Before evolv­ing into a writer, Car­ol Good­man Kauf­man worked as an indus­tri­al and orga­ni­za­tion­al psy­chol­o­gist and crim­i­nol­o­gist. Her pub­lished works span mul­ti­ple gen­res, includ­ing aca­d­e­m­ic re- search, food his­to­ry, trav­el, human inter­est, children’s lit­er­a­ture, and mys­tery short sto­ries. The First Mur­der is her first novel.

Title: The First Murder

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.

Run­ning through­out the book is the sto­ry of Purim and its mes­sages. Who is the killer hid­ing behind a mask?

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