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 the novel, including a second murder: a woman in the Soames household, dressed in a red kimono, is strangled in her room. As Frank follows the trail, it leads to a number of unlikely places, including the Cultural Studies Department of Stanford University and a wedding chapel in Las Vegas. Maybe if he can endure reading the dead professor’s novel, he can solve the evolving mystery.

Part of the series The Frank May Chronicles by QP Books, by Stanford law professor Lawrence M. Friedman.

Paperback edition: Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BooksAMillion, Powell’s, YBP Library Services, MLS, Ingram catalog, and other retailers.

Also available in these digital formats:

Kindle edition, at Amazon.

NOOK, at Barnes & Noble.

Apple iBooks and iTunes: find it on iPad and iPhone at the Books app.

Google at Play and Google Books.

And at such ePUB sites as Smashwords and Rakuten Kobo.

…

Cataloging: The Red Kimono
Author:  Lawrence Friedman

ISBN 9781610274036 (pbk.)
ISBN 9781610274043 (ePUB)
ASIN B085Y8MXBB (Kindle)
List price: US $5.99 (ebook) / $16.99 (pbk.)
Page count: 230 pp.
Published: March 15, 2020