Registration opens:
June 19th, 2026 at 9:00am

True Crime Book Club

"We Keep the Dead Close" by Becky Cooper

Forty years after her murder, Jane Britton's story became an urban legend at Harvard. Until undergraduate Becky Cooper, started to look into the case to discover the truth.

***For July only, our meeting will be on the second Monday of the month***

We will meet on the third Monday of every month. This will be a great way to discover new and classic True Crime writing.

From Amazon:

1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious twenty-three-year-old graduate student in Harvard's Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd Britton, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment.

Forty years later, Becky Cooper a curious undergrad, will hear the first whispers of the story. In the first telling the body was nameless. The story was this: a Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology because she'd threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumor proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for ten years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a 'cowboy culture' among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims.

View and print the list of books and check out the Book Discussion page for more book clubs and resources!

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