Bookshelf

Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.

The First Murder by Carol Goodman Kaufman K’74.

November 13, 2025

Tags Kirkland College Alumna

(Little Cottage Press, 2024).

Here’s a summary from the publisher to get you hooked: “When Mary Jane Bennett is found dead in her bed — alone, strangled by her own scarf, and with every door in the house locked — the medical examiner rules her death accidental, the result of a sex game gone horribly awry. State police decline to investigate further, but Queensbridge Police Chief Caleb Crane doesn’t buy for a minute that his good friend died this way, so he undertakes his own investigation. Facing town councilors afraid of bad publicity, an angry medical examiner, and his own personal demons, he labors to solve what he believes is the first-ever murder in his pastoral Berkshire Hills village. Complicating things: the list of suspects includes some of the people to whom he is closest — including his own wife.”

And as one reviewer wrote, “The author so adeptly dropped clues throughout the novel yet had you guessing until the very end who the murderer was. I really hope this will become a series.”