Emily Dickinson is dead

Emily Dickinson noted "death's tremendous nearness" in one of her poems. Of course, she'd been dead 100 years when her admirers came to Amherst to celebrate her at a memorial symposium. Among them was Homer Kelly, distinguished Thoreau scholar and ex-detective, who had himself dealt with murder -- a form of death -- in the past. To his amazement he finds himself once again embroiled in sudden death when murder stalks the symposium.