Literary Retro Snapshots and Quirky Whodunits offer a new voice in Northwest fiction.
Marooned in an Oregon trailer park, Josie Wallgood thinks she's discovered a way to hit it big as a psychic headliner. While barely making rent money as a fortune-teller spinning tales for the gullible, a trusting heiress hires her to exorcise the spirit of her father Max who was killed in action during the Korean War. Josie teams up with Cain Reeves, a washed-out minor league catcher, and hatches a plot to bilk her client out of the family fortune. But something seems to be going wrong...
Can virtue be found in a turn-of-the-century bordello? Can a frontier teacher stand idly by as the Shoshone culture is subsumed by Anglo missionaries? Can a suburban lawyer justify that his casual dalliances don't amount to infidelity? From the opulent parlor of an 1898 Seattle bordello to a Portland law firm in 1989, each heroine, hero, and villain in this memorable collection of short stories is captured at a crossroads in life. They are ordinary people: brave, timid, foolhardy, modest, brazen, and often self-sacrificing...
Woodrow Hand is off the rodeo circuit with a busted shoulder and stuck in the Great Basin Badlands of southeastern Oregon. He has a girlfriend all set to lasso his hide and drag him to the altar. He’s on the run from the preacher party when he runs into a twisted set of circumstances that make him wish he’d left town already. Bodies keep turning up in unexpected places, and nobody, including the sheriff is real sure who’s a corpse and who isn’t...
Marsha Scamponi has a hobby to cure the housewife blahs. She spends afternoons romancing truck stop Romeos at the Lullaby Motel. When road jockey number 37 on her list threatens to spoil her fun, she lets her pistol even the score. The State Trooper whose ring she's wearing has a sideline of his own named Phyllis. They get tangled up with wacky revolutionaries and a gang of zany misfits planning to blow up a Reno casino to finance their motley band...
Two irrepressible midlife losers Lester McKue and Mike Bochsleiter, goodhearted, dead-enders are on a three-day odyssey across Idaho. Lester is a short-changed dreamer who believes the Gospel according to Readers’ Digest. Mike is a bargain basement schemer whose latest game is selling burial and cremation polices for the Peaceful Assurance Company of Hackensack, New Jersey. Ricocheting through the simmering summer of 1967...
Slap Happy invites you on a quirky, riotous ride through the Galaxy with con men, eight-legged, three-eyed cephalopod nymphos and desperate writers to a crazy, hilarious parallel UNI that just might make even a skeptic’s dreams come true. Spurned and dissed by countless agents, book doctors, gatekeepers, editors and critics, an author’s only hope may be an alternate reality where a deal with a Uni parolee named Bob sounds like the ticket to fortune and fame...
In the Christmas chill of 1944, Big Joe Welk is the hardcore crime boss in Oregon. He runs the rackets and the cronies who put the skim in his pocket. But he’s got enemies with a score to settle, and they’re willing to kill to make Joe pay. Miles Brodie is just a bargain rate lawyer handling divorces for Joe’s Tiki Bar girls. He’s barely squeezing rent money from his third-rate law practice when Big Joe hires him to find out who’s knocking off his pals...
Old Wive's Tales uncovers the erotic secrets of women long past their sexual prime. Thesis interviewer Charlotte Pulver exposes their reminiscences of deflowerings, torrid affairs, romances, dangerous liaisons. betrayals, lusty lovers and sins of the heart as well as the flesh. Charlotte wonders if the contented old-lady image she's comfortable with is less like Opie Taylor's Aunt Bea and more like her grandmother’s idol Mae West.
THE RAY BATES MYSTERIES - Police Procedurals for True-Crime Junkies and Mystery Buffs
Blue Butterfly is the first in a series featuring Detective John Bowers.
Tracking a call girl's killer through Portland's sleazy sex trade, John uncovers a police bureau prostitution ring and bags a political primetime player with an appetite for S&M. While the cops, ME and prosecutors touch all the bases in a job they sometimes love to hate, the Bureau's dirty little secrets begin to unravel...
It’s 1994, and veteran homicide detective John Bowers teams up with his partner Minola Raye to solve another grisly murder in Babylon — Portland, Oregon’s fringe district of losers and forgotten victims. Like hungry sharks, Babylon’s riffraff feed on the innocent and vulnerable, and only case-hardened cops like Bowers seek justice in a system that has no heart.
The CAMELOT CLUB is the third book in the Detective John Bowers series. He's a witty veteran with the Portland, Oregon, Police Bureau, a dedicated realist railing against the politically correct injustice in his life. The only mysteries Bowers hasn't solved in twenty-three years behind the badge are women, especially his exes. The last split cost him everything but his Fruit of the Loom.
Detective John Bowers is a street-worn homicide cop in the Rose City. He’s in shouting distance of retirement with a gurgling trout stream, Winnebago Chief and a brand new bride. But before he can surrender the badge, he catches another shitcan case. The victim is young, engaged to be married to her high-school sweetheart, obeying all the rules to keep safe when her life is snuffed out way too soon by pirates prowling the mean streets for easy prey. Now it’s John and partner Minnie Raye’s job to track her sadistic killer stalking the night and try one more time to find justice for the innocent.
Bowers and his Partner Minola Raye are on the trail of the killer who assaulted a young mother found shot to death in her car. The forensics point to a staged scene and unlike the television dramas, putting together a winnable case isn’t easy. Modern juries demand cold, hard facts, clear motives, stunning forensic evidence and scientific gurus to make sense of it all. Murderers watch the same crime shows detectives do, so it’s a contest to see who comes out on top. Just when it seems the game is over, there’s an unexpected twist that surprises everyone but the killer.
City Serenade is number six in the Detective John Bowers series. A rogue offender sidelines Bowers while a downtown serial rapist is disturbing the Peaceful, Green, Urban Oasis rep Portland likes to claim. When a second assault ends in a vicious murder, the stakes go up for the City, the cops and especially for Central Precinct’s Robbery/Homicide Unit. Once again, Detectives John Bowers and his partner Minola Raye start the case working from the inside out. The trail leads through a crowd of midtown white-collars from the landmark towers to the Follies Revue and the dregs of rejects and losers prowling the alleys and back streets below. How one thread weaves a connection from one face of the Rose City to the darker side may turn out to be the key to solving the case.
It’s a good day to die for lawyers. A deposition is about to begin in a large, metro law firm where the senior partner is breathing his last before a shooter barges into the conference room and redecorates with blood and brains compliments of his Glock nine.
The shooter seems like a nice guy. Admits everything, asks for his lawyer and the only question unanswered by the Central Precinct detectives is the motive. Lots of folks have grudges against lawyers, but this killer’s reaction seems a bit extreme even for clients with a distaste for the legal system in general and insurance defense lawyers in particular.