Books

Retired Judge Jim Randall sits shoulder-to-shoulder on the Lechmere bus with a young man who is screaming at his mother over his speaker phone, “I hate you! I hate you! You’ll never see me again!” A short time later, the young man’s battered and broken body is found in the water beneath Boston’s Tobin Bridge. Unable to get the young man’s...

After twenty-one years as a judge on the Massachusetts Superior Court, Jim Randall retires and uses his knowledge of the criminal mind to solve crimes. In Judge Randall and the Identical Twin, a theft from the Harvard Art Museum leads Jim to the loneliest man he has ever met. Jim questions his objectivity after he finds himself identifying with...

Connie Hawkins, a law student Pat Knowles mentored, goes missing with her boyfriend, Crankshaft, who is the front man of a heavy metal band. Jim Randall hates the pile driver beat of heavy metal but as he searches for Connie, finds himself immersed in its dark world.

To honor a classmate who is dying, retired judge Jim Randall overcomes his aversion to reunions and attends his law school reunion. While the classmate is on stage being honored, he dies in his wheelchair. A few days later, the classmate’s hated business rival also dies. Both deaths are attributed to natural causes, but Judge Randall suspects...

Judge Jim Randall is approached in The Long Gone - a Cambridge coffee house that, in retirement, has become Jim’s hangout - by the wife of a man he sentenced to life for murder many years ago. She implores Jim to support her husband’s petition for parole, which he tells her he cannot do, but the case was Jim’s first murder trial as a judge, and...

Newly retired Judge Jim Randall is invited to be on a panel at the Harvard Divinity School with Melvin Watson, a fiery evangelical preacher, and Sara Vincent, an MIT professor of philosophy. During the panel discussion, Melvin Watson loses his temper and assaults Judge Randall, an incident which goes viral on social media. When Melvin Watson is...

Fake Smiles is a graceful, moving and reflective memoir of a contentious fatherson relationship set against the backdrop of the Eisenhower and Nixon eras. The father–William P. Rogers–was attorney general in the Eisenhower administration and secretary of state in the Nixon administration, a period of dramatic change from post-war stability to...