"Iced"

Chico State University grad Robert Grindy now teaches creative writing courses at Richland Community College in Decatur, Illinois. He has crafted a wonderfully convoluted murder mystery set in 1999 and centered on the fictional Kickapoo Community College located in a town sort of like Decatur. The story takes the central character, a cynical creative writing instructor at Kickapoo named Henry Streator, into a droll world of mayhem and murder.

In "Iced" ($15.95 in paperback from Livingston Press; also for Amazon Kindle) the not-very-likable Streator is on the verge of being fired, despite his tenured status. 

He's perpetually late to class, rude to colleagues and students alike, and now, "facing down the end of a decade, the end of the century, the end of his thirties just weeks away with his September birthday, what had he to show for the nineties? Ten years of shoveling … out … the Aegean stables of freshman composition. A failed marriage. No book."

Then one of his down-on-his-luck students, Tarvis Conner, brings him a plot idea for a story that features the murder of the town's prominent ethanol factory owner Frederick Gunther, head down in the thin ice of a nearby lake, skis up, legs in a V. A spark of interest kindles in Streator, especially since his Dean friend, Loren Locke, makes it clear that unless Streator gets a novel published, he is toast.

Conner dies in a freak car accident, and Streator, desperate, takes Conner's idea for his own. In a fit of creativity (and a change of "Gunther" to "Geddes"), he finishes the manuscript, gets an agent, and lands the book (and a big promised advance) with a small publisher. 

Streator quits his job at Kickapoo and prepares to fly to New York to sign the contract, when Gunther himself is found head down in the ice, with his skis on and legs in a V. It seems clear Conner knew beforehand this would happen, and Streator becomes detective, piecing together clues into a tapestry of deceit and destruction (he's almost killed in a freak car accident himself). And then he gets the surprise of his life.

Maybe the world is not as screwed up as he thought.