ACADEMICS | Highlights of Professor Arthur Gross Schaefer’s resume may sound like the start of a joke — an accountant, a lawyer, a professor, and a rabbi — but they help to explain how the co-chair of LMU’s department of marketing and business law has also become an insightful and successful author of a growing murder-mystery series.
“The Rabbi Wore a Fedora” is the second installment of The Rabbi Daniels Mysteries, a series of novels following California rabbi and lawyer Elijah Daniels. As with Gross-Schaefer’s first novel, “The Rabbi Wore Moccasins,” readers are taken on a journey as Rabbi Daniels finds himself in a more-than-sticky situation.
A discussion and book signing with the author will be held this coming Wednesday, Feb. 7. The event will take place from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the Hilton Center for Business, Room 300. Register here to attend this free event. Books will be available for purchase.
In the new novel, after some hesitation Daniels decides to take a tour of Germany, but his historically conditioned anxiety about anti-Semitism soon pales in comparison to the rabbi’s present problems. An Arab woman has been murdered in the institute Daniels is staying at, and crime-scene evidence makes him a prime suspect. Throw in a German police kommissar bent on proving the rabbi’s guilt, major plot twists as Daniels races the clock to find clues, add spiritual and historical themes and you have an intense and intriguing page turner.
Though often busy with classes on ethics, spirituality, business law, and more, Gross Schaefer also belongs to several professional and religious groups, frequently consulting or giving lectures both in- and out-of-state. His family established the Avi Schaefer Fund in 2010 in honor of his late son, whose memory and life message inspired LMU’s Interfaith Peace Garden. Somehow, Gross Schaefer still manages to find time for thriller writing,
Political science major Dylan Ramos is a junior, and a contributor to LMU This Week.
