Round O and Crooked S

      murder, insanity, and the Oxford English Dictionary

Synopsis: 

James Murray, Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, is on a mission to meet the man responsible for finding, writing down, and sending to him over 10,000 words. That man, Dr. William Minor, turns out to be an incarcerated homicidal maniac who is serving a life sentence at the Broadmoor Asylum. Despite his hallucinations and perversions that conflict with Murray’s staunchly conservative mores, their acquaintance grows into a friendship built upon mutual respect. 

Conflicts erupt when the Chief Alienist of Broadmoor, Dr. Thaddeus Qwilt, applies his own brand of sadistic therapy to the hapless Minor; and Murray, spurred by his wife, Ada, now has a new mission—to seek and acquire the release of William Minor and to arrange his return to America. 

During his stay at Broadmoor, Minor has developed a furtive affair with the widow of the man he killed. In a twisted perversion of a love affair, Eliza simultaneously demands money and love in a relentless pursuit of revenge against the lunatic who shot her husband. 

The plot culminates in a drunken frenzy of death and self-mutilation and the question that plagues Murray and his society—who owes and who is owed?