Sucked Up by Mark Travis
On Sunday afternoon, May 22, 2011, a Category Five tornado touches earth west of Joplin, Missouri, and rips twenty-two miles easterly through the town. It kills 162 people and does $2.2 billion dollars damage.
Brad Carson rides his motorcycle on the east side of Joplin when he sees the twister coming his way. He tries to reach the safety of a highway overpass. After the tornado passes, a resident finds Brad’s Harley-Davidson in his front yard. The headlight is on and the bike is in gear. Brad is nowhere around.
A week later 156 people remain unaccounted for including Brad Carson.
A month later all tornado victims are accounted for except for Brad Carson.
Chad Carson, Brad’s twin brother, files a claim for $2 million dollars in life insurance, but the company wants proof of death. Rather than risk negative publicity, the company negotiates a monthly-payment settlement with Chad. It also sends private investigator Dan Ballantine to Joplin.
Dan learns Brad’s rich and reclusive uncle, Martin Weaver, lives on eight forested acres in northeastern Oklahoma. When Dan visits the property to see if Brad is hiding there, he spots an infrared security system on the fence. Soon somebody in the trees unloads a pump shotgun loaded with nine rounds of double-aught buckshot at him.
Dan escapes, treats a minor wound, and returns to the property several hours later. He finds the house and garage empty. With the help of super-hacker Pearl the Girl, Dan gets a description of Weaver’s vehicle and learns it left Oklahoma headed toward St. Louis. Dan tracks the van with the idea he will look for Brad and ask why Weaver tried to kill him.
A Hurt for a Hurt- A Dan Ballantine Mystery by Mark Travis
On Jeff Sanford’s 21st birthday, his Sigma Pi fraternity brother, Tyler Thompson, offers to buy the first round at Sacramento’s Overtime Sports Bar. Four brothers join them in the celebration.
Several beers later the Lakers are beating the Kings, and a group of rowdy Laker fans are beating the Sigma Pis on the pool table. When Laker fan Josh Goldman loses a game of 9-Ball to Jeff Sanford, he makes nasty remarks about Jeff’s sexual preference and his mother. Jeff punches Josh, Tyler socks the Laker fan closest to him, and other fights start.
While the bartender calls the cops, Jeff whacks Josh with his pool cue. Josh goes down, and most patrons head for the parking lot.
Joshua Goldman dies in the ambulance, and Jeff Sanford, charged with murder, pleads guilty to voluntary manslaughter for eleven years in Folsom Prison.
Jeff Sanford gets out in five, and, two weeks later, a killer knocks on his door and shoots a small bullet through his right eye.
When the case cools, Kyra Simmons, Jeff Sanford’s sister, asks her Private Investigator friend, Dan Ballantine, if he can prod the cops to work the case harder.
Tyler Thompson is murdered before Ballantine can talk with his Sacramento homicide detective pal, Sergeant ‘Harker’ Smith. When Curt Hendricks is shot dead in Southern California, Dan decides the killer has three more Sigma Pis to murder. He hits the road to warn them and see if they have information which might help him identify the killer.
Walking in the Clouds- Colombia through the eyes of a gringo by Michael F. Kastre
“Walking in the Clouds - Colombia through the Eyes of a Gringo” is a series of true events and corresponding stories as experienced and chronicled by an American writer who lived and worked in the country during the violent cocaine wars and leftist guerrilla uprisings in the 1980s. From the Torching of the Judicial Palace, 23,000 Souls Vanish, and Conversations with a Guerrilla to Carnival, A Shot in the Dark, and A Water Tower View of the Pope, this series of stories provide a timeless lens through which to view Latin America, They also provide a mirror that reflects back a realistic perspective of how others view us.
Colombia represents not only the promise, but the problems that haunt an entire continent. Unlike those to the north, the seeds for the idea of hereditary power and landed gentry were sown from the beginning. The continent’s oldest surviving democracy, Colombia combines the splendor of colonial Spain with the energy of Latin America. Yet, despite the fame of Colombian coffee and its notoriety for drugs, most people know little about the country. As colored through its stories, Walking in the Clouds provides a glimpse into Colombian history, economics, politics, psyche, culture, and contradictions.
The Repairer of the Breach by Norman C. Norman
The purpose of this book is to awaken the body of believers to truths that have been hidden from them by showing the scriptures from a Hebraic point of view, and through this point of view bring more continuity to the Holy writ. It shows us how Paul (Shaul) and Jesus (Yahshua) were in complete harmony and that the son of God and God (Elohim or Yahweh) are not only on the same page, but have the same nature (character). In these pages you will find out who and what Paul was really dealing with, what Jesus meant when He said "the greatest commandment is this...", and what He meant when He said "think not that I came to abolish the law and the prophets, I came not to abolish, but to fulfill." You will also be exposed to concepts like abiding, the biblical Sabbath, sanctification, and where do we begin our faith journey, just to mention a few.The Archaic Smile by Ramun Bjerken
Our fundamental study of natural reality is physics, and I found that physics has taken a direction that somehow violated me; and the more I probed the deeper the violation. The attitude that surfaced was that we have to start over. An eventually I realized: if not me, who; I sensed the crucial urgency involved. Our Time will be defined by a need for a natural form of spirituality structured by reason and set in the real. I began with the richest Period in human history: the 6th Century B.C. The challenge was to fuse aggressive intellectual penetration, as stressed in the West, with calm spiritual participation as stressed in the East, knowing that the synthesis had been at the core of both cultures. The goal is to conceptualize Reality through traditional reason, extend reason into traditional spiritual awareness, and have that continuity establish a resonant ground for creative action. Oriented Relations presents a restructuring of our conceptual foundation by exposing a formal harmony extending universally. This essential State is applied to celestial motion, light, and consciousness, unifying them in a simple clarity where paradox and conundrums tend to dissolve in a consistency of form intensified by mathematics and commonsense.On Guard for Thee (War and Strife in 1812) by Wayne Cain
The year is 1812. Nicademus Kane is on his way home to Upper Canada. He ran away a young teenager and ended up in Mexico, where he fell in with the rebel leaders fighting the Spanish. His little army had eventually been trapped and crushed. Nic had barely escaped with his life. Now he just wanted to rest. he was tired of war, killing and destruction. But the Gods of War weren't finished with Nicademus Kane. He would soon need every skill he had learned as the Americans and the British were about the dispute the future of North America for a second time.In the Land of Shoes by Nancy Lund
It came to her when she was on her knees, frantically searching for two dollar bills – the only money in the house until Friday when she hoped her husband would be paid. All this fuss over two measly dollars. And that is what triggered the memory: “That shoe! I’m living in the land of the shoes.”
The title of Nancy Lund’s memoir comes from the moment when she remembered herself at age six finding a strange object and being told it was a shoe “probably dropped off the rag-pickers wagon”. A sheltered child of an upper-middle class family, she had never seen a shoe that wasn’t polished, without a heel, laces or neat little buttons. She tried to imagine what kind of a creature could wear the flat, shapeless thing – maybe a tribe of one-footed people who flitted about in the sky.
She never thought of it again until at the age of thirty-three, needing to buy milk for her kids, she realized that she herself was living in the land of the shoes. Real people lived in that world; they grew up, married, had kids, and their shoes got run down – if they were lucky enough to have any.
"In the Land of the Shoes,” is a journey told with humor and honesty. Nancy gives us stories about her family, the unlikely beginnings of her very happy marriage to Dick Lund, the turmoil of the sixties, and her difficulty accepting the choices her kids made. Even more, it is the story of Nancy’s longing for a world free of discrimination, poverty and war. Full of ideals, she joined the Communist Party in 1941; but after almost twenty years (and hundreds of pages in the files of the FBI), she dropped out, disillusioned. Her search for alternate ways to use her ideals – and her considerable energy – led her to working in the mainstream, in the Democratic Party, women’s rights, the peace movement, and for the last thirty five years, in the small mountain town of Greenville, California, as an advocate for the elderly.
Characterizing herself as a “card-carrying optimist,” Nancy continues at the age of 94 in unwavering dedication to equality, justice and peace.
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