Lois Wells Santalo, '43

On return to Ann Arbor, Jill Szekely immediately gets caught up in the affairs of a newly formed graduate commune when her old friend and former housemate, Renee Corliss, goes missing. The police believe Renee chose to disappear, since her marriage, like so many occurring in wartime, had just imploded. But this makes no sense to her friends, Jill and Alison, who know Renee has already made the hard decision to seek a divorce and upgrade her education for a career. They look elsewhere, and discover, in that volatile election year, a great many mysterious things Renee had been involved in.

In the author's second murder mystery, she takes her sleuth back to college for graduate work at U-M in post-WWII years, about the time the author herself did the same thing. Later she went to New York to work for a literary agent, and now lives in California.