The Professor's Assassin (Short Story)

Matthew Pearl’s upcoming novel, The Technologists, is a stunning historical thriller based on the early days of America’s great institution of learning, MIT—and a depraved killer teaching Boston to fear its own shadow. In this original eBook short story, Pearl delves further into the turbulent world of nineteenth-century academia to re-create a shocking, real-life, and all-but-forgotten crime.
 
William Barton Rogers will one day become MIT’s founder and president. But in 1840 he is still a science professor at the University of Virginia. A tall and commanding intellectual, he epitomizes the strong and liberal ways of “Mr. Jefferson’s University,” a controversial experiment in progressive thought and laissez-faire governance. Then a startling event rocks the school to its foundation. Riots led by masked “volunteers” have begun roiling the campus, exploiting its attitude toward discipline. When one of his colleagues is brutally slain during the unrest, Rogers must become a man of both words and deeds to capture the killer—and keep an essential institution from collapsing around him.
 
Includes a preview of Matthew Pearl’s forthcoming novel, The Technologists, which Joseph Finder calls “the best yet from a true master of the historical thriller.”

Praise for Matthew Pearl

"Matthew Pearl is a shining star of literary fiction."-Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code

"The term ‘thrilling' genuinely applies."-Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked

Advance praise for The Technologists

"The Technologists combines everything I love in a thriller: fascinating history, science, and a frightening mystery that demands to be solved. Matthew Pearl is one of my must-read authors. He never fails to intrigue and thrill!"-Tess Gerritsen, author of The Silent Girl

"Fascinating, mesmerizing, and richly atmospheric, The Technologists is the best yet from a true master of the historical thriller. I loved this novel."-Joseph Finder, New York Times bestselling author of Buried Secrets and Vanished

"Pearl's signature complex plotting, strewn with red herrings and populated with unlikely villains, leaves readers as shocked and intrigued as the Bostonians."-Booklist

"Pearl again blends detective fiction with historical characters (such as pioneering feminist and MIT-trained scientist Ellen Swallow), and his cast reads like a who's who of nineteenth-century Boston. . . . Great fun."-Publishers Weekly