While at a college to give a commencement speech and receive an honorary degree, Jessica attends a celebration held by Professor Jocelyn Laird, head of the English Department. Midway through, Jocelyn's wild daughter Daphne and her boyfriend Nick Fulton crash the party. The next morning, Nick turns up dead in a construction site, in what Jessica quickly realizes was murder.
This episode includes examples of the following tropes:
- Absence of Evidence:
- The roof's under construction, and Jessica points out that if Nick had really fallen to his death from up there, he'd have plaster dust on his feet.
- Jessica notes that Daphne claims to have come back home to work on her books, but doesn't have a typewriter or even so much as a pencil in the guest house she's staying in.
- All Love Is Unrequited: Alger Kenyon has been carrying a torch for Jocelyn Laird for years, with her apparently unaware.
- Blackmail: Nick tries to blackmail Joeclyn after learning she's the one who's actually writing Daphne's trashy novels. Alger kills him in a fit of rage.
- Blatant Lies: Daphne assures her mother that she and Nick won't cause any trouble at the party. A few drinks later and Daphne's skinny-dipping while Nick's violent.
- Frame-Up: Alger plants a blackmail note and the murder weapon in Daphne's house.
- Locked Out of the Loop: Even though Alger was close to Jocelyn, he had no inkling that she was the one who wrote trashy romance novels. He tried to frame Daphne after he killed Nick because he thought she was shaming her mother with them and wanted her to pay.
- Magnum Opus Dissonance: In-Universe, Jocelyn has written scholarly work that barely made back its publishing costs. Therefore, she began writing trashy romance novels for the money and letting her daughter take the credit for writing them because the novels would be embarrassing to admit for a professor.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: The police originally assume Nick died from falling off a balcony in the middle of the night. However, Jessica points out a clue meaning it must have been staged.
- Naked in Mink: Midway through the party, Daphne and Nick come back in from swimming. As they retire for the night, Daphne opens her fur coat and flashes everyone. Jessica points this out when saying she doesn't think Daphne committed the murder, because she clearly demonstrated she wasn't wearing enough to hide the murder weapon.
- Sex for Services: Ron Mercer claims that Jocelyn was the one who initiated their affair, pressuring him into sex for his job. Technically, he later got promoted by moving a body, just not hers.
- Sex Sells: Jocelyn notes that she spent years writing a Walt Whitman biography and barely made enough off of it to buy a secondhand car, but she wrote a trashy sex novel in six weeks and started a highly profitable (if secret) new career.
- Taking the Heat: Both Jocelyn and Daphne confess to murdering Nick, which Jessica reasons was because each of them suspected the other had committed the murder and wanted to save them.
- Unequal Pairing: Professor Mercer works under professor Laird, and sometimes he works over her, sometimes beside her...
- Yandere: Alger looks like a wimp, but he stone cold killed a guy for threatening the woman he loves, and then tried to frame said woman's daughter for murder because he thought she was humiliating her mother. Don't mess with Alger.
