A Fine and Dangerous Season

Born in Chicago, Keith Raffel has lived in Palo Alto since he was eight. As a boy growing up there, he remembers eating with his parents at JFK’s old haunts like L’Omelette, long gone, and selling soft drinks at football games at Stanford Stadium, since rebuilt. He watched as local orchards filled with cherry and apricot trees were replaced by tilt-up buildings filled with software engineers and MBAs. He founded UpShot Corporation, Silicon Valley’s first cloud-computing company, which won numerous awards. In addition to his career as an entrepreneur, Keith has been counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, a college writing instructor at Harvard, a candidate for Congress in California’s Twelfth District, a professional gambler at Bay Area horse tracks, and chief commercial officer at a DNA sequencing company. (He seems to have career ADD, doesn’t he?) An avid reader of crime fiction since picking up his first Hardy Boys mystery, Keith became a published author in 2006 with Dot Dead, which Bookreporter.com called “the most impressive mystery debut of the year.” These days he stays busy following the San Francisco Giants and writing his novels just around the block from where he grew up.