About this item
As St. Louis attorney Rachel Gold knows firsthand, the grueling hours and demands of Big Law take their toll on young lawyers. Some turn to drugs, some quit the profession, and occasionally one quits altogether. According to the medical examiner, Sari Bashir quit for good on leaving work one Thursday night. That's when she fell to her death from the eighth floor of the downtown garage adjacent to her firm where she parked her car. The police ruled her death a suicide. Stanley Plotkin, however, rules it a homicide. Stanley is a genius. He also has Asperger’s Syndrome which makes employing him tricky. So Sari’s firm employed Stanley in the mail room. Among his obsessions is the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), a massive compilation that correlates hundreds of facial muscle actions with specific emotions and mental states.
About the Author
Michael Kahn is a trial lawyer by day and an award-winning author at night. He wrote his first novel, GRAVE DESIGNS, on a challenge from his wife Margi, who got tired of listening to the same answer whenever she asked him about a book he was reading. "Not bad," he would say, "but I could write a better book than that." "Then write one, honey," she finally said, "or please shut up." So he shut up for a long time, and then he wrote one.
A former elementary school teacher, Mike is the author of THE DEAD HAND and 9 other Rachel Gold novels; a legal thriller, THE MOURNING SEXTON, under the pen name Michael Baron; and THE SIRENA QUEST (2015) , a stand-alone novel that he describes, in Hollywood jargon, as "a Baby Boomer version of 'The Big Chill' meets 'The Maltese Falcon.'" His latest novel, PLAYED!, features, as Booklist wrote, "the same sharp dialogue, wit, and clever plotting his fans have come to expect." He is also the author of numerous short stories, including the three collected in A HANDFUL OF GOLD.
In addition to his day job as a lawyer, he is an adjunct professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches a class on censorship and free expression. Married to his high school sweetheart, he is the father of five and the grandfather of, so far, five.
His proudest moment as a writer: when his children took one of his books to school for show-and-tell.
