Mark Bagshaw

A Coffle of Slavers Mark Bagshaw

In A Coffle of Slavers, two students of novelist and newly arrived English professor Jerry Gardiner organize and lead the campus community of a major Ivy-League university to "rectify" the names of its residential colleges that have been founded by slave-holders, slave-breeders, and slave-traders. A black man and a white woman, the students' efforts set them squarely against the interests of the president of the University, other members of the administration, and its board of trustees. It is in this context that a retired university buildings & grounds employee returns from an attempt to rekindle an old romance in Hawaii, only to find himself a person of interest in a murder investigation at the local "Hart-Mart" big-box store, where he had been working in retirement as a store "greeter." Concurrently, the detective investigating the Hart-Mart murder is also the principal investigator in a second murder that involves the husband of one of Jerry Gardiner's colleagues in the University's English department. Two other university faculty members are discovered to have been sexually involved with the now-dead husband, and all three women are now suspects in the husband's death. Improbably, all three women are being consoled by the indefatigable Jerry Gardiner.