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Lawrence Friedman’s new Frank May Mystery has him confronting Stanford professors and their bad prose
Frank May’s practice leans heavily to estate planning. Murder cases are way out of his line. But when his client, Stanford law professor Peter Prosser, is found murdered at home, Frank becomes deeply entangled in yet another violent death. Prosser had been writing a detective novel; Frank has the only copy of the manuscript, minus the crucial last chapter. Far from a literary masterpiece, the novel features the (thinly disguised) members of the Soames family, the family of Prosser’s ex-wife — and even a pudgy character based on Frank himself. Can this badly-written novel tell us why Prosser died and who killed him? Mysteriously, real-life events start paralleling events in…
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Lawrence Friedman’s Frank May Mystery has will-seekers coming out of the woodwork
Frank May’s law practice is mostly estate planning. Nothing is further from his mind than murder … but mysterious deaths somehow seem to pursue him. This time, it’s the body of a woman, murdered and hidden on the grounds of the home in Los Altos Hills, California, owned by a new, young client, Freddy Lucas. Freddy was adopted by a couple who disappeared in the Amazon jungle; he was raised by his immensely rich great-aunt, Clara Fisk, who left him most of her money — but who also left a sizable gift to Freddy’s mother, if she turned out to be alive. Many women come out of the woodwork to…
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Lawrence Friedman’s novel Dead in the Park has Frank May tracking down his link to a corpse
Frank May is a private practice lawyer in San Mateo, California, and he doesn’t want to get involved with an unidentified dead body in the park. So why is he involved with an unidentified dead body in the park? The man was found in a neighboring California town with no identification; all the police found was a scrap of paper in the corpse’s pocket with Cynthia Greenhouse’s address and phone number. This would be none of Frank’s business … if only Cynthia wasn’t one of his clients. Here’s where the questions start: Who is this dead man? Why does he have Cynthia’s address? And why on earth does Cynthia have…
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Lawrence Friedman’s novel Death of a Schemer pits Frank May against a house full of suspects
Frank May, the lawyer who’s a reluctant detective, takes on the mystery of a house full of characters and and secrets. Frank’s law office is in San Mateo, California, his practice often dealing with wills and estates. Dead clients are an essential part of an estates practice, but these are, for almost everybody, quite natural deaths. Yet somehow, through some quirk of fate, unnatural deaths seem to plague Frank’s clients and those close to them. And he gets drawn into these mysterious affairs. Andrew Wright, a schemer if there ever was one, was not exactly a client. Andrew had befriended a woman well past her mental prime, living in a…
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Lawrence Friedman’s novel Who Killed Maggie Swift? Takes Reluctant Sleuth Frank May to the Dentist
Frank May practices law the safe, routine way: wills, trusts, business law. Books, forms, and documents. At least that’s the way he wants it…. But clients and life don’t always oblige. Frank avoids murder cases like most people avoid the dentist. That’s not so easy to do when a dead body shows up during his routine appointment for a teeth cleaning, and he is thrust into an investigation that bridges his law practice. He needs to get to the root of this death. That will take more than scraping the surface of a dental practice with deep secrets and suspicious characters — or the nearby, bizarre Xyloquex Corporation. If Frank…
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Lawrence Friedman’s novel of lawyer Frank May proves where there’s a will there’s a death
Frank May practices law, but not the glamorous kind. His bread and butter is the sedate sort—writing wills and handling estates. Or more to the point, handling heirs. Even so, where there’s a will there’s a death. Try as he might, Frank just can’t avoid some of the more unsavory sides of human existence. And of heirs. There’s more than one unsavory side to the family Mobius, and Frank has front row seats to watch the quirks and squabbles of the various Mobiuses, after two older family members die. One, at least, was murdered in his squalid San Francisco apartment, while sitting on a family fortune that appears to be…
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Lawrence Friedman’s Mystery The Book Club Murder Drags Lawyer Frank May into his Wife’s Domain
Frank May hates trouble, as a lawyer and as a guy. But it likes him just fine. For someone who practices wills and trusts law because it is far from the scene of murder and mayhem, he has a knack for being caught up in it anyway. Which is why he thought he was fortune’s friend the night his wife stayed home from her book club meeting—a lucky migraine—when someone got smothered. He wouldn’t be caught up in it this time, nor his wife, and someone else could figure out all the tangles and suspicions of the book club women. Somehow it did not work out that way, and all…
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Lawrence Friedman’s Mystery An Unnatural Death Takes Lawyer Frank May Into May and December
Frank May practices law, but he gets by just doing the safe, bland kind—writing wills, forming partnerships, processing papers. Everything far from the seedy adventures of criminal law or detective work. But every lawyer knows: clients have a habit of taking you to places you don’t want to be. One of those clients is the estate of the late Harriet Wingate. Harriet had money, and that always makes for interested relatives. But a bizarre husband Harriet’s junior, by a half-century? Two squabbling nieces? The suddenly revealed grandson? Worst of all, a litter of soon-to-be rich cats? Frank did not think she even had a cat. Frank wrote Harriet’s will, or…
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Lawrence Friedman’s mystery novel A Body in the House follows the death of a Stanford professor
Lawyer Frank May is, as always, reluctant to get involved in murder cases. But when his young client, Margot, comes back from a vacation with her husband and finds the dead body of a woman in their house, Frank is drawn in despite himself. Who was this woman? And when another murder occurs—this time on the campus of Stanford University—you have to wonder: Are the two deaths connected? And does a quirky Hungarian violinist have something to do with the case? Baffling questions, to be sure. But in the end, Frank finds the surprising key that unlocks the mystery. … A new QP Mystery, in the series The Frank May Chronicles.…
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Lawrence Friedman’s novel The Late Doctor Savage proves where there’s a will there’s a murder
Frank May practices law in San Mateo, California. Much of his practice deals with estate planning—wills, trusts, and related matters. So dead people are very much on his mind and the mind of his clients. But not, for the most part, unnatural deaths. Yet mysterious deaths, for some odd reason, seem to creep inevitably into his practice. A young woman, Ashley Savage, is Frank’s newest client. Her birth father, whom she never met and who played no role in her upbringing, has suddenly entered her life—though very indirectly. He’s created a trust for her, worth millions of dollars but whose origins are, to say the least, questionable. Dr. Langley Savage,…
