Quoth the Raven

I don't place this in Haddam's top tier (which starts with Precious Blood and A Stillness in Bethlehem) but it's not far below. The puzzle is solid and the clues good. The milieu is an indictment of certain trends in academia; whether it is realistic or a base caricature (or worse) may depend on your personal politics.

The first person Father Tibor Kasparian has really hated since escaping from the Soviet Union is Dr. Donegal Steele, the pig who's the fly in the ointment for most of Independence College. Otherwise, teaching a semester of philosophy at Independence is a dream come true for Father Tibor: it's even what he was trained to do, once upon a time, even though teaching philosophy is what first got him into *so* much trouble. Father Tibor even has his first experience with pets, as Independence College has tame deer and even a talking raven (named Lenore, of course).Two days before the Halloween bonfire - that is, two days before Tibor's friend Gregor Demarkian is due to make a guest lecture - Steele has disappeared. One half-joking rumor is that Jack Carroll, the soon-to-be-self-made law student whose tuition is cobbled together from scholarships and 30 hours a week in a body shop, finally beat the stuffing out of Steele for slandering Chessey Flint, Jack's girl. Steele's sexual harassment of various faculty and students is breathtakingly outrageous, and it doesn't seem to be blocking him from making a move for the post of chairman of the history department. Dr. Alice Elkinson, the youngest tenured faculty member and with the most serious reputation, would get it on merit if merit were considered, and her fiancee Ken Crockett would get it if the historical society got a vote, but Steele has written a popular (though tripey) book. Katherine Branch and her shadow, Vivi Wollman, are fretting that they are now professors without a department, since Women's Studies has had neither the popularity nor the academic rigor to survive at Independence, at least the way *they* teach it. The only person who is interested in locating Steele is Maryanne Veer, the department secretary; like everyone else, she doesn't *want* to see Steele, but a professor skipping out on his lecture and office hour schedule makes problems.And when Gregor Demarkian and Bennis Hannaford are greeted with a case of lye poisoning over lunch in the Independence College cafeteria, it's Maryanne Veer who's the victim. Although she survives the attack, the damage done to her throat and voicebox effectively silences her for some time to come. And it's definitely an attack: the local sheriff can testify that Maryanne, having come from the wrong side of the tracks, knows too much about lye to attempt suicide with it; no other food in the cafeteria is contaminated, which rules out accident; and whatever food on her tray was spiked with lye disappeared while Gregor was giving first aid with his expertise on poisons.Gregor and Tibor both have problems dealing with the students' childish antics and the other aspects of Halloween, each for his different reasons. Neither has much use for immaturity, and both have seen too much real violence to enjoy its illusion. (Gregor, of course, is a veteran of the FBI. Tibor, who up to this point in the series had been a peripheral supporting player, escaped from rel