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Georgia Jensen and friend, Ellie Forsythe, find themselves embroiled in another suspicious death when Georgia, against her better judgment, agrees to speak at a symposium for historians. The most Georgia expected was publicity for her one-woman retiree's business, "Historical Research, By George," not a dead body. But that's exactly what Ellie finds shortly after she joins Georgia on the final day of the symposium. Hoping the death of one of the speakers would put an end to what Georgia termed "two of the worst days of her life," their hopes were dashed when the final day wasn't cancelled, and the police ask that everyone involved stay on campus until they complete their investigation. Unhappy with having their vacation plans disrupted, Georgia and Ellie set out to 'help' the police uncover the real motive for the rising young historian's murder by following the victim's research trail through the 1920s. Wading through old newspaper microfilm, books and old city directories, they begin to realize that those efforts may not be enough to lead them to a cold and calculating murderer. The reason may lie in the past of one of others involved in the gathering of illustrious academicians, some of whom aren't exactly what they seem to be and something much more difficult to research. The deeper they dig, the more muddied the situation becomes. And their efforts may lead to naught. Unbeknownst to them, a killer is watching and waiting, prepared to put an end to their meddling if need be. As they move closer to the truth, the killer might just manage to do away with the problem of Georgia and her research, especially if Ellie doesn't find Georgia's note in time!

Lyn Richards has a highly unusual range of relationships with qualitative research. After undergraduate training as a Historian and Political Scientist, she moved to Sociology. Her early work as a family sociologist addressed both popular and academic audiences, with a strong motivation always to make the funded research relevant to the people studied, and the qualitative analysis credible to those affected. Each of her four books in family sociology was a text at university level but also widely discussed in popular media and at community level. During her tenure as Reader and Associate Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, she won major research grants, presented and published research papers, was a founding member of a qualitative research association and taught qualitative methods at undergraduate and graduate level, supervising Masters and PhD students.

She strayed from this academic pathway when challenges with handling qualitative data in her family and community studies led to the development, with Tom Richards, of what rapidly became the world s leading qualitative analysis software. They left the university to found a research software company, in which for a decade Lyn was Director of Research Services, writing software documentation and managing international teaching of the methods behind the software. Designing and documenting software taught her to confront fuzzy thinking about methods, and to demand straight talking, clarity of purpose, detail of technique and a clear answer always to Why would we want to do that? Teaching methods to thousands of researchers in dozens of disciplines in 14 countries, she learned what worked and what didn t. From those researchers, graduates and faculty in universities and research practitioners in the world beyond, she learned their many ways of handling data, on and off computers, and their strategies for making sense of data.

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"Handling Qualitative Data "is a direct result of this experience. It offers clear, practical advice for researchers approaching qualitative research and wishing to do justice to rich data. Like her previous book, with Janice Morse, "Readme First, for a user s guide to qualitative methods "it strongly maintains the requirements of good qualitative research, assumes and critiques the use of software and draws on practical work, helping researchers whose progress has been hindered by confusion, lack of training, mixed messages about standards and fear of being overwhelmed by rich, messy data.

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Throughout this hybrid career, Lyn continued contributions to critical reflection on new methods, as a writer and a keynote speaker in a wide range of international conferences. She has life membership of the International Sociological Association and its Methodology section. Her writing aims always to cut through barriers to high quality qualitative research and to assist researchers and teachers in making the inevitable shift to computing whilst maximizing the benefits for their research processes and outcomes. On leaving software development, she took an Adjunct Professorship at RMIT University where she is now Associate Research Fellow of the Centre for Applied Social Research (CASR) and coordinates an active, informal and splendidly supportive qualitative research network group.