A Book and a Chat with Charles Rosenberg

The name Charles Rosenberg might well not mean anything to you, but you might well have seen some of his work on television. “Death on a High Floor” is his first novel, but you might well have heard himon TV and radio.

Charles is not a stranger to crime, nor for that fact drama. He was half of the “on-air” legal analysts for E! Entertainment Television's live coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial, he also provided commentary for E!'s coverage of the Simpson civil trial. This after writing a book “The Trial of O.J. Simpson: How to Watch the Trial and Understand What’s Really Going On”.

Also he has been the credited legal script consultant to the popular prime time television shows Boston Legal, L.A. Law, The Practice and Showtime Channel's The Paper Chase.

With all this plus his own background of practicing and teaching about law both in the US and Europe, it’s not surprising that his debut book “Death on a High Floor” is a classic legal thriller.

As we learned during the show, Charles did start writing a novel but that never was completed (up to now anyway) though one of the characters from that first draft does appear in “Death on a High Floor”

About Death on a High Floor:

On the surface, Death on a High Floor is a classic legal thriller, complete with tense courtroom scenes. As the novel opens, Simon Rafer, the managing partner of Marbury Marfan, a glitzy, L.A.-based international law firm of more than a thousand lawyers, lies dead in the firm's swank 85th floor reception area. An ornate Swiss dagger protrudes from his back.


Simon, it turns out, had recently paid $500,000 for the ancient world's most infamous coin, the EID MAR denarius, minted by Brutus to commemorate his assassination of Julius Caesar. On the back of the coin appear double daggers, the helmet of liberty and the Latin words EID MAR (Ides of March). The police quickly conclude that Simon was killed in a dispute with the seller over the authenticity of the coin. The question, "Real or fake?" echoes through the novel.

Robert Tarza is a sixty-something senior partner at Marbury Marfan. He had recently sold the coin to Simon and is instantly suspected of being the killer. Robert is proper, self-contained and sardonic but has lived his entire professional life, literally and metaphorically, on the "high floors." He is utterly unprepared to deal with being accused of murder, let alone prepared to deal with the police, the ravenous media, and the generally unsupportive reactions of those he had thought of as his close friends. The title of the book, Death on a High Floor, is thus simultaneously a description of both the physical place where Simon Rafer was murdered and the metaphorical place where Robert's psychological death spiral begins, as he falls from highly respected attorney to common criminal. On a deeper level, Robert's fall from grace is what the novel is really about, and I hope reader's will take from it not only a better understanding of how criminal procedure really works, but an appreciation for what it is like, emotionally, to be falsely accused.

While a second separate book is already underway, there is also a promise of a follow up the “Death on a High Floor".

As one reviewer put it…

Death on a High Floor" is a great book. The suspense starts on page 1 and continues until the very end. Once I began reading it, I could not put it down. I finished it in two days only because I had to go to work. Otherwise, I probably would have read it all in one sitting. I'm looking forward to Rosenberg's next book!

So listen now and share an interesting, and entertaining show as I chat with my special guest today on A Book and a Chat with Charles Rosenberg

Barry

Direct link to the show
A Book and a Chat with Charles Rosenberg

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You can find out more about my guest and their books at:
"Charles Rosenberg - Death on a High Floor"

Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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