The Dance

As the Windham College Spartans win their first trip to the Big Dance, John Stella is once again involved in murder. As the fans storm the basketball court to celebrate the victory court, Assistant coach Ray Hopson lies crumpled on the bench, the victim of poison. Solving the case will require the untangling of relationships on and off the court that reach back over twenty years. All this plays out against the backdrop of the unlikely run of the underdog Spartans through the NCAA tournament.

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.

John Tuccillo is a working economist. He is the author os eight trade books, and a novel, The Experiment, available as an e-book from major distributors. He lives in Sarasota, Florida, and is currently working on a third novel featuring psychologist-sleuth, John Stella.