Posts by MELISSA COFFMAN
Dancing with the Muse in Old Age
Dancing with the Muse in Old Age, by Priscilla Long Dancing with the Muse in Old Age is a book about thriving in old age. While focusing on creative engagement, it is for everyone who is aging. It reflects the new ways of looking at old age as a potentially dynamic, happy, and productive time.…
Read MoreThe Crocodile’s Kill
The Crocodile’s Kill, by Chris McGillion Babies are being abducted from their homes in the mountains along East Timor’s southern border with Indonesia. Local villagers believe the babies are being taken by demons and sacrificed in order to appease ancestral spirits disturbed by development projects encroaching on traditional land. FBI Agent Sara Carter, on secondment…
Read MoreTrack 61
Track 61, by Eve Karlin Midnight, June 13, 1942: Peter Burger stands on a foggy beach, ears primed as a submarine hull scrapes the sandy sea bottom. He has endured seventeen months in a Gestapo prison and seventeen days on a Nazi U-boat only to have landed on American shores with six boxes of explosives…
Read MoreCriminal Justice
Criminal Justice, by Randee Green After a lifetime of dealing with her family’s criminal antics, Detective Carrie Shatner has run out of tolerance. The Shatners have also run out of time. Thanks to their recklessness, the Department of Public Safety has finally caught on to what they’ve been up to. Carrie is trying to play…
Read MoreRestitution, by Donald Catalano
Restitution, by Donald Catalano Restitution, a follow-up to Donald Catalano’s novel Recusal, continues his suspenseful tale of Capitol Hill political retribution. President Andrew Cochran’s White House tacks to the moderate center after scandal rocked his nascent administration. His conciliatory gesture is seen by far-right ideologues as a Judas-like sellout of his prior conservative principles. His…
Read MoreWrapped in Darkness, by David Carlson
Wrapped in Darkness, by David Carlson The monastery of the Holy Dormition sits peacefully on a remote shore of Lake Superior until a fall morning when the body of a skinhead female is found outside the monastery’s gate. For the police, all the signs point to the youngest monk in the community. Although maintaining his…
Read MoreLike a Thief in the Night, by David Carlson
Like a Thief in the Night, by David Carlson The feast day of Saints Peter and Paul in Rome deserves better than to be spoiled by a prank. That’s what the sleuth Father Nicholas Fortis thinks as he watches a drone hover over the huge crowd in St. Peter’s Square. Annoyance turns to terror when…
Read MoreCriminal History, by Randee Green
Detective Carrie Shatner has just about run out of tolerance for her criminally inclined family members. The Shatners have long since passed toeing the line. They have obliterated that line, and they are getting increasingly reckless with their criminal endeavors. Carrie is trying to figure out what to do about her family when Sergeant Jerrod Hardy of the Texas Rangers pops back up in her life with a warning…Texas’s Department of Public Safety has just started investigating the Shatner family, and their time as the leading crime family in East Texas is about to come to an end. It’s time for Carrie to make a choice—save herself or go down in a blaze of glory with the rest of the Shatners.
Read MoreMurder in the Summer of Love
It is the Summer of Love, and unorthodox private eye Harry Strummer is hired by night club singer Valerie Rolfe to find her estranged husband, who may or may not have been murdered by a pair of out-of-town killers after a drug deal gone wrong has left three men dead on a Florida beach.
Read MoreThe Case of the Missing Game Warden, by Steven T. Callan
Veteran Northern California game warden Norman Bettis and his wife, Martha, lived an idyllic life in the small Sacramento Valley farm town of Gridley. On the morning of December 13, 1956, Norman kissed Martha on the forehead and drove off to work. He had no way of knowing he was destined to stumble into a rat’s nest of commercial duck poachers and disappear–patrol car and all.
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