Tanenbaum, Robert K., (No Lesser Plea [first book in 29-volume Roger “Butch” Karp & Marlene Ciampi series, hc, Franklin Watts, 1987]) 978-0531097830 [pb, Pan Books, 1988] 978-0330303460. [Butch Karp is a non-religious, secular Jew whose Jewishness is defined by cultural roots and an unyielding moral framework. He is married to a non-Jewish woman and teaches a Bar Mitzvah class at a local synagogue (!). Issues of anti-Semitism, geopolitical friction and New York City inter-ethnic tensions all come up during the series.]
United States · Fiction author
Michael Gruber
Michael Gruber (born 1940, Brooklyn, NY, now resident in Seattle) – He worked as a US Army medic (1968-69), a restaurant chef, and a traveling roadie for rock bands. Along the way, he completed a Ph.D. in marine sciences at the U. of Miami and served as a policy analyst and speechwriter in the Jimmy Carter administration. In the mid-1980s, he entered a partnership with his law professor first cousin, Robert K. Tanenbaum, to write a series of novels featuring a Jewish New York District Attorney and his Catholic-Italian assistant D.A., who is also his wife. Tanenbaum supplied the legal details based on real cases and Gruber ghostwrote them into novels for the popular market, with the cousins splitting the proceeds 50-50. Gruber conceived the plots and character development, and did 100% of the actual writing. This arrangement lasted for the first 15 novels, spanning the years 1987–2003. The series continued through another 14 volumes after that, with different ghostwriters, but without the same degree of success of the first phase.
Among Gruber’s post-Butch Karp novels, under his own name, three feature Jewish protagonists:
Gruber, Michael, (The Book of Air and Shadows [hc, William Morrow, 2007] 978-0060874469 [pb, Harper, 2008] 978-0061456572 [Jake Mishkin is a brilliant New York intellectual property lawyer. He possesses a sharp, characteristically ironic Jewish wit and skeptical world view. The plot revolves around the search for an undiscovered Shakespeare manuscript, which attracts the dangerous interest of nefarious mobsters and treasure hunters.
Gruber, Michael, (The Good Son [hc, Henry Holt & Co., 2010] 978-0805091281 [pb, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011] 978-0312674946 [Sonia Bailey Laghari is an American-Jewish psychologist, author and pacifist. Born into a traditional Jewish family of circus performers (!), she later converts to Islam after marriage to a wealthy Pakistani man. She is later kidnapped by jihadi terrorists from a peace conference and subsequently rescued by her son, Theo, a deeply scarred ex-Delta Force soldier.
Gruber, Michael, The Return [hc, Henry Holt & Co., 2013] 978-0805091298 [pb, Corvus, 2014] 978-1848875913 [Richard Marder is a Jewish book editor, who is discreet about his background as a tough, Vietnam war veteran. Years earlier, a Mexican drug cartel murdered his late wife’s family. Marder is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, leaving him “nothing left to lose”. He embarks on a bloody, apocalyptic campaign of retribution to wreak revenge on the cartel responsible for the earlier massacre. [ChatGPT]