Jessica shares the plot of her new book, in which a law student (Shaun Cassidy) seeks the killer of an arrogant music professor with many enemies amidst the backdrop of a fiery campus protest.
Tropes:
- Actor Allusion: Shaun Cassidy plays a young college student who turns Amateur Sleuth to solve a murder, a callback to his biggest role of Joe Hardy in the The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries. Not to mention his character's named "Chad Singer"... a reference to Shaun's pop music career.
- Amateur Sleuth: Chad Singer, assisted by his girlfriend Jenny, works to Clear Their Name of their friend Michael.
- Cynic–Idealist Duo: Chad is a self-proclaimed cynic who plans to become a corporate laywer and thinks public defenders are wasting their time (although he's disheartened to realise the actual public defender is more cynical than he is). Jenny is studying to be a social worker, attends student demonstrations against the company he hopes to work for, and disagrees with his attitude in a bantering way.
- Clear Their Name: Chad has to clear Michael's name as his friend was inconveniently caught at the murder scene by a security guard, and had a beef with the plagiarizing professor. The fact that Michael had been seen waving the tuning fork around while arguing with the professor previously didn't exactly help.
- Family of Choice: Chad mentions that he's the closest thing Michael has to family.
- Improbable Weapon User: The professor's wife stabs him with a tuning fork. The ends of a tuning fork are blunt, by the way, which means she must be incredibly strong or ridiculously angry.
- It Began with a Twist of Fate: The Asshole Victim was a music professor at a California university, and had spent years plagiarizing and selling the works of various students under a pseudonym as a side hustle. The whole matter blows up because his latest 'source' went to a bar where the piano player got an advance copy of the score for a new Broadway show... and Michael recognizes the music, since he wrote it.
- Plagiarism in Fiction: Stoneham stole the music he sold to Hellinger from Michael. Since he also stole the lyrics—from the poet Reagan—and left Papasian's name off of a book they cowrote, this seems to be a pattern with him.
- Sequel Hook: In-universe. At the end of the episode, Jessica talks about already having an idea for a sequel also starring Chad and Jenny, starting as a road trip gone wrong. However, the episode never had a sequel.
- Show Within a Show: The case is a dramatization of Jessica's still-in-galley novel.
- Who Murdered the Asshole: Music Professor Tyler Stoneham, who's been stealing his student's compositions for years and selling them under a pseudonym and has taken solo credit for the music dictionary he wrote with his assistant, as well as cheating on his wife, gets a tuning fork straight though the sternum.
- Worst News Judgment Ever: Stoneham's murder makes the front page. Justified in that it is a college town.
