Product Description

Dedicated to the study of toddlers and their development of verbal skills, the Wabash Institute should be staffed by kinder, gentler scholars, but instead is home to a nest of sublimely cranky academics. When one of them is bludgeoned to death, Jeremy Cook – the Institute’s premier scholar and the book’s socially clueless hero – becomes the prime suspect. To clear his name, Cook resolves to solve the case, even if it means taking time off from his hobby of teaching imaginary words to the Institute’s tiny “subjects.” While gleefully skewering academia, Carkeet – himself a professor of linguistics – also provides a spectacularly ingenious puzzle. “Mystery stories that have a really original solution to the crime are very rare,” said the New York Times Book Review, “but Dr. Carkeet has found one.”

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58511 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 223 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Dr. Jeremy Cook becomes the prime suspect in a double murder at the linguistic development institute where he works in Double Negative , a debut novel PW called "a first-rate thriller." Cook appears again in The Full Catastrophe , this time as a marriage counselor assigned to move in with his patients: according to PW , "Laugh-out- loud scenes and swift, convincing dialogue mark this lunatic look at serious issues."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Intelligent, unpredictable, and extraordinarily funny" -- San Francisco Chronicle

"Intelligent, unpredictable, and extraordinarily funny" --San Francisco Chronicle

"The dialogue is crisp and witty and the plot as engaging as any from the Golden Age of mystery fiction" -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"The dialogue is crisp and witty and the plot as engaging as any from the Golden Age of mystery fiction" --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

From the Publisher
Nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Mystery of 1980

Customer Reviews

unusual setting and character... warm and funny...
Just picked this up and enjoyed it thoroughly! Unusual setting is a linguistics facility doubling as day care center. (They study the evolution of language in toddlers.) One of the linguists is run over at night and the mystery begins.

It's intelligent, humorous, and human as our hero, Jeremy Cook, stumbles along being head smart, heart dumb, dealing with a quirky police lieutenant, a beautiful young graduate student, a napoleonic department head, and fellow academic linguists who like him more than he realizes.

The plot twist is unusual but what really makes the book endearing is being inside Jeremy's head and hearing human concerns expressed through bookish terms in a warm and funny way. I've ordered the next two already.

Carkeet's first book and only mystery
The first title of a trilogy featuring the central character, Jeremy Cook, a linguist who in this mystery is employed in a research lab/day-care center where the scientists study the development of language in children. When one of the researchers is discovered dead in Cook's office he becomes the prime suspect. Eventually, however, the answer comes from the mouths of babes. This was Carkeet's first book, and his only straightforward mystery. Its quirky-but-likeable characters are well-suited to the form, but the two succeeding volumes ("The Full Catastrophe," 1990, and "The Error of Our Ways," 1997) were set in more conventional, albeit bizarre, situations. All three are concerned with the effect of speech (or lack of it) in interpersonal relationships. Carkeet is also the author of "The Greatest Slump of All Time," (1984), a superb novel about baseball players; "I Been There Before, (1985), about the resurrection of Mark Twain; "The Silent Treatment," (1988), a novel for young adults; and "Campus Sexpot," (2005), a memoir of his high-school days in Sonora, CA in the early 1960s and the effect on the town by the publication of a steamy roman-a-clef that was written by a former teacher.

A comic adventure for an unlikely character.
I put David Carkeet in the same category as Patrick Dennis. He finds unlikely scenarios and populates them with likeable characters. He may be considered a young adult author because even his adult books are accessible (no strong language or graphic scenes). This is not a book to be agitated by but to be reassured by: good people survive when the inevitably unfortunate circumstances develop in the routine interactions of daily home and work, however unlikely the actual work may be.