THE AUTHOR:  Larry Karp

Larry Karp grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, reading novels during math class, and spending much of his free time pounding away at an old Royal manual.  Those early novels never quite worked out, but at the age of eight, Larry did get into print via a self-written, self-published, self-distributed four-page neighborhood newspaper which featured a serialized detective story, "Richard Richard, Private Dick."

Larry attended Rutgers University and NYU Medical School, then had post-degree training in New York, Baltimore, San Antonio and Seattle, finally becoming certified in Obstetrics and Medical Genetics.  He worked as a specialist in complicated pregnancy care for 25 years, founding the Prenatal Diagnosis Center at the University of Washington, and Swedish Medical Center's Department of Perinatal Medicine.  Residents in the Family Practice Programs at both Swedish and Providence Hospitals named him Teacher of the Year.

All that time, nights and weekends, Larry kept writing.  Erin, his daughter, remembers falling asleep to the clack of the Royal in the room across the hall.  Since his medical work didn't allow for the sustained concentration he needed to carry off a novel, he wrote newspaper and magazine articles on a wide range of subjects, as well as a monthly column of commentary for The American Journal of Medical Genetics.  He also wrote three nonfiction books, one on life as a med student and intern at New York's Bellevue Hospital, another about antique music boxes, and the third on the newly-merging field of genetic engineering (of which one text book author wrote, "Of the many recent books on genetic engineering, the only one that...carefully delineates the limits of current knowledge and tries to evaluate the significance of recent advances without resorting to sensationalism is by Karp").

Larry collects and restores antique music boxes, and is a regular contributor to Mechanical Music, the magazine of the Musical Box Society International.  In 1997, the Society presented him the Bowers Literary Award "for outstanding literary contributions to the field of automatic music."

By 1994, with Erin and son, Casey, out and on their own, Larry decided it might a good idea to change careers and compose some novels before he himself was decomposing.  He chose to write mysteries because the genre demands stories be well-paced and tightly-constructed, but does not preclude the possibility of presenting characters and ideas which refuse to leave the reader's mind once he or she closes the back cover of the book.  Larry set his well-received Music Box Mystery Series (The Music Box Murders, Scamming the Birdman and The Midnight Special) in present-day New York City;  for his next book, First, Do No Harm, a World-War II home-front standalone involving complex and troubling medical ethical issues, he moved back to 1943, to a fictionalized Paterson.  Then, for The Ragtime Kid, the first book of an upcoming Ragtime Mystery Trilogy, Larry ranged farther back and farther away, to Sedalia, Missouri in 1899, to explore a strange incident involving racial relations that historians have never explained.  Larry intends to expand this book into a Ragtime Mysteries Trilogy.

Larry lives in Seattle with his wife, Myra.