Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Expectation
ISBN: 9781573668439
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / The University of Alabama Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Murder; Women detectives;

On the surface a murder mystery--a detective's search for the killer of five people in Denver-- Expectation is also, among other things, a meditation on the relationship between language and music.

In his newest novel, Jeffrey DeShell draws on the musical innovations of Arnold Schoenberg--by turns traditional, serial, and atonal--to inform his grammar and language. Moving progressively through specific Schoenberg compositions, DeShell complicates the surface of his text into lyrical derivatives, all the while drawing us into a murder mystery like no other as Detective Francisca Fruscella pursues both the killer and her own complicated personal history.

By turns rapturous, rigorous, and gripping, Expectation is a thriller of another kind--and a bold venture to the limits of the mystery genre and language itself.