When a controversial biology professor dies unexpectedly, how many people might have wanted him silent?
Late on New Year’s Eve in Boaz, Alabama, Snead State Community College biology professor Adam Parker is found dead in his car.
The preliminary conclusion is straightforward: heart attack.
His daughter, Marissa Booth, does not believe it.
Four days later, she hires local private investigator Connor Ford to determine whether her father was murdered.
Adam had spent months publicly challenging people in Boaz through an increasingly hostile Facebook debate centered on religion, science, reason, and his controversial research into the effects of long-term indoctrination.
He had also made powerful enemies.
Among them were local political figures, law-enforcement officers, and a prominent businessman whose son was running for governor while promoting a controversial proposal to arm teachers.
As Connor investigates, Adam’s past begins creating as many questions as his final months in Boaz.
What first looked like the death of one difficult professor becomes a much larger mystery involving ambition, ideology, science, religion, political power, and people with strong reasons to keep certain truths buried.
Connor’s first problem is determining whether Adam Parker was murdered.
His second is discovering who might have wanted him dead.
Beneath the Story
The Case of the Perfectionist Professor is a mystery-thriller about truth, belief, evidence, power, and the consequences of challenging ideas that people regard as settled.
It asks:
- What happens when scientific claims collide with deeply held religious or political beliefs?
- How much social punishment can follow from publicly challenging a community’s assumptions?
- When does disagreement become intimidation?
- What happens when money, politics, business, and ideology begin reinforcing one another?
- How should a person distinguish evidence from conviction?
- What responsibility follows when the search for truth threatens powerful interests?
Connor’s investigation places him inside conflicts involving belief and doubt, truth and deception, power, loyalty, and responsibility.
About the Novel
Genre: Mystery / Thriller / Southern Fiction
Setting: Boaz, Alabama, and surrounding locations
Author: Richard L. Fricks
Part of: The Boaz Novels
From Richard
The Case of the Perfectionist Professor grew from my interest in the friction that develops when people who are certain of what they believe encounter claims that challenge that certainty.
Adam Parker is not an easy man, and the novel does not depend on making him one. His personality, research, public arguments, and willingness to provoke others create consequences that Connor Ford must sort through after Adam’s death.
The story also allowed me to explore several themes that continue to appear in my fiction: belief and evidence, science and religion, political power, public certainty, and the difficulty of discovering what is true when almost everyone involved has a reason to tell a different version of the story.
