The Dance

Windham College, a small liberal arts college in Hamilton, New Hampshire, has just won it's basketball conference tournament with a desperate last-second shot. Coach Phil McKenzie is taking his team to the big dance, the NCAA Tournament. As the fans storm the court in jubilation, associate head coach Ray Hopson sits slumped in his chair on the bench, dead. Poisoned, in fact. John (Johnny) Stella, forensic psychologist, college professor and ex-cop, and Frank Fiamella, chief of detectives in Hamilton and John's former colleague on the Philadelphia police department, have to find out, among the chaos of the great victory, how and who. The task is made harder when the medical examiner determines that Ray was poisoned twice, once by slow-acting nicotine and once by the quick-killing formalin. Are we dealing here with one murderer or two? Complications abound as Frank's shaky marriage is threatened by his wife's insistence that he re-investigate the murder and arson conviction of her brother. And the local authorities are dead set against Frank's reopening the case. Both these investigations play out against a media frenzy that engulfs Hamilton both because of the murders and because the Windham's basketball team has been ordained the Cinderella of the national tournament.