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The truth about HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman's abrupt departure from her job has now been established, sort of. While it's obvious that News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch fired her—not least because heir-in-waiting Brian Murray was offered Friedman's job two days before she knew anything about it—no one who's willing to speak knows why the unscrupulous Aussie cut loose a woman who, by all accounts, had done extremely well for the company and was widely admired by her publishing cohorts. And so the normally dry old book industry is consumed with soap opera-ish emotion and intrigue: Agent Robert Gottlieb calls the decision "a dreadful mistake...What can be in the minds of these people, losing somebody that valuable, is simply beyond my comprehension," while a HarperCollins exec says that they'd "all be helped emotionally if we had a better sense of why this happened." Bring in the trauma counselors!