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Born in Germany, Hannah S. Hess came to the United States via Ecuador. She was educated in the New York City public schools, and worked as a high school English teacher, assistant principal, and principal. The mother of three children, she lives in New York with her husband, Walter, a published poet and filmmaker.

She is the author of The Third Side of the Desk, How Parents Can Change the Schools, Honest Deceptions, and We Perish Each Alone.

The corpse of the title is that of William Hennessy, a university disliked teacher at US Grant High School, who turns up dead in one of the science labs. There is no shortage of suspects, and when Charlotte Hill (Charlie to her friends), the principal of the school, discovers that a group of students has been using the lab to make illegal drugs, and that the newly deceased had been blackmailing these enterprising chemists, she hopes for a quick solution. However, this hope is dashed when the students admit the chemistry but insist Hennessy was already dead when they arrived. Suspicion then turns to various others: a recent graduate and boyfriend of a student Hennessy had sexually abused; the school custodian; one of the janitors. When the janitor is found dead in his car the police are happy to call it a suicide and to write finis to Hennessy’s murder. But Charlie has her doubts, and sets about to find answers. Eventually she does, but not before her life is threatened, and the threat almost become a reality.