title: Any Resemblance to Actual Persons: A Novel
author:  Kevin Allardice 
description: Community college adjunct English professor Paul McWeeney is outraged when he learns that his ditzy sister, Edie, is about to publish a book identifying their late father, TV screenwriter George McWeeney, as the murderer of Elizabeth Short, the iconic Black Dahlia, whose unsolved 1947 murder in Los Angeles spawned books and films. Edie credits her therapist with helping her recover repressed childhood memories that implicate her father. Paul resolves to use a two-week break between school terms to write a cease and desist letter to the publisher. What begins as a project filled with Olympian self-regard becomes an obsession that dives deep into the weeds of the Dahlia murder and also chronicles the dissolution of Pauls so-called life. Allardices first novel attempts many things as both crime story and character study and often succeeds. Its quite a funny book, by turns broad and sly, and occasionally, its shocking, as when Paul uses Ritalin to face grading students assignments and later upgrades to cocaine for energy and clarity. Through it all, though, we empathize with his travail. --Thomas Gaughan
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  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
  
  
  
  
  
  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
  the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
  resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely
  coincidental.
  
  
  
  
  
  Text copyright © 2011 by Christopher Paolini  
  
  
  Jacket art copyright © 2011 by John Jude Palencar  
  
  
  Illustrations on endpapers, [this
  page](CR%21HAK46H0K7N50DDRJ0JJN771NYTWR_split_001.html#filepos399), [this
  page](CR%21HAK46H0K7N50DDRJ0JJN771NYTWR_split_002.html#filepos851) copyright ©
  2002 by Christopher Paolini
  
  
  
  
  
  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an
  imprint of  
  
  
  Random House Children’s Books, a divisi