Alex must be even more worked up than I’d thought. The front-and only-door to his apartment didn’t quite fit in the frame, so it required a good hard slam, and sometimes considerable shaking, jiggling, and prayers for mercy, to get it to shut enough to be able to shoot the deadbolt. Will they manage to resolve everything in time?…Īlex left, slamming the sticky door behind him so hard that the dishes rattled on the shelves. Not only has their relationship hit a rocky patch, but someone has gone missing under alarming circumstances. But things are, as is so often the case, more fraught than they should be. She’s living with her boyfriend Alex, who works at the DLI, the military language institute there. To set the scene, the action takes place in Monterey, CA, where Rowena is spending the summer teaching at the civilian language institute. Well, actually, there is a bit of a spoiler, so proceed at your own risk 🙂 I had a hard time finding a good excerpt, since pretty much the entire story is a massive spoiler for the cliffhanger at the end of Honor Court. Several of you have already weighed in, but if you have a preference for the title, let me know! It’s a long novella/short novel of about 45,000 words set over a single weekend in the summer following the end of Honor Court, book 5 in the Doctor Rowena Halley series.

This is Chapter 10 of the story that I initially titled Summer Intensive but then later tentatively decided to call Total Immersion.

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