Her Professor, Her Alibi

Junie Okonkwo found the seed pod three hours before the trustee's body turned up on the same path. Campus police call it coincidence. Dr. Marcus Vane, who runs her department and has a career built on not being reckless, calls it evidence. So they meet after hours, in the herbarium nobody locks, comparing her pod to specimens older than either of them. He's forty-six. She's twenty-two. He's her committee chair. None of that stops the room from getting smaller. Then her key card puts her at the scene, and the only person who can vouch for where she really was is the one man whose answer would end him. An age gap academy romance with a mystery at its spine.