Books published by Open Road Media

A young woman in New York is caught between her politician father and a manipulative lover in a novel that offers ';sheer enjoyment' (Library Journal). Jonathan Fleishman has always been perceived as the rarest kind of politician: as idealistic as he was powerful, genuinely committed to the good of the people. For Jonathan, public approbation is the oxygen he breathes; so it is deeply galling that the one person who refuses to see his worth is his own beloved daughter, Grace. When his spotless record is challenged by accusations of corruption leveled by Gracie's lover, a ruthless young journalist named Barnaby, Jonathan's good life is abruptly shattered. And Grace, faced with the betrayal of a lover who used her to get at her father, comes to realize that neither man is what he seems, even to himself.Saving Graceis an intricately textured book, a portrayal of a family in crisis and an exploration of the intersection between public and private lives. Library Journal calledSaving Gracethe book that ';Bonfire of the Vanitiestried to be.'

Cafe Nevo is a Tel Aviv gathering place for artists, politicians, lovers, and BohemiansArabs and Jews, young and old, conservative and radical. Nevo is presided over by Emmanual Sternholz, the waiter whose unblinking gaze takes in the tangled web of destinies and desires spun out around him. In this comic, tragic, and compelling mosaic of intertwined lives, Barbara Rogan has created a dazzling work of fictionand a marvelously illuminating mirror of Israel in its pioneering heyday.

The shocking true crime story of a beloved Hollywood star gone too soontold by the captain of theboat on which Natalie Wood spent her last night. Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour is the long awaited, detailed account of events that led to the mysterious death of Hollywood legend Natalie Wood off the coast of Catalina Island on November 28, 1981. It is a story told by a haunted witness to that fateful evening: Dennis Davern, the young captain of Splendour, the yacht belonging to Wood and husband Robert Wagner. Davern initially backed up Wagner's version of that evening's events through a signed statement prepared by attorneys. But Davern's guilt over failing Natalie tormented him. Davern reached out to his old friend Marti Rulli, and little by little, at his own emotional pace, he revealed the details of his years in Wood's employ, of the fateful weekend that Natalie died, and of the events following her death that prevented him from telling the whole storyuntil now.

From the New York Timesbestselling author of Jaws 2 and Jaws: The Revenge: ';One of his best-known novels ... the story of a troubled couple at sea' (People). It was supposed to be a relaxing vacation for a hard-working lawyer and his wife, but one slip and what begins as an adventure quickly becomes terrifying. When Mitch Gordon opens his eyes to find his wife missing in the middle of the ocean, he panics. He is seventy miles from Tahiti on a forty-foot ketch and there is no sign of help. Join Hank Searls, the creator ofJaws 2andJaws the Revenge,in this beautiful but frightening tale of love, trust, and survival.

One of Washington's spies hunts a murderous turncoat in this ';fascinating [and] most satisfying' novel of the American Revolution (Publishers Weekly). In a quiet room in the White Swan Inn, sunlight slowly breaks through the curtains revealing two young loversan American seamstress and an English officer. They have been brutally, ritualistically murdered in their sleep. It is a grisly scene that can only mean one thing: There is a traitor within the American Revolution. The year is 1779. General Washington, struggling to keep his army together, sends his best spymaster, Matty Grove, to investigate the killings. As Matty follows the trail of clues, he comes up against more questions. Who gave the killer his orders? How much does the mole know of the Revolution's plans? Is this treason a matter of principle or simply profit? WithThe Traitor, author Dan Sherman brings the political and economic maneuverings of the Revolution into vivid detail. The rising pace and complex characters in this stunning work of historical fiction will have history buffs and fans of modern espionage alike clamoring for more.

When struggling painter Nicholas Gray first sees Margaretha Zelle, it is in a poor photograph. But something draws him to her. All men are drawn to Margarethaher mysterious eyes, her effortless sensuality. In another life, she will become known as Mata Hari.As a dancer, she becomes famous. As a seductress, she becomes legendary. Soon, Mata Hari is crisscrossing Europe, collecting generals, aristocrats, and businessmen as her lovers. But staying behind in Paris, only Gray truly loves her. He watches from afar as her shifting alliances and brushes with power entangle her in a world of espionage and danger. Can Gray save her before the trap springs shut?Author Dan Sherman brings his mastery of modern suspense to this thrilling story of the world's most legendary femme fatale. Blending history with fiction,The Man Who Loved Mata Harihas earned its author comparison to John La Carre and Graham Greene. It will ensnare readers with its tale of the woman who held all of Europe spellbound.

A CIA double agent holds the fate of Chinaand the worldin his hands in this gripping spy thriller from the author of The Man Who Loved Mata Hari. John Polly enters Shanghai in 1948 on a muggy, velvet evening, just in time for the Communist takeover of China. It marks only his fourth month in America's newly formed Central Intelligence Agency. Over the next two decades, Polly will becomeThe White Mandarin, a double agent buried so deep within the inner circle of the People's Republic as to shape the futures of both that nation and his own. Dan Sherman's intricate, superbly crafted spy thriller follows Polly as he walks a dangerous tightrope of intrigue and suspense. As China rebuilds itself, Polly attempts to start a family in the intersection between the American intelligence system and the Asian drug trade. Can Polly keep his wife and daughter safe? Can he keep track of the shifting stories and changing allegiances in the CIA? Will his emotion get in the way of his mission?Only pages into this stunning novel, readers will easily understand why Sherman has earned comparison to the great John le Carre and Graham Greene. It is both a story of very personal love and loss, and an insightful history of China between the rise of Chairman Mao and the 1972 visit by President Nixon. Anyone looking to understand the China of yesterday and todayits power, its flaws, its beautyneed look no further thanThe White Mandarin.

';Larry felt something he hadnt experienced for yearsthe sharp clutch of jealousy twisting his stomach. In all the years they'd been together, he'd never doubted Eleanor's fidelity in the slightest.'In this striking, startling novel, Vassi turns his talent to a tale that blends Zen and jealous passion into a suspenseful, erotically charged thriller. For Larry, he wonders if the evidence of his wife's supposed infidelity is real, or a hallucination produced by his own meditations . . . and inner fears. It all builds to a shattering climax that reexamines the idea of life, death, and sex.

Follow the adventures of Charlie, an urban three-year-old on the fast track, and his slow-track mommy. In this hilarious volume, Charlie gets a haircut like Sting's, runs up a tab at a baseball game, and prefers the garlic press to any of his expensive ';educational' toys. Charlie is a kid learning to be a consumer. His mommy reveals important secrets, like which stroller is ';in,' which is the ';right' playgroup, and how to throw a fabulous fourth birthday party. Moms and dads alike will find these anecdotes of parenting at the end of the century to be truly priceless.

In this ribald, titillating, exciting book, Marco Vassi exposes the human animal in all its absurdity. He spares no one and nothing in his ironic X ray of our exalted obsessions. Capturing the sizzling vitality of our current erotic upheaval while grasping its peculiar pretensions, Vassi creates a gallery of unforgettable characters who are only ourselves in a form larger than life. In these nineteen stories, Vassi turns erotic literature inside out, unraveling the seams of our most secret fantasies. The Erotic Comedies offers a mere taste of what awaits readers in his full length novels.

Driving down the Long Island Expressway in November of 1992, Sol Wachtler was New York's chief judge and heir apparent to the New York governorship. Suddenly, three van loads of FBI agents swerved in front of himbringing his car and his legal career to a halt. Wachtlers subsequent arrest, conviction, and incarceration for harassing his longtime lover precipitated a media feeding frenzy, revealing to the world his struggles with romantic attachment, manic depression, and drug abuse.In this, his prison diary, Wachtler reveals the stark reality behind his vertiginous fall from the heights of the legal establishment to the underbelly of the criminal justice system. Sentenced to a medium security prison in Butner, North Carolina, Wachtler is stabbed by an unseen assailant, berated by prison guards, and repeatedly placed in solitary confinement with no explanation. Moreover, as a prisoner he confronts firsthand the inequities of a system his judicial rulings helped to construct and befriends the type of people he once sentenced.With unflinching honesty, Wachtler draws on his unique experience of living life on both sides of the bench to paint a chilling portrait of prison life interwoven with a no holds barred analysis of the shortcomings of the American legal justice system.

A double murder in a Canadian fishing village pits a rogue cop against a motorcycle gang in a mystery with ';a hero as canny as he is strong' (Publishers Weekly). Reid Bennett and his dog Sam serve as the police force for not so quaint Murphy's Harbor, Ontario. They have yet another perilous but important task. There are some pretty nasty bikers disrupting the faade of serenity of Murphy's Harbor, and Reid must find a way to make them take a hike without ';disrespecting their civil rights.' Reid really just wants to kill them, but he knows that he must act with discretion in order to keep hidden a secret from his past. Then, to complicate matters, a young boy named Kennie Spenser is reported missing. Reid has to find the boy, who may have been kidnapped for his camera, and restore order to Murphy's Harbor. All in a day's work!

A killer mines the wilds of Canada for victims. On the case: police chief Reid Bennett, ';one of the most interesting series whodunit heroes of the decade' (Chicago Sun-Times). When gold is found in the mountains of Canada, it brings a rush of prospectors, pilots, and men looking to get rich quick. It also brings a slew of dead bodies. That is when Reid Bennett, the lone cop of tiny Murphy's Harbour, gets called in to help. The dead body of geologist Jim Prudhomme is found mauled beyond recognition by a bear. Or is it? Bear attacks are more than rare in these parts, and the tracks do not add up. Is it murder instead? Things get complicated as witnesses cry foul and more bodies pile up, including the reappearance of someone already dead. Thankfully, Reid has the help of the local police chief out for one last big case. He is also joined by a beautiful motel keeper and by his faithful dog Sam. But with gold on the line, the danger might come too fast and furious for our four heroes.

Chief Reid Bennett and his ';super-sleuth' dog tackle the crimes of Murphy's Harbor in this ';fairly sturdy, small-town tale, with quiet appeal' (Kirkus Reviews). In tiny Murphy's Harbour, where Reid Bennett serves as the one man police force, questions and dead bodies tend to pile up all at once. The morning starts with Reid chasing off a gang of threatening teens with a baseball bat. Minutes later, Reid learns that a bank robber might be headed his way looking for vengeance. But the day does not really start rolling until Reid finds a dead woman in the trunk of a waterlogged car. What follows is a fast paced thriller involving rich lawyers, a questionable movie producer, and quite a few shifting identities. Everyone seems to be circling everyone else in a complicated orbit of sex and money. Can all these events be tied together?

A crime spree ends in murder for Canadian police chief Reid Bennett, ';one of the most interesting series whodunit heroes of the decade' (Chicago Sun-Times). There is no rest tonight for Reid Bennett, police chief of tiny Murphy's Harbor in Canada. Not if he keeps getting phone calls, that is. The first comes in from Amy Wilson. She's been brutally attacked on her arrival home from play rehearsal. The second has Reid breaking up a fight at a bar called Murphy's Arms. But the third call, about a dead body, is when things get complicated. The body belongs to one of the night's bar brawlers, an American tourist now stabbed to death in the road. It seems like there is an obvious murder suspect until another body shows up in the lake. Are these murders and the attack somehow intertwined? Reid must wade carefully through the evidence and the witnesses, all the while juggling pressure from a hostile city council and unwelcome reporters. Add in the town play, bear baiters, and American evangelicals, and Reid has his hands more than full. Thankfully, he has got his dog Sam by his side.

Dirty money draws Canadian police chief Reid Bennett and his dog south of the border, where they come up against racism, the moband murder. Canadian police chief Reid Bennett is back with his faithful dog Sam by his side. This time, the case takes them across the border to Chambers, Vermont, where an old buddy needs Reid's help. Doug Ford, a black policeman in the all white town, has been charged with murdering the attractive bookkeeper of a local ski resort. Only Reid believes Doug's story that he and the woman were working together to investigate an entrenched money laundering conspiracy. But as new bodies pile up and the mafia rears its ugly head, things start to fall in line with Doug's story. Can Reid untangle the mystery before more blood gets shed? He will have to act fastan unseen hand seems willing to stop at nothing to keep its secrets safe.

This gripping crime thriller pits ';the most savvy cop currently in the genre' and his police dog against a band of mercenaries (Library Journal). Reid Bennett, police chief of tiny Murphy's Harbour in Canada, is looking forward to a month's vacation. He plans to spend time with his girlfriend, Freda, and he might even get to go fishing with his dog, Sam. But then Norma Michaels, the wife of a rich businessman, turns up with a $25,000 offer: Find her twenty year old son, Jason. He has run off with some mercenaries to train for overseas service and she is afraid she has lost him forever. Even though he is of age, she wants him found, and she will pay handsomely. The mercenaries call themselves Freedom for Hire, and their leader is a cashiered sergeant from the British paratroopers who now styles himself Colonel George Dunphy. He was court martialed for brutality, forced out of the service, and stands ready to brutalize a bunch of young men while stealing their pay. Since people like Dunphy annoy Reid, he decides to take the jobdespite the minor risk of a few ex SAS men with automatic weaponsbut he is more worried that the boy will not want to come home when he is found. There are lots of questions to be answered when he and his German shepherd head north on the hunt for a few good (or maybe bad) men.

This ';inside account captures the energyand the madnessof the software giant's race to develop a critical new program. ... Gripping' (Fortune Magazine).Showstopperis the dramatic, inside story of the creation of Windows NT, told byWall Street Journalreporter G. Pascal Zachary. Driven by the legendary David Cutler, a picked band of software engineers sacrifices almost everything in their lives to build a new, stable, operating system aimed at giving Microsoft a platform for growth through the next decade of development in the computing business. Comparable in many ways to the Pulitzer Prizewinning bookThe Soul of a New Machineby Tracy Kidder,Showstoppergets deep inside the process of software development, the lives and motivations of coders and the pressure to succeed coupled with the drive for originality and perfection that can pull a diverse team together to create a program consisting of many hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

A wife and mother grapples with love and loss in World War IIera Hollywood, in a New York Timesbestselling author's emotional tour de force. For two decades, Elizabeth Herlong has been a devoted Hollywood wife, supporting her husband as he built an empire in the budding motion picture industry. But far from the bright glamour of her current life, World War II rages in Europe, forcing Elizabeth to remember her past, awakening feelings and longings she thought she would never experience again. Most of all, she fears for her eldest son, who turns eighteen in less than a year and will have to enlist in the army. Then one night, Elizabeth's husband introduces her to a German screenwriter he's been working with. Erich Kessler is a disabled veteran of World War I attempting to make a new life for himself. Something in his face stirs Elizabeth's heartsetting her on a journey of discovery about the meaning of true love and the things that war cannot destroy. Made into a film starring Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles, and Natalie Wood, this is a novel of a woman haunted by the shadows of war both past and present, from the New York Timesbestselling author of JubileeTrail, Deep Summer, and other acclaimed novels.

The first novel by Newbery Awardwinning author Nancy Willard: A stunning story of magic and miracles, and a testament to the enduring power of faith and loveBen and Willie Harkissian are twin brothers (think Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau) growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the eve of World War II. A baseball launched into the October sky sets in motion a series of events that transforms many lives. Ben leaves for the front and faces deathfiguratively as well as literally. Left behind is Clare Bishop, who has been paralyzed from the waist down. But in exchange she receives some very special gifts. She can see the future, be at one with animals, and chat with Death. Willie Harkissian remains in Michigan as well, though his relationship with his brother will never be the same.A love story interrupted by war, this is also a novel about discovering the ordinary in the extraordinary and finding the miraculous in everyday life.

Selections from Nancy Willard's acclaimed volumes of poetry and proseThis diverse collection features some of Nancy Willard's most critically lauded poetryincluding works from her Newbery Medalwinning volume,A Visit to William Blake's Innas well as her short fiction and four unconventional essays on writing.Hens, children, magic bottles, and the moon are just some of the characters running through the luminous musings gathered here. ';How to Stuff a Pepper' becomes a heady discourse on the thoughts and sleeping habits of peppers. ';The Doctrine of the Leather-Stocking Jesus' and ';The Hucklebone of a Saint' are tales about the power of superstition to shape our lives. Other stories showcase favorite Willard themes about God, religion, and the magic and mysticism in everyday lifeand the ancestors, guardians, saints, and spirits who, in Willard's words, come back ';once in a while to keep an eye on us, the living.'A paean to the power of storytelling,A Nancy Willard Readeris an essential volume for poetry and fiction lovers.

From the award-winning author ofMinor Characterscomes a haunting novel about the persistence of love and the sustaining and destabilizing power of memoriesIn the vibrant downtown Manhattan art world of the 1960s, where men and women collide in ';lucky and unlucky convergences,' a series of love affairs has left Joanna Gold, a young photographer, feeling numbed. Then, at yet another party, a painter named Tom Murphy walks up to her. ';Why do you hang back?' he asks.Rather than another brief collision, their relationship is the profound and ecstatic love each had longed to find. But it's undermined by Tom's harrowing pasthis fatherless childhood, his wartime experiences, and most of all, the loss of the two children he left behind in Florida, along with the powerful red, white, and black paintings he will never set eyes on again. Tom, both tender and volatile, draws Joanna into the unwinnable struggle against the forces that drive him toward death.Once again, Joyce Johnson brings to life a mythic bohemian world where art is everything and life is as full of intensity and risk as the bold sweep of a painter's brush across a canvas.A New York Times Notable BookExcerpted in theNew YorkerandHarper's Magazine

The award-winning author ofMinor Characterswrites with delicious transparency about a love that cannot be harnessed and a woman who refuses to be deceivedIn the great wave of husband-leaving ushered in by the Sexual Revolution, Molly Held frees herself from her cold, flagrantly unfaithful husband after their final quarrel turns violent. With her five-year-old son, she lights out for an Upper West Side apartment and the new life she hopes to find with Conrad Schwartzbergthe charismatic radical lawyer who has recently become her lover. Having escaped from a desert, she lands in a swamp.While Conrad radiates positive energy, he is unable to tell Mollyor anyone who loves himthe truth. No longer the wronged wife, Molly now finds herself the Other Woman. She is sharing Conrad with Roberta, another refugee from marriagewith Conrad's movements between the two of them disguised by his suspiciously frequent out-of-town engagements.Roberta either knows nothing or prefers to look the other way, but Molly's maddening capacity for double vision takes over her mind. What saves her from herself is her well-developed sense of irony, which never fails heror the reader.

Paul Monette's uproarious, sexy novel takes us deep into the glamorous world of vintage Los AngelesPerched on top of a hill in the oldest part of Bel Air, Crook House is the grand mansion that gilded Hollywood dreams are made of. It seemed like the perfect place for the exhausted and neurotic Rita to take time away from her life and catch up with her old friend Peter and his lover, Nick. What she didn't count on was her friends' emotional baggage, not to mention the suspicious tales of a buried treasure underneath the house.This second novel from Paul Monette puts a tender focus on the ways in which money and time can distort relationships, while also demonstrating how the ties between friends can endureand even grow strongerno matter what the distance or history. As Rita, Nick, and Peter get closer to unraveling the mystery buried underneath Crook House, they begin to learn that what they are searching for could be the key to their very survival.This ebook features an illustrated biography of Paul Monette including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the Paul Monette papers of the UCLA Library Special Collections.

College friends Lucy and Katherine reunite as adultsand build a new friendship as changed womenKatherine shows up at Lucy's Manhattan doorstep having run away from the marriage altar. Lucy isn't thrilled to see her former sorority sisterher own life as a children's book illustrator is complicated enough, especially as she may be falling out of love with her boyfriend. Along with Lucy's oddball best friend, Julia, the women tackle the complicated challenge of being young, lost, and in search of life in New York City.Something Blueis a heartfelt but never sentimental modern classic, capturing three women on the verge of the future, still figuring out the past, and trying to solve the present all at once. A novel that addresses friendship, ambition, and love head on,Something Blueand its three heroines head in surprising directions in their search for meaning.

The powerful story of an unlikely friendship and a doctor's re-education on the battlefields of the Vietnam WarFresh out of medical school and planning to enter academia, David pragmatically applies to serve in the US Army, thinking he would rather work in a stateside military hospital than get drafted. But when he gets reassigned to Southeast Asia, he suddenly finds himself on a base in Vietnam. He joins a civilian aid mission on a supposedly secure plateau, and spends his days dispensing pills to villagers. As David comes to terms with the unexpected factors that brought him to Vietnam, he must adjust to many more twists and turnsamong them his relationship with his driver, Tom, a young, rough-hewn Southerner whose reticence feels unnervingly like indifference.Gradually, however, David sees that there's far more to Tom than he initially thought. As their friendship grows, David also realizes that his fellow doctors and the troops on base hold widely diverging opinions about the war and its objectives. As it becomes clear that their base is located on a key strategic routethe notorious Ho Chi Minh Trailand thus a vulnerable target, it's only a matter of time before battles break out . . .

In Grand Master of crime fiction Dorothy Salisbury Davis's second Mrs. Norris novel, which theNew York Timeshailed as ';tensely perplexing,' the crime-solving Scottish housekeeper helps crack the case of a serial lady-killer As housekeeper to James Jarvis's recently deceased father, a retired major general of the US Army, Mrs. Norris has raised Jimmie since boyhood. Now the Wall Street lawyer faces a challenging case. The son of one of the firm's old blue-blood clients has been slapped with a paternity suit. But Teddy Adkins swears he never slept with the woman. Meanwhile, Mrs. Norris is miffed when her gentleman friend Jasper Tully, the widowed chief investigator for the Manhattan DA's office, cancels one dinner date after another because a real estate magnate has been found strangled in the bedroom of her Upper East Side apartment. Jewelry was stolen, but there are no signs of a break-in. Tully's investigation turns up a trail of strangulations that extends all the way to the Midwest. As Mrs. Norris pursues her own unorthodox investigation, she uncovers a shocking link between the cases that threatens her very life.A Gentleman Called, a finalist for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award, is the second novel in Dorothy Salisbury Davis's Mrs. Norris Mysteries, which also includeDeath of an Old Sinner,Old Sinners Never Die, and ';Mrs. Norris Observes,' a short story in the collectionTales for a Stormy Night.A Gentleman Called is the 2nd book in the Mrs. Norris Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Grand Master of crime fiction Dorothy Salisbury Davis brings back the beguiling character Major General Ransom Jarvis in this third Mrs. Norris Mystery, a prequel, which immerses the redoubtable crime-solving Scottish housekeeper in a murder investigation in the nation's capital With a new president in the White House, Major General Ransom Jarvis suspects that his retirement from the US Army is imminent. But at Washington's annual invitation-only Beaux Arts Ball, the decorated soldier becomes an unwitting pawn in a far-reaching conspiracy. It begins when Ransom meets Virginia Allan, a beautiful blonde with secrets. And there is something decidedly shady about Frenchman Leo Montaigne. As Ransom starts to uncover damning intel about DC's most powerful movers and shakers, the town is suddenly rocked by murder. Now Ransom's son, Jimmie, a freshman congressman, and his housekeeper, Mrs. Norris, are risking their necks as they conduct their own fact-finding mission in a city rife with patriots, spies, and deadly political wannabes.Old Sinners Never Dieis the third novel in Dorothy Salisbury Davis's Mrs. Norris Mysteries, which also includeDeath of an Old Sinner;A Gentleman Called, a finalist for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award; and ';Mrs. Norris Observes,' a short story in the collectionTales for a Stormy Night.Old Sinners Never Die is the 3rd book in the Mrs. Norris Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

A Grand Master of crime fiction, Dorothy Salisbury Davis introduces the redoubtable crime-solving Scottish housekeeper Mrs. Norris in this thrilling tale of family secrets and murder General Ransom Jarvis is writing his memoirs about a distinguished career that spanned five continents and three wars. Along the way, he stumbles upon a scandal about a philandering ancestorAmerica's ambassador to England who went on to become president of the United States. But a very clear and present danger embroils the irascible retired general in a deepening quagmire of deceit, fraud, and murder. Enter Mrs. Norris, the housekeeper who has been almost a mother to Ransom's son since he was a boy. Jimmie is currently running for governor of New York and enjoying his budding relationship with sculptor Helene Joyce. A sudden death changes everything, plunging Jimmie and Mrs. Norris into a bizarre case headed up by Jasper Tully, chief investigator for the Manhattan district attorney's office. With more lives at stake, the trio follows lead after lead into a web of crime that only the canny housekeeper can clean up in the nick of time.Death of an Old Sinneris the first novel in Dorothy Salisbury Davis's Mrs. Norris Mysteries, which also includeA Gentleman Called, a finalist for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award;Old Sinners Never Die; and ';Mrs. Norris Observes,' a short story in the collectionTales for a Stormy Night.Death of an Old Sinner is the 1st book in the Mrs. Norris Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

The acclaimed author ofTo Sir, With Loverecalls his lifelong struggle against ignorance and racism while sharing a train ride with a bigoted white neighborOn a commuter train traveling from New Canaan, Connecticut, to New York's Grand Central Station, a well-heeled white suburbanite reluctantly takes the only available seat and eventually strikes up a conversation with the black man sitting next to him. The white businessman's verbal barrage of insensitive questions and offensive remarks incites a rage in his black neighbor that can barely be suppressed. But the offended rider is E. R. Braithwaiteformer Royal Air Force pilot, Cambridge graduate, schoolteacher, social worker, diplomat, and bestselling authorand he has triumphed over prejudice and hatred throughout his truly extraordinary life and multifaceted career.Against the backdrop of a short railway commute, E. R. Braithwaite powerfully recounts a personal history of remarkable accomplishments in the face of bigotry and hatred. Part memoir, part treatise on racial intolerance and oppression, and the ignorance that engenders them,Reluctant Neighborsis the unforgettable story of one man's continuous struggle against injustice and his unwavering dedication to the pursuit of human dignity.