The Raven and the Nightingale — Joanne Dobson

As professor of American women's literature at an elite New England college, Karen Pelletier has discovered that murder can occur even within the civilized confines of academia. But even she is not prepared for the waves of violence that rock Enfield College in the wake of a surprise bequest....

When Professor Karen Pelletier receives a box of papers from a descendant of Emmeline Foster--a nineteenth-century poet rumored to have drowned herself for the love of Edgar Allan Poe--she plans to use them in women's studies at the newly endowed Northbury Center. But Professor Elliot Corbin, a sexist Poe specialist, is scathingly opposed--until he is found stabbed to death beside a blood-spattered notepad emblazoned with Karen's name. No sooner has Karen established her alibi--and begun to dissect those of her colleagues--than the Emmeline Foster papers are stolen from her office. Now it's up to Karen to use her considerable literary expertise and survival skills to solve these two crimes over a century apart--and tie together the threads in a case as twisted as anything Poe himself could devise....