The History Teacher

“RIVETING” — Midwest Book ReviewA compelling political mystery, an intrigue, a puzzle. During the blizzard of 1978, a woman is discovered face down at the edge of her Delaware estate, a dog half-dead by her side. Nearby, a CIA officer lies buried under two feet of snow. Their secret meeting—sabotaged. When Emma Quinn gets a call in her Manhattan apartment—your grandmother, found dead—she has no reason to suspect foul play. But she is drawn into an intrigue that harks back to the beginnings of the Cold War—and forced to confront the truth about her family and history as we know it.PRAISE FOR THE HISTORY TEACHER “Susan Bacon’s THE HISTORY TEACHER is a rare thriller . . . scrupulously researched, cagily and compellingly plotted and eminently credible. . . . thought-provoking as both history and fiction. And oh yeah, a pleasure to read, written, sentence by sentence, with the eye of a shrewd observer and the ear of a writer who knows language is music.” — BRUCE WEBER, journalist and author of Life Is a Wheel: Memoirs of a Bike-Riding Obituarist “Starting with a baffling double murder in a snowstorm in Delaware . . . THE HISTORY TEACHER rushes the reader through a perilous intersection of chateau country wealth, the academic world in Manhattan and Cold War intrigue . . . an excellent, well-crafted debut novel.” — CURTIS WILKIE, journalist and author of The Fall of the House of Zeus“THE HISTORY TEACHER is . . . a lively, classic page-turner—full of spying, murder and double dealing. Emma Quinn and her grandmother Margaret are 20th century heroines who would have to wait for a 21st century writer as skilled and clever as Bacon . . . to imagine their brave and savvy pursuit of the truth.” —EMILY YELLIN, journalist and author of Our Mothers’ War