Anatomy Lesson

by Raymond Obstfeld

Stevie Croft, Orange County’s most successful prosecutor, is running a losing campaign for district attorney when she is assigned to the most heinous crime in the county’s history. A body is discovered composed of the severed parts from five different people, all crudely sewn together to form one grotesque corpse. Stevie has the chance to ride this high-profile case right into office. Then the killer begins leaving cryptic messages for Stevie in her home, in her office, even in her purse. Calling himself ?The Tutor,” he claims that deciphering these clues will not only lead her to his identity, but save the lives of his future victims. His taunting clues target her darkest since she was 10, Stevie has hyper-memory, a combination of photographic memory and total recall which causes her to precisely remember everything she’s ever seen, heard, or read. While often a strength that gives her a competitive edge, this condition is also her Achilles heel?excruciatingly painful migraines are often a by-product. As her pain escalates, so do the killer’s clues.

341 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2008

About the author

aka Laramie Dunaway, Jason Frost, Carl Stevens

Raymond Obstfeld is a writer of poetry, non-fiction, fiction, and screenplays as well as a professor of English at Orange Coast College. He lives in California.

Obstfeld has authored or co-authored nearly 50 books. Since 2007, he has been co-author to eight books with NBA basketball legend, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Obstfeld has twice been nominated for the NAACP Image Award, having won once. He has also been nominated for an Edgar A. Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Dead Heat.Early in his writing career, Obstfeld wrote under several pseudonyms (Pike Bishop, Carl Stevens, Jason Frost) because he wrote different genres. After writing over a dozen thrillers, Westerns, and occult novels, he decided to return to mainstream literary fiction that he had written in graduate school. Because he’d already achieved some fame as a mystery writer, he decided to write his new novel under the name Laramie Dunaway. The novel, Hungry Women, was written from the points of view of four women friends. It was published by Warner Books without anyone at the publishing house knowing Obstfeld was a man. The novel went on to great success, being published internationally. Laramie Dunaway published two more novels before informing Warner of his gender. The publisher decided to publish Obstfeld’s next novel, Earth Angel, under his real name.