Flesh — Hollis Seamon

Flesh provides a smart, sexy, scary, and always surprising take on both pleasures and sins of the flesh. Combining comedy, mystery and Gothic thrills, Flesh introduces a strikingly original female sleuth: Suzanne Brown, aka Suzanne LaFleshe, deluxe-sized woman and connoisseur of all things corporeal. Suzanne is a graduate student writing a dissertation on cannibalism in contemporary literature.

When poet Sam Tindell -- one of Suzanne's lovers -- falls to his death, smack in the middle of the university Humanities Building, Suzanne is tossed into a maelstrom of mayhem and mystery. Was Sam's death suicide? So everyone assumes, but Suzanne has her doubts, especially when she finds herself hounded by obscene messages and haunted by visions of the wendigo, a cannibal creature with a heart of ice. A strange band of cohorts -- starving graduate students; a handsome campus cop; faithful animal companions; a faculty committee; Suzanne's lovers, past, present and wanna-be; and the oldest practicing witch in Albany New York -- join Suzanne in her quest to uncover the secret evil that stalks the campus. Along the way, Suzanne struggles to hide her own past as the nude model for an artist sexually obsessed with her plentiful body. In the end, Suzanne, alone, is forced to confront both the danger and the beauty of what her books call "cannibal knowledge" when she finds herself face to face with the murderous wendigo spirit, in the flesh.