Sheerluck, Sam Merriman’s pet beagle, appears in every book. He’s the one in the center, seen here at an early age.
The Merriman Institute Mystery Series
The Case of the Single-sided Razor Blade
(MS complete)
Over the span of sixty years from the Fifties to now, grandfather, son and grandson Merriman, a wealthy Boston Brahmin family, solve a murder that happened in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1956 during Carnaval, expose fraud, neutralize criminal operations, and save lives. Family sagas interrelate and play out against the larger conflicts of the times, taking us from hot Carnaval in the Fifties in Rio, where ugly Americans lived high, to the cool Brahmin brownstones of Boston's Back Bay today, where the Merriman Institute’s cyber-sleuths detect old crimes and foil current villainy.
The Case of the Deadly Mummy
(MS complete)
In 1986, the director of a prominent Boston museum calls on his friend Samuel Merriman: Would Samuel and his son Colby agree to investigate strange events in the Museum? Colby bumps up against but cannot pin down two underworlds hidden in the Museum’s operations: A cocaine distribution center and a trio of Trustees who target hot, new tech companies for hostile takeovers. The Museum borrows an ancient mummy sarcophagus to enhance its blockbuster exhibition Osiris in the Underworld. When it is opened thirty years later, it contains a corpse—not a mummy— a tuxedoed guest rotted away except for his polyester bowtie and cummerbund. The corpse gives Colby and the Institute incentive and new evidence to reopen the case.
The Case of the Toxic Tear Gas
(MS complete)
There were many tear gas victims that night in 1970 after the riots in Harvard Square. One of the Jane Does was different. She was dead, and tear gas is not normally toxic. Using the latest in chemical and DNA analysis, and the input of a team of Merriman Fellows expert in political dissent, cultural history, fashion and material science, Colby Merriman and his daughter Sheila identify the murderer. In 1970, Colby was fresh out of college and living in the midst of the revolution in arts and politics, all under the pressure of the Vietnam War and the draft. The pressure could drive some young hippies crazy. It could be murder.
The Case of the Shocking Frankenstein
(Concept only)
Against the background of rampant campus unrest, the Living Theater came to Yale New Haven in the fall of 1968 to perform their controversial Frankenstein and Paradise Now. At the height of the Vietnam protests, it was like tossing a lit Molotov cocktail into a pile of dry autumn leaves. There was incitement to revolution. There was nudity. There were arrests. And one night, there was murder when the metal scaffolding of the Frankenstein set electrocuted a troubled campus radical. Colby Merriman was there and knew the victim. Only recently, however, did the Merriman Institute finally receive the transcripts of the FBI’s surveillance of the Living Theater, and what Colby discovers they reveal about the murder that night, and why.
More concepts available on request