.

When one of them is bludgeoned to death, Jeremy Cook—the institute's premier scholar and this novel's socially ...