M.I.T. Can Be Murder

About the Book

M.I.T., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is world famous for turning out America's top scientists and engineers.  But for the students, M.I.T. is an intense academic pressure cooker that makes demands and sets standards that are impossible to meet.  To survive, students struggle to find some way, any way, to cope.  Some commit suicide.  Some commit murder.

Mike Werner, a patent attorney from Los Angeles, returns to graduate school at M.I.T. ten years after getting his law degree to pursue a Ph.D. in Oceanographic Engineering.  While testing an underwater robot in the Charles River, Mike discovers a rusty ax head, a twenty year old women's high school class ring, and what looks like a piece of bone, buried in the grimy river bottom.  The ring is inscribed with the initials "M.E.R.

As an escape from his seemingly endless hours of studying, Mike conjures up a murder mystery around the ax head, the ring, and the mysterious M.E.R.  He becomes convinced that twenty years ago, M.E.R. was murdered.  Odd behavior of his academic advisor, Derek Cartwright, leads Mike to believe that Derek, a student at M.I.T. twenty years earlier, is involved in the murder.

Finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the academic pressures of M.I.T., Mike spends more time pursuing his imagined murder mystery.  He finds a picture of a striking young woman with the initials M.E.R. in an old high school yearbook.  He discovers old newspaper stories about brutal beheadings of two other young women.  He becomes convinced all three murders are connected.

Mike befriends Kristen, a bright, feisty, attractive, no-nonsense Ph.D. student seeking a degree in marine biology.  Despite their fifteen-year age difference, they get along fabulously, becoming friends, then roommates.  Mike develops romantic feelings about Kristen, feelings that Kristen, involved in a long-term relationship with someone else, cannot return.

As the semester continues, Mikes studies start to suffer.  With the end of the semester rapidly approaching, Kristen persuades Mike to stop wasting time with his twenty-year old murders, and instead, concentrate on his studies.  The murders can keep, she says, but finals are in three weeks.  Reluctantly Mike agrees.  He puts the murders aside.  For the last three weeks of the semester he concentrates all his energy on studying.

But Kristen is wrong.  The murders cant keep.  By stirring around in the long forgotten past, Mike has disturbed the real murderer, awoken his need to kill.  The murderer sets his sights on his next victim.  It is Kristen.

About the Author

Frank Weyer has worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa, a campaign manager in Ohio, a Wall Street attorney, and an engineer on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Mr. Weyer has over fifteen years experience as an engineer and attorney in the areas of corporate finance and intellectual property, with degrees from Caltech and UC Berkeley. He completed recent graduate work at M.I.T., the setting for his first novel, "M.I.T. Can Be Murder." Mr. Weyer loves to travel to out of the way places. He recently returned from a trip to Cuba, which forms the setting for his second book, "Murder at First Sight," now in progress. Mr. Weyer, who also owns a house on Cape Cod, has for the last three years lived on his 33 foot sailboat "Strumvogel III" in Marina Del Rey, California.