title: Quieter than Sleep: A Modern Mystery of Emily Dickinson (Karen Pelletier)
author:  Joanne Dobson 
description: Has anybody kept actuarial statistics on those faculty parties? They must be more dangerous than skydiving. This one, president Avery Mitchell's annual Christmas bash for the staff of Enfield College, leaves logorrheic hotshot Randy Astin-Berger, who's been putting the moves on newcomer Karen Pelletier, welcomely silenced and immobilized by a strategically applied necktie. (Bonnie Weimer, a student whose whining is stilled by similar means soon after, proves that academic life itself is dangerous, since the more you talk the more likely you are to get killed.) It's not easy for Karen to tear herself away from her romantic preoccupations--the husband she left back in New York to take her teaching job, her fascination with President Mitchell's cute buns, her love/hate mating dance with investigating homicide cop Lt. C. Piotrowski--and her determination to protect brilliant, suicidal student Sophia Warzek from her family demons. Egged on by Piotrowski, though, she gradually focuses on the mysterious letter Randy bragged about discovering. What 19th- century secret could he have unearthed that pushed one of his colleagues to murder? Emily Dickinson scholar Dobson's first novel has an appealing heroine, a nifty payoff, and a beguiling way with the extracurricular entanglements of her teaching stiffs. But suspicion is distributed more generously than are clues to the hard-to-believe killer. -- <I>Copyright &copy;1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.</I>
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  > > > > > > > ![](images/00004.jpg)
  
  
  > > > Dear Reader,
  
  > > > Of all my books, Silent Melody seems to be a reader favorite, mainly
  > because of the heroine. She is a deaf-mute living in the eighteenth century,
  > when there was no standard sign language and deaf people were often
  > considered mad and consigned to insane asylums. Lady Emily Marlowe is
  > fortunate enough to belong to a family that loves her and wants her, and she
  > has taught herself to lip-read. However, most of her life is lived
  > internally. I did not see her as a victim or as handicapped. I tried to show
  > how richly her life is lived even though she cannot share that
  > richness—until she meets Lord Ashley Kendrick.
  
  > > > When Emily and Ashley fall in love, he has much to offer her. Because
  > she had hearing for the first few years of her life, he is able to teach her
  > to speak. And he is able to protect her from all the dangers that threaten
  > over the course of the story. But Emily has at least