A Grievance with Dead is a 100,000-word mystery told in third person point of view. When Professor Edwina Heyward swings by the Mall Center of Nathan Bedford Forrest Community College to leave a message with a fellow faculty senate member, Frederick "Rabbit" Denning, she and a maintenance worker discover that a seemingly drunk Denning had apparently tried to kill himself by shooting himself in the head and neck with a cross-bow. By the time Rescue and the police have finished with her, she has missed her first class at West Campus and has drawn the wrath of Dean Ernest J. Tubbins, who hasn't yet learned about the incident at the Mall Center. When Edwina and colleague Bill Tarleton offer their sympathy to Denning's wife, she tells Edwina that Frederick had been trying to get in touch with a faculty senator about "something." She insists that her husband was not suicidal and asks for Edwina's help. Two articles explode in the paper. The head of an FCC student had been cut off and left on a package bin of Extra Fast Express at the "Murder Mall," her nude body nearby. A newspaper column reports Edwina's doubt about whether Denning was a suicide. These stories spur a pregnant adjunct to withdraw as the instructor of a speech class and humanities class at the Mall Center. Tubbins assigns Bill and Edwina to handle the courses, and, when Edwina picks up class rolls, etc. from the adjunct, she learns that one murdered girl was the adjunct's cousin. Once they are based part-time at the Murder Mall, they uncover a list of possible perpetrators. Besides fending off "paper" attacks from Dean Tubbins, Edwina also has to fight off attacks from a midnight invader of her town house and later try to escape being dumped into the Gulf of Mexico from a small aircraft.