Joanne Dobson, a professor of English, wrote a six-volume series centered around her fictional stand-in. Karen Pelletier is a professor of 19th-century American literature at a college suspiciously like Amherst College, where she seems to regularly stumble onto murders involving lost manuscripts, mysterious authors, and academic politics.
It's a fun series -- Karen can be a bit melodramatic (fitting given her academic specialty), but she is smart, capable, and caring. She also comes from a working class background, and was a young single mother before she even entered college, so her perspective cuts through the privilege and Ivory Tower cluelessness that can sometimes permeate a liberal arts campus. There are lots of fun literary tidbits, too, and to top it off in each book Dobson includes a pastiche of a particular writing style -- a "lost" poem by Emily Dickenson, a scandalous Peyton Place-type novel, noir crime fiction -- skillfully done.
The fifth book of the series (I haven't been able to get the sixth from my library) wasn't quite as good, and there was a decrease in the quality of the editing, but over all I recommend the series for those who want a smarter cozy mystery.
