Death at Clover High

is an equally mind-blowing and educational fiction about a high school's baffling death and the students' brain-busting algebra class. In this proficiently written self-contained book, Horwitz will take the readers to two different but solidly connected situations. A high school student at Clover High is found dead in the lavatory, with her head thrown back, mouth open, and eyes looking completely blank. The situation elicits questions and confusion, and leads a few other students to investigate. While the mysterious death continues to infuse anxiety and puzzlement among the students, the Algebra class is also facing its own numerical battle. Each meeting presents increasingly complicated algebra problems—from signed numbers and absolute values to equations and variables to linear equations, inequalities, and quadratic equations—that appraise each student's intelligence. How algebra relates in analyzing and solving the murder mystery is quite surprising.