Emily Dickinson noted "death's tremendous nearness" in one of her poems. Of course, she'd been dead 100 years when her admirers came to Amherst to celebrate her at a memorial symposium. Among them was Homer Kelly, distinguished Thoreau scholar and ex-detective, who had himself dealt with murder -- a form of death -- in the past. To his amazement he finds himself once again embroiled in sudden death when murder stalks the symposium.