Death by Student Loan

A ＄100,000 student loan is murder-but then so is a human head stashed in your pantry.Anyone who has ever struggled under the weight of a hefty student loan can appreciate the extreme lengths one might be willing to explore in order to shift the burden a bit-even if it means stealing the head of a corpse, or traveling into the past.Mariah Garrett has two weighty problems-crushing agoraphobia, and a six-figure student loan, the result of locking herself away in a seaside Victorian cottage to complete her PhD-online. While desperately looking for something to sell on eBay one morning, Mariah discovers a staircase in the back of a closet. As she starts down, her foot catches, plummeting her to the bottom-and into the year 1957, where she meets her long-dead relatives and discovers that even the Nifty Fifties can be a dangerous place. But Mariah has more problems than time-shifts and timely installments. A body has been discovered long-buried beneath an old pier, and her best friend Phoebe has stolen its mummified skull in order to sell it to the National Inquirer for enough money to pay off both their student loans. To save her friend from pursuing media hounds (not to mention the police), Mariah agrees to keep the head in a Tupperware salad bowl until it can be returned under cover of darkness, but she must first return to 1957 to correct a mistake that could ultimately alter the future.Set on a small island south of Galveston, Texas, Death By Student Loan is replete with unique and unusual characters and events including the H.O.E.S., (Houston's Outstanding Emissaries of Society) a mail carrier known as Sea Hag, a teen skater with the IQ of Einstein, a power-hungry politician with a sordid past, two hunky guys (in two different decades) and a wealthy '50s drag-queen who knows where all the bodies are buried. And then there is the Caveman-the dark voice of Mariah's agoraphobia.