UKULELE OF DEATH

Copperman launches yet another new franchise with perhaps his most offbeat protagonist to date.

How could the creator of a sleuth who communes with ghosts, a problem-solver on the autism spectrum, and an animal talent agent with a knack for detection push the envelope even further? By creating a detective who is herself created. Fran Stein learned at a young age that she and her brother, Ken, were made in a lab by her mother, a professor of genetics and biology who taught at Rutgers under the alias Olivia Grey, and her husband, a neurologist known to the world as Brandon Wilder. The Grey-Wilders have long since disappeared, leaving Fran and Ken to be raised by their “Aunt Margie,” actually a journalist who was working on a story about the brilliant scientists when they decamped for parts unknown and who then sacrificed her career to raise Fran and Ken. When she grew up, Fran naturally became a private eye specializing in helping adults find their long-lost parents and pressured chronically underemployed Ken into joining her. Their latest client, Evelyn Bannister, wants the pair to find a Gibson Poinsettia ukulele that she claims will lead to her birth father, an avid collector. The siblings think her story stinks like week-old sushi but play along to see what her game really is. Evelyn’s murder pushes Fran to keep going, and pursuing the homicide leads her into a perplexing relationship with 5-foot-8 Det. Richard Mankiewicz. (Like most lab-created humans, Fran is on the statuesque side.) The solution is likely to strain the credulity of even die-hard Copperman fans, but what his shaggy dog story lacks in verisimilitude, it makes up in commitment to its wacky premise.

What next?