The Wilder Bunch

Terrorism comes to the rural Midwest heartland — can one ordinary man stop it? Islamist terrorists frame small-town Minnesotan Nat “Hack” Wilder for the murder of his friend Amir Mohammad. Hack must survive a January blizzard, elude the police and FBI, track down the real killers, infiltrate a terrorist gathering, and stop a terrorist attack on his nine-year-old daughter’s school. This is a suspenseful, fast-paced action thriller that is often disturbing, sometimes surprisingly funny, and always PC-indifferent.

Human traffickers have kidnapped 10-year-old Zarah to an alien desert. Frightened for her safety and disgusted by her captors’ plans for terrorist attacks on a nearby city, Zarah escapes in the dead of night and begins a dangerous trek across the wilderness. On her flight she encounters predators and helpers, smugglers and saints, threats and kindness. Meanwhile, friends of her murdered father go all out to find her and save her.

Professor Soren Pafko has made a life and career out of lying, conniving, manipulating, and abusing everyone in his path. So far, it’s working great: he’s Chair of his College’s Department of Comparative Literature; he’s leader of the local chapter of the Democratic Communists of America; and when he wants to cheat on his wife, he’s got his pick of women who think he’s the second coming of Che Guevara. But when he flunks local yokel Gus Dropo’s teenage son for a politically incorrect classroom comment, everything in Professor Pafko’s world begins to go hilariously wrong.

When Hack Wilder decides to recover the money stolen from a friend by an Internet scamming gang, it turns out that one of the victims may be his onetime musical mentor. The discovery propels Hack into a quest to reunite with the man who helped shape Hack’s life. The experience brings home to Hack the fundamental meanings of friendship, loyalty, and love.

High Jingo begins with a young couple in love “spelunking” in a cave that isn’t really a cave, but an abandoned mineshaft, a relic of a Gold Rush that wasn’t really a “rush” but more of a Gold Kerfuffle that never materialized. The couple is assisted by a beer-loving husky dog which eschews the normal protocols of an archaeological dig and willy-nilly unearths an artifact with Hebrew letters on it. And the reader thinks, “This is not your every-day story!”