THE LAZARUS FILE

In the summer of 1986, the body of thirty-year-old Sherri Rasmussen was found in her condo in Southern California after what appeared to be a furious struggle. Rasmussen, a Director of Nursing at a local hospital, had been married just eight months to her husband, whom she'd met two years earlier. LAPD detectives dismissed the murder as a burglary and filed it as a cold case.

Twenty-three years later, thanks to the emergence of both DNA testing and an LA cold case unit, an intrepid lab worker discovered that the DNA of the perpetrator at the crime scene belonged to a woman, and investigators determined the killer to be none other than an art theft investigator and respected detective in the LAPD—Stephanie Lazarus. McGough, obsessed and consumed by this case for years, reconstructs the full trajectory of the crime in a thrilling, fast-paced whodunit—and even raises the possibility of a cover-up within the highest levels of the LAPD.

Matthew McGough's nonfiction writing has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and Slate. His acclaimed memoir Bat Boy: Coming of Age with the New York Yankees was the basis of “Clubhouse”, a primetime TV series on CBS. McGough's spoken word performance about his first day with the Yankees was selected to lead off the pilot episode of “The Moth Radio Hour”. McGough served as both a legal consultant and writer for NBC's Law & Order and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their two children.