Every Past Has a Name
A staged murder, a falsified record, and a wartime secret that refuses to stay buried.
Independent fiction • Georgia
Every Past
Has a Name.
Red Clay Lantern Press is the home of K.A. LeVan and the Merritt Franklin novels—historical crime fiction about memory, evidence, loyalty, and the truths people work hardest to bury.
Available now in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover.
Merritt Franklin • Book One
Every Past Has a Name
A murder staged to look obvious. A ten-year-old war story that no longer holds together.
Georgia, 1978. When private investigator Lewis Pike is found shot and bound in an abandoned textile mill, the evidence appears to point toward Caleb Ward, a troubled Vietnam veteran with a violent past and a missing night.
GBI Special Agent Merritt Franklin sees something else: a crime scene built to make the answer look easy. Following Pike’s unfinished investigation pulls Franklin into altered records, buried wartime history, institutional loyalty, and a truth that powerful people have spent a decade keeping intact.
The Merritt Franklin series
One case opens the door.
The series begins in 1978 with a grounded homicide investigation and expands through the buried histories surrounding Merritt Franklin and his family.
The story continues
Merritt’s next investigation turns closer to home and deeper into the history his own family kept.
Research, history & publication news
The journal will collect period research, behind-the-book notes, publication updates, and selected glimpses into the series.
“The official report reads clean because I knew how to make reports read clean.”Every Past Has a Name
K.A. LeVan
History leaves evidence.
K.A. LeVan writes historical crime fiction about the distance between the official record and what actually happened. The Merritt Franklin novels combine procedural investigation, period detail, and character-driven mystery.
About the authorRed Clay Lantern Press
Independent by design.
Red Clay Lantern Press is an independent publishing imprint focused on carefully researched, story-first fiction with a strong sense of place and history.
About the press