Doctor Rowena Halley

Meet Rowena Halley, a former human rights activist turned academic. Rowena thought teaching on US college campuses would be a lot safer than interviewing torture victims in Russia. Boy, was she wrong. Rowena quickly gets caught up in campus intrigue that threatens to turn deadly. Meanwhile, the life and lover she thought she’d left behind in Moscow might not be so firmly back in the past as she’d believed.

During one of the worst years on record in the academic job market, newly minted PhD Rowena Halley has, against all odds, gotten a job. For one semester. At poverty wages. In New Jersey. But with so many of her fellow PhDs bagging groceries or worse instead of teaching Russian, this is the best chance she has.

After the tumultuous events of the previous semester, Russian professor Rowena Halley has found a new job. This time, it’s a one-semester adjunct position in Charlotte, North Carolina. Not ideal, but better than no job at all. At least, that’s what she’s telling herself. Rowena loves what she does, but love isn’t always kind. Her job is keeping her broke and three states away from her best candidate for serious boyfriend material. Her ex is sending her cryptic messages from the war zone in Ukraine, and her brother has come back from Afghanistan even more messed up than before.

Russian professor Rowena Halley’s life finally seems to be taking a turn for the better. She has a job for the summer and the fall, her family dramas of the past spring have settled down, and she’s got a promising romance going with Alex, a fellow academic and actual American. But the course of true love rarely runs smooth. Rowena’s weekend of fun and good times with Alex is disrupted when one of her students goes missing, in a town that’s already had more than its fair share of missing young women. Simple flakiness or something more sinister?

Doctor Rowena Halley has finally found a job that pays enough to live on. Too bad it’s a continent away from one of the men in her life, and an ocean away from the other. Plus, the campus she’s teaching at is not the idyllic haven it seems. There are the usual problems of academia: busywork, embarrassing extracurricular activities, a difficult department chair. And then there’s real danger. A Gamergate activist has been invited to speak at the college, and a campus men’s rights group has threatened to protest the event.

When a student with a hijab and a strong Chechen accent confides in Rowena about a tricky sexual assault case and asks for her help, Rowena can’t say no - again. Being the only Russian professor on campus, as well as the faculty member students go to for help, has its advantages. But the disadvantages can be deadly.

Doctor Rowena Halley was really hoping that a summer in California would help her heal from the previous semester’s injuries, mental and physical. Instead, it might throw her into the greatest danger she’s faced yet. Spending the summer working in Monterey and living with her boyfriend, Alex, was supposed to prove to both of them that they were ready to take their relationship to the next level. But what it’s really shown is that they’re still clinging to old flames.

August 2016. Rowena Halley, PhD, is nursing a busted knee and a busted heart. Plus, her career path is on a toilet trajectory and the divisive politics of a particularly fraught election cycle are threatening to bust up her family, too. Then Madison, former student, (former?) drug addict, and troublemaker extraordinaire, comes bursting back into her life.