English professor Alison Bergeron is not having a very good day. Her car has been stolen so she has to walk to the train station to get to her office at St. Thomas, a college in the Bronx, New York. When she arrives she finds two homicide detectives waiting for her. The good news is that they found her car; the bad news is that in the trunk was the body of one of the students in her Shakespeare seminar.

Trying to get her name off of the handsome Detective Crawford's suspect list turns out to be just one of her problems. Alison has to bail her ex out of jail; deal with the victim's distraught parents, classmates of hers back when she was a student at St. Thomas; and grade those Shakespeare exams, which seem to be getting a lot of attention for a boring old stack of reports. And in the meantime, who would want to murder seventeen-year-old Kathy Miceli?