Books published by Coffeetown Press

In the summer of 1967, a Florida bookie is found dead in a Chicago motel, a businessman is missing along with a satchel of money, and Private Eye Harry Strummer is in the middle of it.

In mid-December 1956, veteran Northern California game warden Norman Bettis confronts a gang of commercial duck poachers and disappears-patrol car and all. Thirteen years later, rookie game warden Henry Glance sets out to solve the mystery of his disappearance.

For FBI Special Agent Jack Paris, cases are personal. Using a flurry of high-tech equipment, a search is on for a kidnapped girl. But it takes more than technology to understand why this happened and FBI case Agent Jack Paris knows that more than anyone. 

Marriage is an evil most men welcome,'' the ancient Greek philosopher,Menander, observed; and so an American woman discovers to her dismayafter marrying a man she met on a beach in Greece one summer.

It's the countdown to Election Day in Cave City, Indiana and its sister city, Ciudad de la Gruta, in Yucatán, Mexico. Their original agreement, back in 1999, requires the sister-city status be re-approved every twenty years via referendum. What should be an easy, has become a political hot-potato in 2019.

When three-year-old Joshua Gortler and his family were forced from their hometown in Poland during World War II, they scrambled for safety across border after border, finding refuge at last in Europe''s Displaced Persons Camps. Undocumented and unschooled, Gortler spent his adolescence learning to survive. When his family eventually relocated to the US, Gortler found himself starting over as teenager in a foreign land with only his spunk and sharp wits to rely on. 

In March, 1933, Fay Wray is on hand for the world premiere of King Kong at Radio City Music Hall. She's upset because she's just received an extortion note from someone claiming to have dirty pictures of her. The studio hires Jimmy Quinn to deliver the cash and he finds himself caught up in a twisted tangle of sex, revenge, pornography and power.

Life has a certain reassuring if not terribly exciting rhythm for the residents of North Oxford. Miss Morrow is content in her position as spinster companion to Miss Doggett, even if her employer and the woman''s social circle regard her as a piece of furniture. Stephen Latimer, the new cleric and Miss Doggett''s dashing new tenant, upsets the balance for Miss Morrow by proposing the long discounted possibility of marriage. Miss Doggett''s nephew, Mr. Francis Cleveland, is a handsome, middle-aged professor not destined for greatness in his field. He has a complaisant wife and an adoring pupil, a dangerous midlife combination. The town gossips witness an impulsive declaration of love between Francis Cleveland and Miss Bird and conclude that Mr. Cleveland is willing to sacrifice marriage and respectability for the sake of passion. Caught in a potentially compromising situation with Miss Morrow, Mr. Latimer clumsily refers to a nonexistent town: Crampton Hodnet. His lie is harmless. In this town appearances are much more deceiving. Barbara Pym began writing Crampton Hodnet in 1939. It was first published posthumously in 1987, thanks to her friend and biographer, Hazel Holt.

Over his thirty-year career as a wildlife protection officer for the California Department of Fish and Game, Steve Callan and his longtime working partner, Dave Szody, conducted some of the most fascinating, complex and highly successful wildlife investigations in California history. They also collected a wealth of true stories—action-packed, suspenseful and often humorous. In Badges, Bears and Eagles, Steve provides a vivid first-person account of his adventures. The author and his colleagues outsmart game hogs, thwart fish thieves, and foil outlaws with names like “Squeaky.” Steve is even stalked by African lions and mauled by a five-hundred pound Bengal tiger. One of the most important cases of his career begins with a slain bald eagle dropped on the doorstep of the Fish and Game office, along with a note threatening the life of a fellow warden. A decade later, Steve and Dave conduct the investigation of their lives, uncovering a statewide criminal conspiracy to kill California black bears for their valuable gall bladders. It’s not all about catching bad guys—in “Saving Lake Mathews,” Steve chronicles how he helped save a beloved wildlife sanctuary from developers.

An unexpected letter from his old employer calls Vermeulen back to Antwerp. His past has come back to haunt him. Old and new foes are conspiring to lock him up and, worse, kill him. He must fight both the authorities and criminal syndicates to make it out alive.

The basic conflict in the poems is the poet fighting what is real and what is not real in his brain. We see him going around St Louis struggling to come up with a language that would make sense of his experiences. While somewhat confused, he takes great pleasure in words and the characters he meets on his way. 

Parkinson Pete on Living and Dying with Parkinson's Disease is a direct, honest, and sometimes funny assessment of what it can be like to face a life and a death with a neurodegenerative disease like Parkinson's. Most of the writers of the books Pete reviewed in Parkinson Pete's Bookshelves dealt exclusively with the easy early stages of the disease. Then they mumbled something about the need to keep hoping that a cure is just around the corner. Pete shares that hope, of course, while advising readers how to take charge of their own futures, cure or no cure.

In 1945 Berlin, a young American intelligence officer finds himself occupying the house of a German with the same name.  Seeking to learn more about his German double, the American is captivated by his wife, who draws him into a web of deceit and danger with tales of treasure and promises of love.

CIA officer Karl Baier has been running a highly-placed source in the Communist Party and Hungarian government from his post in Vienna for over a year. When he receives a warning that is source is in danger, Baier knows he will have to return to Budapest to find and rescue his agent-if he is even alive. Despite resistance from CIA Headquarters in Washington, Baier and a colleague will have to locate the Hungarian agent, overcome his reluctance and skepticism, dodge Soviet tanks, evade Red Army patrols, escape from KGB prisons, and disobey orders from Washington as they search for a way to freedom. Along the way he will discover support and betrayal where he least expected it.

Just days after solving the murder of a young TV reporter Iraq War bet Jack Connor and his BioClean crew are called to a Myrtle Beach hotel suite where a "John Doe" has taken his life. When the crew arrives on-site nothing's typical about this scene. The deceased jmped from the balcony, but blood is virtually everywhere in the suite, along with two suicide notes.

What did TV reporter Rebecca Rose do that got her brutally murdered and left In a gutter in downtown Charleston? That's what Jack Connor- crime scene clean-up tech, Iraq War veteran, and the victim's one-time lover-wants to know when he and his crew are called to sanitize her murder scene. When the police learn of Connor's romantic link to the victim, they waste no time bringing him in as a "person of interest." Still dealing with emotional and physical scars from the battlefield, Connor takes it upon himself to find Rebecca's real killer - a search that leads him to scratch the underbelyl of the South Carolina low country.

The poems in this collection travel across lifetimes, each twist and turn of the outer world reflecting an inner landscape, narratives unfolding against ever-changing backdrops- places, seasons, decades. They trace the complexities of an ordinary life through the histories and environments that gave them shape-shifting from homes and tree-lined neighborhoods, to a rain-soaked cemetery, an opera house in Hanoi, a beach in Ceylon, a village in Poland. In them are the contradictions and surprises, moods and modulations of individual experience, evoking both the transitory nature of our world and the timelessness of the human condition.

Cynthia Lim thought she had the perfect life: a husband who was a successful attorney, a fulfilling career in education, two teenage sons in private school, and a home in Los Angeles rich in books, music, and art. Then in 2003, her husband Perry suffers a cardiac arrest and brain injury, lingering in a coma for ten days before slowly awakening. A different person emerges, one who has lost his short-term memory and is fully dependent on others. Married for twenty years, she doesn't know how much of his former self will return as she fights for the treatment and care he needs.She struggles with caregiving and working full-time while finding connection with the man she once knew and loved, whose brain will never again function as it did before. While wrestling with the urge to leave him in an institution and walk away, she discovers the strength and resolve that will allow her to build a new life. Wherever You Are is the story of a marriage after a spouse is forever changed by a catastrophic event. It is a story of redefining life with disability and discovering the real truth of love and marriage.

Parkinson's disease has struck more than a million people in the United States, and many more worldwide. Although it is an incurable, progressive, and ultimately debilitating neurological disease, Parkinson's can be managed with certain medicines, treated with certain surgeries, and slowed down with regular exercise and nutritional regimens.In the past two decades, many conflicting and confusing books about Parkinson's disease have appeared. Some were written by doctors who have been trained to study and treat the disease. Some were written by men and women with the disease who wanted to share with others what they have learned. Still others are novels about fictional characters with Parkinson's.How are doctors, patients, families, friends, and reference librarians to know which book or books will best serve the particular needs of readers? Parkinson Pete spent several years collecting, reading, and writing reviews of eighty-nine books about the disease. His no-nonsense reviews are an indispensable guide for people who want to know what books will most help them understand Parkinson's disease, the people who have it, and the people who treat it.