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A Novel
by Will Lavender
When the students in Winchester University's Logic and Reasoning 204 arrive for their first day of class, they are greeted not with a syllabus or texts, but with a startling assignment from Professor Williams: Find a hypothetical missing girl named Polly.
If after being given a series of clues and details the class has not found her before the end of the term in six weeks, she will be murdered.
At first the students are as intrigued by the premise of their puzzle as they are wary of the strange and slightly creepy Professor Williams. But as they delve deeper into the mystery, they begin to wonder: Is the Polly story simply a logic exercise, designed to teach them rational thinking skills, or could it be something more sinister and dangerous?
The mystery soon takes over the lives of three students as they find disturbing connections between Polly and themselves. Characters that were supposedly fictitious begin to emerge in reality. Soon, the boundary between the classroom assignment and the real world becomes blurred—and the students wonder if it is their own lives they are being asked to save.
"An inspired thriller about cognitive dissonance, conjectural misdirection and the conspicuous dichotomy between academia and the real world." —Kirkus Reviews
"In his tautly strung debut novel, Obedience, literature professor Will Lavender tears a page of out Milgram's notebooks and sets into motion a chain of events that escalates far beyond its intended intellectual exercise... . Mystery fans will be satisfied to hang on around the story's hairpin turns as the list of suspects swells and narrows with the unearthing of each clue, but Lavender ... is aiming at a broader target and posing deeper questions." —BookPage
"First-time novelist Lavender has a knack for creepy characters and red herrings." —Library Journal
"First novelist Lavender has sprinkled his text with enough red herrings to feed the Biblical 5,000 but uses them to build page-turning suspense... . Lavender's invocation of the notorious Milgram experiment conducted at Yale on obedience to authority adds an additional–and salutary–layer of psychological meaning to his elaborate plot." —Booklist
This information about Obedience was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Will Lavender is a writing and literature professor and holds an MFA in creative writing from Bard College. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife and children and is currently working on a second novel.
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