Synopsis: Chloe Bliss, a recently retired academic and classicist, prefers to live a quiet life, gardening, walking her dog, and reading fiction, which is her “safe haven.” Editing scholarly journals, she works part time from her comfortable home, content to do so. When drawn into the mystery of her friend and colleague’s death, she begins (reluctantly) probing an implicit charge of plagiarism as well as trying to save his legacy of the Friday Chamber Music Society. His faulty step and fatal fall, from two years prior, have fed conjecture and gossip, spurred in part by former graduate students, musicians who struggle to establish their Friday chamber music society. But underlying this storyline is another recurring motive: Chloe’s own lifetime fear of a fall. Unexpected suspicions and her own lifetime fear disrupt her usually calm ordered life. The Friday Chamber Society and close friendships are outward concerns, adapting to retirement another, while she passively listens to confidences and gossip and eventually pieces together truths in her academic society.