Detective Marlitt Kaplan was introduced in Lauren Nossett’s 2022 debut, The Resemblance. Her follow-up, The Professor, takes place shortly after the events of the first novel. Marlitt is trying to lay low and pick up the pieces of her life after fumbling a case that resulted in her being forced to resign from her detective job. Marlitt also nearly lost her life in a house fire which left her with severe burns on her upper body, including her face, and forced her to move in with her parents while her home is being repaired.
As The Professor opens, Marlitt is no longer welcome at work, and she has lost all her old friends — including her former detective partner, Teddy. With nothing else to occupy her time, she has been reluctantly helping her father as a research assistant on the book he’s writing. One morning, Marlitt gets a call from her mother asking her to investigate the recent Title IX charge against a fellow German professor at her mother’s university. Verena Sobek, the professor in question, is being investigated for possible involvement in the death of student Ethan Haddock. Students and others in the university town of Athens, Georgia, seem to think Dr. Sobek had a romantic relationship with Ethan, but Verena has a different story to tell. Marlitt never investigated love affairs when she was a detective, and she is not supposed to investigate the Title IX charge either — at least, not in any official capacity, but she is desperate to regain a sense of control in her life, so she tells her mother yes.
As Marlitt begins asking questions and loitering around campus, she realizes that the seemingly straightforward case of a female teacher taking advantage of her male student is far more complicated. The novel is largely narrated in Marlitt’s first-person point of view, but there are interspersed sections titled “Her” and “Him” which offer third-person perspectives from Verena Sobek and Ethan Haddock, giving the reader a glimpse ahead to key events and clues in the mystery.
Most of the events of the novel take place in just over a month as Marlitt pursues more and more dangerous paths to the truth. For example, she haunts the apartment complex where Ethan lived:
I linger, letting my gaze move slowly up and down the street. I don’t have a plan. Not really. I just want to slip into Ethan’s shoes for an hour, get a feel for the space where he lived, see if Verena left her presence like tendrils of smoke, an outline of her destruction on a wall like volcanic ash. My best bet is to slip in behind a resident, a morning delivery, or a fleeing one-night stand.
After a chance encounter with one of Ethan’s former roommates, Marlitt rents Ethan’s room for the rest of the term, fully immersing herself in the case as she socializes with his roommates and sleeps in the room where he died. Is she strategically going undercover, or is she being reckless with the traditional rules of conducting an investigation?
As she subtly interviews his friends and classmates, Marlitt learns that Ethan may have left a suicide note, and although he supposedly died of an overdose, there were no drugs found at the scene. She also begins to learn more about Verena’s complex relationship with Ethan. As she explores potential suspects, she encounters more dead ends than answers, and it’s only after she secretly teams up with a former colleague working the case that she begins to piece together what happened — but by then it may be too late, and Marlitt may have unburied more secrets than she can handle.
The Professor is a standard dark academia crime novel, but the insightful main character Marlitt shines. Nossett, a Nashville resident, is a former college professor with a Ph.D. in German literature, and her nuanced knowledge of campus culture and interdepartmental politics further enhances the atmosphere. As Marlitt exhibits increasingly risky and desperate behavior, the reader begins to feel protective toward her, like an overanxious mother or the concerned instructor of a young student. Reading The Professor is like watching a car crash in slow motion, aware that the outcome can only be disastrous but still unable to look away.
Abby N. Lewis is from Dandridge, Tennessee. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection Reticent and the chapbooks This Fluid Journey and Palm Up, Fingers Curled.
Tagged: 2024 Southern Festival of Books, Book Reviews, Fiction
