DEAD AT THE DESK is both a mystery and a coming-of-age tale set on a bucolic Missouri college in 1964, the last quiet year before the decade erupted into the rousing Sixties. Times were different then, simpler and more easy-going, but murder was still murder, and the shock of it could turn a small town inside out, which is what happens in DEAD AT THE DESK.

Loren Schneider is a graduating senior who had polio as a child. He walks with crutches but has been raised to believe he can be anything he wants. His dream is to become a high school English teacher. When his college advisor, Dr. Wilson, is found strangled and maimed after an intense disagreement with Loren about his potential as an applicant for a teaching position, Loren heads the list of possible suspects. His life is turned completely upside down.

DEAD AT THE DESK follows the love between Loren and his girl friend, Amy Anderson, who joins him in the pursuit of the killer's identity. The reader meets Amy and Loren as college sweethearts and watches them become more committed to one another. Amy risks alienating her parents because she sees Loren and not his disability as do her mother and father. The story is laced with references to period values, books, music, events, and celebrities.

The novel also examines the bias, both spoken and unspoken, that affects the handicapped. Loren refuses to be a crippled man but challenges the world to see him as a man who is handicapped. He wants not sympathy nor to be an inspiration.