Scamming the Birdman


Book Description

Scamming The Birdman by Larry Karp released on May 25, 2001 is available now for purchase.




First, Do No Harm


Book Description

The past comes rearing up to bite the next generation when a son digs too deep into his family's past.... Martin Firestone can't figure why his father, the eccentric painter Leo Firestone, is throwing a fit. All Martin did was tell his dad he'd been accepted to medical school. Then, Leo tells Martin a story about his own father, Dr. Samuel Firestone, an extraordinarily gifted doctor and a living legend in the small city of Hobart, NJ, but a man with a serious character flaw. During the summer of 1943, while Leo worked as Samuel's extern, he witnessed some highly questionable behavior. Illegal abortions, supplying heroin to an addict, black-market pharmaceuticals, babies sold to adoptive parents—all in a day's work for Samuel Firestone, M.D. When Leo decided his father was covering up a murder, he and his girlfriend, stage-struck Harmony, followed a trail of clues into the Fleischmann Scrapyard. There, they ran afoul of old Oscar Fleischmann, Samuel's longtime nemesis. By the time Leo realized he and Harmony were in far over their sixteen-year-old heads, it was too late to call off the investigation. But there are loose threads in Leo's story. Martin picks them up, and sixty years after the fact, goes snooping in Hobart. And like his father, he comes away with a whole lot more junk than he'd bargained for.




A Perilous Conception


Book Description

Lauren Rose moved to Phoenix to begin a new life as she starts a prestigious emergency medicine residency, but she could end up doing life in the Arizona State penitentiary instead. Lauren has always lived in the shadow of her more glamorous sister Liz, the wife of baseball superstar Jake Wakefield. But when Liz is found viciously murdered in her Scottsdale home, the spotlight turns to Lauren as prime suspect in the high-profile investigation. Having lost both parents at an early age, Liz's death leaves Lauren all alone in a new city. Jake's support proves invaluable as she navigates the nightmare her life has become. As Lauren spends time with Jake, they develop a closeness that she finds both comforting and confusing. It's an intimacy forged by their shared grief, their mutual love of baseball, and by the thrill of him pitching a perfect game for the Diamondbacks. Meanwhile, the Scottsdale police repeatedly question Lauren. She objects to a lie detector test as bad science. An arrest warrant is issued. The ensuing trial leads the evening news every night as a rabid public just can't get enough of the sordid proceedings, quickly dubbed "The Trial of the Millennium." Will the outcome be influenced by this media circus?




Writing the Mystery


Book Description

"Hayden then goes one step further and guides the reader through the post-writing process, explaining manuscript preparation, cover letters, acquiring an agent, and methods of successful promotion. Writing the Mystery concludes each section with in-depth exercises that put the lessons of the chapter into practice. Also included is a special collection of interviews, featuring mystery major leaguers who discuss the craft and offer their own valuable advice for the aspiring author and professionals switching to the mystery genre."--Jacket.




The Ragtime Fool


Book Description

It's 1951, and ragtime is making a comeback. In Sedalia, Missouri, plans are underway for a ceremony to honor Scott Joplin. Brun Campbell, the old Ragtime Kid, learns of a journal Joplin kept and wants to show it to Sedalia's movers and shakers, hoping to persuade them to set up a ragtime museum. Unfortunately for Brun, author/historian Rudi Blesh is determined to publish the journal. But Joplin's old friend wants to suppress the material. Even worse, two Sedalia Klansmen are hot after the journal and don't care if they have to kill someone to get it. In the middle of this imbroglio is Alan Chandler, a 17-year-old pianist in love with ragtime. If Alan can stay alive, he may be able to prevent catastrophe and learn what it really means to be Black in 1950s America.




The Adventures of George Pitts, An Inmate with the Birdman of Alcatraz


Book Description

When George Pitts faked insanity in a federal district court in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1960 to beat twelve felony counts, he was sent to the US Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, under a lunacy commitment. He worked in the Education Department. Robert Stroud, the famous Birdman of Alcatraz, ran the library next door. They were friends, thus the title.




Az Murder Goes...Artful


Book Description

Raymond Chandler called it “The Simple Art of Murder, ” but It never has been simple to write mysteries. This volume explores the crimes in novels that are rooted in the worlds of art, architecture, and antiquities.




When Texas Prison Scams Religion


Book Description

When Texas Prison Scams Religion exposes corruption in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, especially in the abuse of religion. In many ways, this book is a literature review of 1,800-plus works that defends freedom of conscience in prison while exposing the unconstitutionality of the seminary program that “buys faith with favor” from prisoners. The state veritably ordains the prisoner a “Field Minister” that represents the offices of the Governor, TDCJ Director, and wardens throughout the prison. Therein, TDCJ lies about neutrality in a program all about Christian missions and lies again in falsely certifying elementary Bible students as counselors. Why is the director sponsoring psychopaths counseling psychopaths? In fact, TDCJ pays $314 million a year to UTMB for psychiatric care and receives not a single report of the care given, and worse, for UTMB generates no reports itself. The underbelly TDCJ’s executive culture of cover up is exposed. TDCJ has hired the lowest qualified of the applicant pool many times in the last 25 years and regularly destroys statistics on violence. TDCJ Dir. Collier led the prison to model Louisiana Warden Burl Cain, the most scandal-ridden in penal history according to a host of published news stories for 20 years. Therein, Collier led TDCJ to favor the smallest segment of religious society within Evangelical Dominionism. Texas has no business endorsing the truth of any religion over another. We close with a proposal that utilizes the 400,000,000 hours of officer contact over ten years as a definitive influence in contrast to a commissioner that spends less than 10 minutes on each decision. Maness has been lobbying Austin for 15 years to definitively access staff for his “100,000 Mothers’ 1% Certainty Parole Texas Constitutional Amendment,” which would revolutionize prison culture and save Texans millions of the dollars.




Bobby the Birdman


Book Description

Bobby Tulloch, known to his pals as 'Tucker', was the son of a crofter in the island of Yell. He'd started his working life as a baker and became, through his own extraordinary talents and a certain amount of good luck, a renowned field ornithologist, tour guide, author and wildlife photographer. He was also an accomplished musician and songwriter, a skilled fisherman and a daring (some would say reckless) navigator of small boats among big rocks. He toured the UK giving illustrated talks for the RSPB and frequently appeared on national TV and radio. But perhaps his greatest skill was for friendship. When he died in 1996 at the age of 67 he was mourned by hundreds of friends throughout his native islands and far beyond. In this book, some of those friends celebrate their many happy memories of his life. After a biographical sketch by Jonathan Wills the stories from other contributors tumble out - dramatic, insightful and usually very funny. The book is illustrated throughout with evocative pictures from those eventful days and Bobby's wonderful wildlife and landscape photographs.




The Ragtime Kid


Book Description

Brun Campbell, a 15-year-old piano-playing fool, hears Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag played one 1898 afternoon in Oklahoma City. It's destiny calling. Asking for ragtime lessons, he's told, No, Ragtime is colored music. So Brun runs away from the family farm to Sedalia, Missouri, to persuade Joplin to take him on as a pupil. What Brun doesn't expect is to trip over the body of a young woman. He thoughtlessly picks up a couple of items before he rushes away from the murder scene. When Edward Fitzgerald, a man who befriended Brun his first night in town, is arrested for the woman's murder, Brun is certain he's innocent. But if the boy shows anyone the things he pocketed at the scene - things he now knows belonged to Scott Joplin - he'll point the finger at the composer ... and himself. Brun decides to get Fitzgerald, Joplin, and himself off the hook by finding the real killer, but for that he eventually needs some help from Dr. Overstreet, the alcoholic town mayor; and John Stark, a man pushing sixty, who's been employing Brun at his music store. Sedalia is rife with suspects, some of them opportunists bent on stealing Joplin's music. And then there are the girls and women - mysteries to Brun - like a teenager seized with religious fever, a couple of mischievous prostitutes, and an attractive, ambitious young woman with a hint of scarlet in her past, who further complicate his pursuit of the killer.