“I don’t sleep a lot,” says Ron Liebman ’66. That explains a lot.

Simon & Schuster has just published Liebman’s second novel, “Death by Rodrigo,” and he is hard at work on a sequel. Meantime, Liebman is still hanging on to his day job as partner in the Washington law firm Patton Boggs, and his occasional night gig as a drummer in two rock bands, “The Developments” and “Moving Parts.”

Mostly, Liebman writes as the sun comes up, perched at a computer in a room that belonged to his now-grown daughter. Sometimes while writing, he chuckles out loud at the places his characters, cops-turned-lawyers Junior “Junne” Salerno and Mickie Mezzonatti, take him.

“I enjoy hanging out with Junne and Mickie,” says Liebman. “I’ve heard other authors say that when you spend time with your fictional characters, they drive the plot. That happened in a strange way.”

In “Death by Rodrigo,” Junne and Mickie take on a drug-lord client who wants to be released on bail so he can skip town. The hardscrabble New Jersey lawyers are a far cry from Liebman’s own experiences. As a young lawyer working in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Baltimore, he helped prosecute former Vice President Spiro Agnew for accepting bribes. He is currently a senior partner in the commercial and civil litigation firm Patton Boggs.

“I’ve been in the professional company of a lot of people who have been educated at some of the best universities in America,” says Liebman, a former English major at McDaniel. “And I have always felt that my college prepared me quite well for the future.”

“Death by Rodrigo” is Liebman’s third book. He also wrote the novel “Grand Jury,” and “Shark Tales,” a compilation of lawyers’ amazing-but-true stories.

Learn more about Liebman’s books here, or visit the author’s web site here.