Frankie

A Unique Whodunit. Experts baffled as many people die in university town. Cause of death: unknown. Frankie is a look into the future of AI. The smarter the robots, the more likely that strange, unanticipated things will happen. Raymond Mason, AI genius, rarely brings his work home. Then late one afternoon he brings his latest, most humanlike creation. Raymond knows his wife will be charmed. No way! Julia Mason feels competitive and threatened. For one thing, Raymond touches Frankie in a romantic way. Julia is hostile and drinks too much. She passes out as Professor Mason runs upstairs to find a gun. An hour later Julia wakes to find her husband dead and Frankie gone. Julia, semi-hysterical, races into the night to find the missing masterpiece. Simon, a grad-school drug dealer, falls in love with Frankie. He realizes he can build a cult around this spiritually evolved woman. First, he has to hide her. For different reasons, many people search frantically for Frankie. Meanwhile, more unexplained deaths are reported. Panic sweeps the state of New Jersey. Some experts think that humanity is dealing with an alien invasion. Dr. Jamison, the pathologist, notes that he has never seen so many beautiful corpses. ------ Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, poet, artist, and education reformer. He wrote his first article about robots around 1990. He was particularly curious about how machines and people would interact in the future. This long-time interest evolved into Frankie. An Honors Graduate of Princeton in English Literature, Price served two years in the Army and then moved to Manhattan to be a writer and art director. Price is the author of the erotic thriller Too Easy (still in print from Simon & Schuster). This novel was hailed by Kinky Friedman as "the unwed mother of all page-turners" and translated into German, French, and Dutch. He also wrote the experimental novel American Dreams. He believes that his Theoryland is among best long poems in contemporary American lit. Price has more than 500 education articles on the Internet. His book Saving K-12 is the go-to guide for understanding what happened to our public schools. He expects to publish Silly and Serious, a book of poems for children, in 2025.