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True Crime Redux
“More than a witness but less than an active participant, I was a bit actor whose role in the crime shaped my life.” So writes Stephanie Kane, who here recounts the dramatic events that forever fractured the lives of the Frye family as well as her own. The murder of Betty Frye goes unpunished for decades. Kane, ex-wife of Betty's son Doug, finally decides to tell her story by fictionalizing the events she witnessed as well as those about which she simply speculated. The result is the novel Quiet Time . She shortly finds out, however, that fiction can oftentimes accurately mirror reality… In her new true-crime non-fiction, T rue Crime Redux , Kane artfully describes the chain of events that followed the publication of her novel and brings a forgotten cold case back to life. She dives deep into the inner-workings of modern crime and punishment through the retelling of events she played an involuntary role in. This strikingly transparent report of a brutal homicide engulfs readers from the very first line. True Crime Redux is thus a perfect pick for true-crime readers looking for a compelling, true story that leaves no stones unturned. What's Unique About This Book *2023 is the 50th anniversary of the murder and the aborted murder prosecution * Can't-put-it-down story of trauma and forensics delivered in propulsive bursts, with a knock-out blow of an ending. * Author holds nothing back about her role in Betty's murder and how it shaped (one might say warped) her life. In promoting its predecessor on podcasts, her transparency and brutal candor were the number one thing that impressed podcasters. * Saga of an American family plagued by mental illness and struggling to adjust to the demands of a rapidly changing world, and what happens when an outsider enters the scene. * Personal tale of Effect of a murder on a normal college girl who felt responsible for it, and the lengths to which she (as an amateur sleuth) went to get answers. A story about finding meaning in the darkness of her past and a reason to move on with her life. * A raw look at the criminal justice system from the vantage point of a lawyer with the shoe suddenly on the other foot, thrust into the quicksand of being a witness in a cold case investigation and prosecution. * Art imitating life imitating How a true crime inspired a fictional novel which in turn catalyzed the opening of a real-life prosecution of a stone-cold killer. * Award-winning author (Bantam, Scribner, Pocket) with an outside publicist who's published many magazine pieces, and appeared on podcasts, TV shows, etc. to promote her books.
- GenresTrue CrimeMystery
278 pages, Hardcover
Published May 2, 2023
8 people are currently reading
95 people want to read
About the author
Stephanie Kane
19 books17 followersStephanie Kane is a lawyer and award-winning author of seven crime novels. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she came to Colorado as a freshman at CU. A second-degree black belt, she owned and ran a karate studio in Boulder. After becoming a corporate partner at a top Denver law firm, she quit to do criminal defense work. She lives in Denver with her husband and two black cats.
Stephanie’s legal thrillers starring defense lawyer Jackie Flowers have won the Colorado Book Award for Mystery and two Colorado Authors League Awards for Genre Fiction. She belongs to Mystery Writers of America, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and the Colorado Authors League.
Stephanie’s legal thrillers starring defense lawyer Jackie Flowers have won the Colorado Book Award for Mystery and two Colorado Authors League Awards for Genre Fiction. She belongs to Mystery Writers of America, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and the Colorado Authors League.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
July 30, 2025
A really interesting, chilling story, written as a series of vignettes. Unlike any true crime book I’ve read before.
September 30, 2023
True Crime Redux is the true crime story of Ms. Kane’s Mother-in-law-to- be in 1973. The book is fascinating and is laid out similar to a law file or dossier.
She begins by telling of her last conversation in June of 1973, with Elizabeth (Betty) Frye, a 45 year old housewife. Betty had been against her son’s engagement to the author upon religious differences, but during that phone call she seemed to have reconciled herself to the impending marriage. Two hours later, Betty was dead, murdered. Beaten to death, but by whom?
I don’t do spoilers as you all well know and so I will say this…True Crime Redux is one of the top ten most fascinating True Crime novels I have read in decades. The Monster in this book was cold, calculating, abusive and cunning. You will not want to miss this one True Crime Dragons!!
It’s sold where your favorite True Crime is available. Get it now, it’s going to be too cold to go outside soon. You will definitely be missing a great true crime story if you don’t.
She begins by telling of her last conversation in June of 1973, with Elizabeth (Betty) Frye, a 45 year old housewife. Betty had been against her son’s engagement to the author upon religious differences, but during that phone call she seemed to have reconciled herself to the impending marriage. Two hours later, Betty was dead, murdered. Beaten to death, but by whom?
I don’t do spoilers as you all well know and so I will say this…True Crime Redux is one of the top ten most fascinating True Crime novels I have read in decades. The Monster in this book was cold, calculating, abusive and cunning. You will not want to miss this one True Crime Dragons!!
It’s sold where your favorite True Crime is available. Get it now, it’s going to be too cold to go outside soon. You will definitely be missing a great true crime story if you don’t.
May 2, 2023
If you put the story of True Crime Redux in a novel, they wouldn’t believe you. Editors would shake their heads. Too implausible. Nobody’s going to believe it.
That’s in part because a novel drives the mind-blowing real-world events that lead to the wheels of justice getting back on track in the case of a long-dormant, unsolved murder of a suburban housewife in 1973.
What’s hard to fathom is the author of the novel that reignites the case—a novel that took decades to germinate, write and find publication—came within two weeks of becoming the murder victim’s daughter-in-law. The morning Betty Frye was killed, Stephanie Kane talked to her on the phone. Later that day, Kane saw Betty Frye’s killer. Later that day, she was dead.
Certainly a galvanizing moment. Certainly a day you’re never going to forget. Especially, in part, because the case, at the time, wasn’t closed. Betty’s husband Duane was charged but the charges were later mysteriously dropped.
Care for another wrinkle on the emotional landscape? Young Stephanie thought her arrival on the scene as an outsider forming a new family with the Fryes’ son played a role in the motive for the killing.
About twenty years later, an older Stephanie Kane decides to write a mystery. When Stephanie Kane landed a publisher, the editors were wary. They asked for a series of changes to make sure that no reader would think Stephanie’s novel clung tightly to the reality she witnessed. The editors required Stephanie to move the timeline up ten years. Stephanie even switched her author surname to that of her second husband.
Sure, there were some rough similarities in the book that became Quiet Time to the events young Stephanie Shafer witnessed, but by the time it was published it had been 30 years since the murder and, well, it was fiction. (A line from the book’s description: “Sari Siegel is engaged to Tim Scott when his mother is found murdered. Sari barely knows the Scotts, but even she can sense the terrible secrets that seethe below the surface.”)
Quiet Time came out one week after 9/11. As Kane has said in interviews, “I was done with Quiet Time, but it wasn’t done with me.”
That’s because the sister of Duane Frye watched a rerun of a late-night defunct book show on public television that included an interview with Kane. And that sister, then 78 years old, relayed that Duane Frye had confessed to the murder. That opened a cold case and, suddenly, Quiet Time was in the crosshairs of the legal defense team. Why? Because Duane Frye’s lawyers tried to prove it was factual lies instead of fiction and subpoenaed all of Kane’s notes, correspondence and some 20 drafts of the novel under the theory that Kane and Duane’s sister had fabricated the confession in order to sell more books.
“My drafts, etc. were eventually protected, but the subpoena made me question what I’d done to real people to exorcise my own ghosts. I’d published three legal thrillers since Quiet Time, but the threat of having my creative processes scrutinized paralyzed me. For the eight years the case was in court, I wrote not a word,” Kane writes in the introduction to True Crime Redux.
Can you imagine being Stephanie Kane, back in court with Duane Frye staring you down?
Well, that brings us to True Crime Redux, Kane’s sterling account of how the real world inspired fiction that altered events in, yes, the real world.
True Crime Redux deconstructs these improbable events into 70 nugget-size chapters within 13 sections—Preface, 1973, The Scene, Statements, Collateral Damage, The Right Man, The Right Woman, 2005, The Cold Case, The Family, The Courtroom, Shooting the Survivors, and Coda. The book takes a kaleidoscopic look from all angles, breaking down events that spanned more than 40 years into manageable nuggets. Kane comes at the story with a cool kind of distance, but confronts her own emotions and role, as well, when needed.
In fact, True Crime Redux doesn’t lend itself to easy quotes, but here’s a sample of Kane’s matter-of-fact and engaging style.
“I met Doug at a karate studio in Boulder, Colorado. I’d applied to CU because it was 2000 miles from Brooklyn. But the moment the plane landed, I was in over my head. The dry wind, blazing sky, and strapping kids playing frisbee on a campus backed by mountain peaks felt unreal, like a Technicolor movie. I wandered into a karate studio and watched my future husband, Doug, throwing one perfect kick after another. With his crisp white gi and sun-streaked hair, he embodied everything foreign and exotic about Colorado. We moved in together that summer. And that fall he brought me home to meet his parents.”
There are twists and turns in the case around the original 1973 murder investigation, there are dramatic ebbs and flows as the cold case is pursued starting in 2005. The wheels of justice spin and sputter. It’s easy to see why all the legal grinding took its toll on Kane’s creative work.
In writing True Crime Redux, Kane sees her role in it but also tries to view the tale as a dispassionate outsider, too. It’s a tall order, but Kane pulls it off looking hard at all the evidence and thinking about all the ways one vicious crime gets distorted by time, by the fallibility of memory, and by the involvement of human beings who have a “gnawing need for answers.”
There are lots of quotes out there about comparing fiction and reality, but they all stem from Lord Byron’s assertion: “Truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.” In the case of True Crime Redux, “truth” needed a boost from fiction but Lord Byron sure wasn’t wrong.
That’s in part because a novel drives the mind-blowing real-world events that lead to the wheels of justice getting back on track in the case of a long-dormant, unsolved murder of a suburban housewife in 1973.
What’s hard to fathom is the author of the novel that reignites the case—a novel that took decades to germinate, write and find publication—came within two weeks of becoming the murder victim’s daughter-in-law. The morning Betty Frye was killed, Stephanie Kane talked to her on the phone. Later that day, Kane saw Betty Frye’s killer. Later that day, she was dead.
Certainly a galvanizing moment. Certainly a day you’re never going to forget. Especially, in part, because the case, at the time, wasn’t closed. Betty’s husband Duane was charged but the charges were later mysteriously dropped.
Care for another wrinkle on the emotional landscape? Young Stephanie thought her arrival on the scene as an outsider forming a new family with the Fryes’ son played a role in the motive for the killing.
About twenty years later, an older Stephanie Kane decides to write a mystery. When Stephanie Kane landed a publisher, the editors were wary. They asked for a series of changes to make sure that no reader would think Stephanie’s novel clung tightly to the reality she witnessed. The editors required Stephanie to move the timeline up ten years. Stephanie even switched her author surname to that of her second husband.
Sure, there were some rough similarities in the book that became Quiet Time to the events young Stephanie Shafer witnessed, but by the time it was published it had been 30 years since the murder and, well, it was fiction. (A line from the book’s description: “Sari Siegel is engaged to Tim Scott when his mother is found murdered. Sari barely knows the Scotts, but even she can sense the terrible secrets that seethe below the surface.”)
Quiet Time came out one week after 9/11. As Kane has said in interviews, “I was done with Quiet Time, but it wasn’t done with me.”
That’s because the sister of Duane Frye watched a rerun of a late-night defunct book show on public television that included an interview with Kane. And that sister, then 78 years old, relayed that Duane Frye had confessed to the murder. That opened a cold case and, suddenly, Quiet Time was in the crosshairs of the legal defense team. Why? Because Duane Frye’s lawyers tried to prove it was factual lies instead of fiction and subpoenaed all of Kane’s notes, correspondence and some 20 drafts of the novel under the theory that Kane and Duane’s sister had fabricated the confession in order to sell more books.
“My drafts, etc. were eventually protected, but the subpoena made me question what I’d done to real people to exorcise my own ghosts. I’d published three legal thrillers since Quiet Time, but the threat of having my creative processes scrutinized paralyzed me. For the eight years the case was in court, I wrote not a word,” Kane writes in the introduction to True Crime Redux.
Can you imagine being Stephanie Kane, back in court with Duane Frye staring you down?
Well, that brings us to True Crime Redux, Kane’s sterling account of how the real world inspired fiction that altered events in, yes, the real world.
True Crime Redux deconstructs these improbable events into 70 nugget-size chapters within 13 sections—Preface, 1973, The Scene, Statements, Collateral Damage, The Right Man, The Right Woman, 2005, The Cold Case, The Family, The Courtroom, Shooting the Survivors, and Coda. The book takes a kaleidoscopic look from all angles, breaking down events that spanned more than 40 years into manageable nuggets. Kane comes at the story with a cool kind of distance, but confronts her own emotions and role, as well, when needed.
In fact, True Crime Redux doesn’t lend itself to easy quotes, but here’s a sample of Kane’s matter-of-fact and engaging style.
“I met Doug at a karate studio in Boulder, Colorado. I’d applied to CU because it was 2000 miles from Brooklyn. But the moment the plane landed, I was in over my head. The dry wind, blazing sky, and strapping kids playing frisbee on a campus backed by mountain peaks felt unreal, like a Technicolor movie. I wandered into a karate studio and watched my future husband, Doug, throwing one perfect kick after another. With his crisp white gi and sun-streaked hair, he embodied everything foreign and exotic about Colorado. We moved in together that summer. And that fall he brought me home to meet his parents.”
There are twists and turns in the case around the original 1973 murder investigation, there are dramatic ebbs and flows as the cold case is pursued starting in 2005. The wheels of justice spin and sputter. It’s easy to see why all the legal grinding took its toll on Kane’s creative work.
In writing True Crime Redux, Kane sees her role in it but also tries to view the tale as a dispassionate outsider, too. It’s a tall order, but Kane pulls it off looking hard at all the evidence and thinking about all the ways one vicious crime gets distorted by time, by the fallibility of memory, and by the involvement of human beings who have a “gnawing need for answers.”
There are lots of quotes out there about comparing fiction and reality, but they all stem from Lord Byron’s assertion: “Truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.” In the case of True Crime Redux, “truth” needed a boost from fiction but Lord Byron sure wasn’t wrong.
July 5, 2023
I learned about the history of this cold case during my representation of Barbara Frye before the Arapahoe County Grand Jury in advance of murder charges being refiled against her husband Duane in 2007. That experience was revisited as I read the unvarnished facts and felt the searing emotions expressed in this superbly-written book. I read True Crime Redux during an afternoon because I couldn’t put the book down. Having lived this true-crime story for the 40-years-plus of its life, Stephanie Kane shares its raw details and her travails during it in such vivid and clear fashion that the reader feels like a welcomed traveler and confidant during the journey. Stephanie reduces complex and frequently misunderstood legal principles to their basic simplicity to enable the reader to understand the vagaries of solving cold cases and why some murder cases never reach finality even though reasonable minds may believe they know the identity of the killer. We sometimes wonder why people are resolved to uncover the true facts of a cold case; Stephanie convincingly tells us why.
David Savitz
Author, Just in the Nick of Time
David Savitz
Author, Just in the Nick of Time
Read
July 17, 2023did not enjoy this book. it was more of a biography about the Author.
May 2, 2023
Do you enjoy reading about true crime cases?
Then you'll love this one! Now available from Stephanie Kane Author , True Crime Redux goes back through the day of her soon to be mother in law's murder and the 50 years following the event. It seems easy enough who did it, but even after that long no one was ever convicted of the crime.
Stephanie does an amazing job weaving each chapter together in a way that let's you follow along in the case as if it's playing out in real time. You don't have to be familiar with it at all to keep up with everything she lays out. Bizarre and strange events that surround the day, the alibi and the individuals will leave you with the sense of being there during the investigation.
An amazing and chilling read about how one family was torn apart and everyone knew who did it, but no one would say anything...
Then you'll love this one! Now available from Stephanie Kane Author , True Crime Redux goes back through the day of her soon to be mother in law's murder and the 50 years following the event. It seems easy enough who did it, but even after that long no one was ever convicted of the crime.
Stephanie does an amazing job weaving each chapter together in a way that let's you follow along in the case as if it's playing out in real time. You don't have to be familiar with it at all to keep up with everything she lays out. Bizarre and strange events that surround the day, the alibi and the individuals will leave you with the sense of being there during the investigation.
An amazing and chilling read about how one family was torn apart and everyone knew who did it, but no one would say anything...
May 30, 2023
Given to me by my dad. Tells the story of the death of my Grandma Jean's sister Betty from the perspective of Betty's daughter in law. Focuses on the two investigations of Betty's husband, 25 years apart, that never went to trial.
August 23, 2023
Duane Frye never read fiction. He thought it was a waste of time. His favorite author was Ayn Rand. Six months after his wife's murder he married a neighbor. He also collected his dead spouse's life insurance. It sounds like a slam-dunk conviction.
The author, Stephanie Kane was engaged to be married to Duane and Betty's son Doug within a few weeks. The bride-to-be is Jewish and the Catholic future mother-in-law was not thrilled with the pairing. She was furious that Stephanie had aborted her grandchild and hell would be her punishment. Even stranger was the fact that Duane did not like Catholics but he had married one, and like Ayn Rand, he was an atheist.
Betty was bludgeoned to death, possibly with a golf club and her husband gave a detailed alibi which was filled with holes. A grand jury failed to indict him and thirty-three years later the case was reopened.
Stephanie was by then a lawyer and she had divorced Doug many years earlier. He had become a doctor. She wrote a novel based on the case and was called as a witness at a hearing. Ironically, a former law partner represented Duane Frye.
Like Mr. Frye, I now only read non-fiction, predominantly true crime and this one is a very good one with an unseen conclusion.
The author, Stephanie Kane was engaged to be married to Duane and Betty's son Doug within a few weeks. The bride-to-be is Jewish and the Catholic future mother-in-law was not thrilled with the pairing. She was furious that Stephanie had aborted her grandchild and hell would be her punishment. Even stranger was the fact that Duane did not like Catholics but he had married one, and like Ayn Rand, he was an atheist.
Betty was bludgeoned to death, possibly with a golf club and her husband gave a detailed alibi which was filled with holes. A grand jury failed to indict him and thirty-three years later the case was reopened.
Stephanie was by then a lawyer and she had divorced Doug many years earlier. He had become a doctor. She wrote a novel based on the case and was called as a witness at a hearing. Ironically, a former law partner represented Duane Frye.
Like Mr. Frye, I now only read non-fiction, predominantly true crime and this one is a very good one with an unseen conclusion.
August 11, 2023
This isn't my usual genre of book, but this one really caught my attention. The idea of a book about a murder being fictional and then prompting the author to write about the actual crime, the cold case, the details that they knew was something that I couldn't pass up!
Her writing style was unique in the fact that she broke things down and put them in a way that anyone could understand, not get bored with and become engaged with. The reader becomes instantly engrossed in the story, the mystery, the who did it aspect of the case and they want to know who committed the murder. The author grabs the reader's attention from the very first page and never lets it go.
The court case, the documents, the witnesses, the reader becomes involved in a way that they never thought that they would. They feel like they are part of the case and want to see justice. An amazing read and one that I can't recommend enough. Perhaps this is the cold case crime solving method of the future! Don't hesitate to add this one to your TBR list and move it to the top!
Her writing style was unique in the fact that she broke things down and put them in a way that anyone could understand, not get bored with and become engaged with. The reader becomes instantly engrossed in the story, the mystery, the who did it aspect of the case and they want to know who committed the murder. The author grabs the reader's attention from the very first page and never lets it go.
The court case, the documents, the witnesses, the reader becomes involved in a way that they never thought that they would. They feel like they are part of the case and want to see justice. An amazing read and one that I can't recommend enough. Perhaps this is the cold case crime solving method of the future! Don't hesitate to add this one to your TBR list and move it to the top!
September 27, 2024
This was an incredibly gripping read. The author was getting ready to marry into a family when her future mother in law was brutally murdered. The main suspect was the husband, the author’s father in law. The book takes a look at the trauma of being an outside family member during a time of tragedy and grief and how it affects all members differently. As well she goes through the two trials of the father, who ultimately gets away with murder, if you believe he did it, which the author definitely does. I took a star off as there were some parts of the book where it was rough to read, the timeline was confusing, or how it was written was just not making sense.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 24, 2023
I was a good true crime rehash, kind of felt like a 20/20 or dateline episode, based on what the author went through and with a twist that she had previously write a novel loosely based on it by the direction of the publisher.
August 21, 2023
I’m being generous with a 2 rating. The format was unusual with definitions and quotes at the beginning of each of the short chapters which helped add pages to the book. The author made it way too much about herself. Not a great true crime book for sure.
March 23, 2023
I don't find it funny
August 6, 2023
This irritates me to no end. There is no resolution to Betty’s murder. UGH
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 23, 2023
first book i've dropped this year? i cannot believe this was published by an actual legitimate publisher. it was unbearable to even look at. i made it to chapter 3, also known as page 16
March 10, 2025
Colorado true crime story. Recognized some attorney names. Kinda interesting.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews