In this novel, the narrator greets nay, welcomes readers into a world of the absurd, with boundaries of neither space nor time. Barely do we arrive at the Crusades’ bloodbath when a zeppelin circles about Renaissance Florence’s Arno, and before we can catch our breath, Cologne is reduced to rubble through Allied bombardment. Next we find ourselves in fin-de-siecle Vienna sharing an espresso with Freud. According to the narrator’s father, appropriately unnamed and unnameable, historical time is a flow of events endlessly repeating themselves ...

In most generations there appears a person, usually a man, who has authenticated powers of healing and who acts, often, as a kind of messiah. This is a person who by his or her charisma and personal magnetism attracts a large following. Charlatan, miracle worker or deluded mystic? Few contemporaries can ever decide and history itself is not sure. Such a person was Francis Schlatter who arrived in Denver in 1892. He was a German immigrant shoemaker and a devout Catholic who was on a special mission for the "Father." The mission required him to wander about ...

The year is 1835, the place New Mexico, the hero or villain, depending upon your view is Don Albino Perez. Perez, the newly appointed Mexican governor, is more of an idealist than a politician. He rides north with high hopes for his new office in a strange land. After reaching New Mexico and assuming his duties, Perez finds he has a strong and forceful opponent in the former governor, Don Manuel Armijo. Armijo, who enjoys popular support, is determined to sabotage all of Perez's programs. His big opportunity comes when Perez puts into effect a vast taxation ...

It is April 1970 and Nikos Meletis, the captain of a Greek cruise ship, is returning from the Caribbean with a charter of German tourists. He docks at Venice to pick up a group of Americans. One of them will change his life. Nikos Meletis is forty-six, tall and darkly handsome, a hero of the Greek resistance during World War II. He has been a seaman for twenty-five years, a captain for the Delphinaki Lines for twelve. His wife and two sons live in Athens and he seldom sees them. At the welcoming cocktail party he meets Alexa Hollister, a beautiful young widow ...

When the granddaughter of an elderly outlaw asks Philip Habib to find the source of her grandfather's money, he encounters the legend of the Lost Adams' Diggings. His request for help from Sarah Johnson, a ranger intern, at the Malpais National Monument in the lava beds of New Mexico leads to more than information. Their growing intimacy is observed by Derek Gruber, a skin head biker, whose paranoia grows when Philip begins speaking Arabic with an old friend. Gruber discovers that Habib is an Arab American private investigator and that his friend, Ross McIntyre ...

Jake Rivers, driving his father's '58 Chevy pickup with a learners' permit, hauls his horse across Texas the day after Christmas. When he gets lost in a snowstorm, Will Tom Sunday helps him find his new home. The family's new Panhandle house and farm seem harsh and desolate to Jake. After spending the worst six months of his life bullied and humiliated at his new school, Jake changes schools and starts to love the Panhandle. But when Jake spends a moonlit night on the sprawling Matador Ranch with the daughter of a local minister, the minister and his family ...

In this collection of poems, Thomas Grissom explores a range of themes and situations gathered from a lifetime of lessons and observations. By turns lighthearted and serious, introspective and philosophical, uninhibited and irreverent, they are always open and honest expressions of inner truths. Taken all together they form a poetic rendering of episodes from the autobiography of a life. Written in the direct and simple language of a modern American idiom in free verse lines that reflect the natural patterns and rhythms of spoken language, they are lucid ...

The year was 1864. The freezing winds off Lake Michigan swept across the snow laden grounds and through the cracks of a building that held Southern prisoners in Camp Douglas, Illinois. Huddled with the other prisoners, John mulled over the reasons he had enlisted, even after his father had forbidden it. He knew the only real reason was to protect his best friend Frankie, who had enlisted first but never even bothered to show up at the station when the recruits left for war. Shivering, he wondered if he would ever see his family again or especially the girl ...

Two altar boys are found dead in the Santa Fe River, apparently murdered, thirty years apart. The first case was never solved, while the second unfolds in present time. The priest from Mora who worked closely with the boys is the obvious person of interest. But a woman from an old New Mexico Hispanic family with a Catholic background who is the homicide detective for the Santa Fe Police Department, and a second-generation New Mexico Anglo woman with a Baptist background who sees ghosts and is a member of a state task force formed to solve difficult cases ...

There were two Whispering Smiths, one the fictional railroad detective in Frank Hamilton Spearman’s novel, and the other a historic westerner whose real name was James L. Smith. The fictional character was the hero in this best-selling novel of 1906, and the book’s popularity made it the prototype for Western fiction. Spearman became fascinated by railroad lore through his contacts with the Union Pacific while a Nebraska banker. He had previously authored several stories with railroad plots and by 1904 had his “Strategy of Great Railroads” ...