Mostrando resultados por autor "Larry Vardiman" en Todas las categorías

Starbuck is a Rainmaker, not Coffee. A rainmaker with the name of Starbuck in a movie from the '50s starring Burt Lancaster and Katherine Hepburn arrives in a small western town and, for a fee, offers to end a drought that's plaguing the ranchers and farmers. He offers to seed the clouds with his secret chemicals. Starbuck is a bigger than life figure who promises, "Rain in buckets, rain in barrels, rain in the lowlands, flood in the gullies, and the land will be as green as the Valley of Adam." Starbuck, a swindler and charlatan, eventually brings rain to the parched land and hope to a ...

Mr. Dillon, Mr. Dillon. Somebody Done Got Kilt! Dodge City, Kansas was a major rail hub for shipping cattle to market in Kansas City and Chicago during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It lies in south central Kansas on the Arkansas River and the old Santa Fe Trail. The radio and television program, Gunsmoke, was created there. Today's sleepy remnant of that once bustling western town hosts a replica of Old Dodge with live re-enactors playing Marshall Dillon and his friends, Chester, Doc, and Kitty. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear as Bordeau and Bristol arrive in ...

An Exciting Life Requires the Right Hat. Larry led nine lives - Air Force officer, graduate student, cloud seeder, research scientist, college professor, science writer, creationist speaker, tour guide, and novelist. Each of these careers provided unique tales that are begging to be told. Larry's Tales is a compilation of adventures most readers would prefer to experience from the safety of their easy chair; experiences shared with friends to exciting destinations; and favorite jokes. A few stories are humorous, some embarrassing, and others downright scary. At the end of this collection of...

Curtis: Kelly’s Imaginary Brother Who Lived Under the House Curtis lived under the house. He was an imaginary older brother who was created in the fertile mind of Kelly. She was the second daughter of the Vardiman family. Kelly needed a playmate after her older sister began kindergarten. Curtis appeared and became her imaginary playmate. Kelly only revealed her new friend to her brothers and sisters as the family grew. But Curtis' presence was carefully hidden from the adults. He became a friend to all the kids and was a leader for many of their adventures.

Fly Me to the Moon Hana's a sixth grader at the Tree of Life Preparatory School in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She and her friend, Phillip have taken an interest in NASA's space program because of Mrs. Livingston's science class. They went to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC together with her dad and got to met James Lovell an astronaut on the Apollo Eight and Thirteen Missions. Because of her increasing interest in space she went to Space Camp and then to the Kennedy Space Center. Come with Hana as she meets new friends and experiences what space is like.

He Will Have Two Horns Like a Lamb Renaldo, the childhood friend of Maurice Bordeau, recently became a Cardinal at the Vatican. He asks Bordeau and his detective agency to help investigate activities in the Vatican to see if there's any truth to the rumors that Pope Francis is organizing a global political/religious federation. Unfortunately, the rumors seem to be true. The Pope is building a robotic creature, called the Beast, and creating a biometric financial system called Diablo that mirrors some of the frightening scenarios of the End Times prophesied in the Bible. Renaldo asks Bordeau...

Empires Come and Go. Will This One Be the Last? Maurice Bordeau and his team of investigators are returning home to London after touring America, Europe, and Israel for eighteen months of sabbatical leave from Scotland Yard. Before Bordeau and Bristol get settled they're assigned to investigate an attempted shooting of Prince Charles as he was horseback riding in Hyde Park. Horatio Hornbladt, Chief Investigator with MI6, joins them to meet with the Prince and provides preliminary information that he's already uncovered. Bordeau and Bristol begin their own investigation that finds an ...

Gog, I will put hooks into your jaws Mossad Agent Abe Gagin returns from Iran with the unsettling news that Russia plans to push back against NATO and the West by invading Eastern Europe. Even worse news is that Russia has already started the offensive by moving into Ukraine. Abe meets with the B4 Detectives he hired earlier to solve the murders of Israeli leaders in the book, Israel Besieged. He assigns Bordeau and Katherine to travel by train from Istanbul to Stockholm and scouting for evidence that the Russians are coming. Bristol and Cindy will travel through Turkey and Iran looking for...

Mount Zion, the city of the great King! After taking a Mediterranean cruise for their honeymoon the B4 Detective Agency is looking forward to a three-week tour of Israel. They'd barely gotten settled in Haifa before Bordeau's friend and Mossad Agent, Abe Gagin, recruited them to solve the murder of three high-ranking Israeli officials. They investigate the murders and an attempt on the Prime Minister's life while simultaneously touring Israel. By the end of the first week they learn that Iran planned the killings and chatter in the intelligence community hints that the King of the North may...

Alas, poor Charles, I knew you well. Bordeau and Bristol have arrived in London after traveling for a year in America. They return home with not only many wonderful memories but two wives. They met Katherine, Bordeau's wife, and Cindy, Bristol's wife in Dodge City, Kansas the previous summer as they were heading back to England. They were married by the captain of the Queen Mary on their way from New York to London and are now jockeying for dominance in their new relationships. At the same time Bordeau and Bristol are asked to solve murders at Westminster Abbey and a break-in at the ...

Were Our Founders White Supremacists? Roger Steele, a Charlottesville FBI Agent and long-time friend of Bordeau"s, requests that Bordeau and Bristol help stop the local Antifa group from burning down Monticello. Antifa wants to make a political statement that America is racist and elitist since its founding. Bordeau identifies the leaders of the radical movement and develops a plan to capture them to prevent Monticello from being burnt. Coincidental to the investigation, the two confirmed bachelors become infatuated with two ladies from France they met the month before in Dodge City, Kansas...

A Smooth Sea Never Made a Skilled Sailor Bordeau and Bristol end their year-long tour of America and return to England in this suspenseful romantic comedy, murder mystery. They've become infatuated with two women from Marseilles, France. The unlikely suitors attend plays and concerts in New York with their new girl friends, Katherine and Cindy, before departing for home. Friendship turns to love and Bordeau and Bristol decide to propose marriage at the top of the Empire State Building. After they learn how to properly say, I love you, and clear up a few misunderstandings, the Captain of the...

Hurricanes are Full of Sound and Fury On their way to New York and finally home to London Bordeau and Bristol's train intercepts Hurricane Jaye, a category five storm, on the Amtrak Crescent through Louisiana. They're forced to seek refuge at the L'AuBerge Lake Charles Resort along with other train passengers and tourists trapped in the hotel. On the first night someone's murdered in the room above by someone driven mad by the incessant sound of the one hundred fifty-mph wind. Bordeau and Bristol volunteer to assist the hotel manager investigate the murders and attempt to rescue the crazed ...

Could One Bomb Turn Off the Lights? Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico is about to test its latest design for protecting the Nation's electrical grid from an electromagnetic pulse by a nuclear explosion at high altitude. The design is to be tested over Bikini Island in the western Pacific by dropping an atomic bomb from a B-2 Spirit Bomber based at Whiteman AFB in Missouri. Bordeau and Bristol are tasked by the head of security, Joseph Warbucks, a former student of Bordeau's at Scotland Yard, to find the nest of spies stealing highly classified secrets about the design ...

The Big Boom Dreaded by All Mid-Eastern terrorists smuggle a dirty bomb through a tunnel under the border from Tijuana, Mexico with the intent of spreading death and destruction to millions of people living in Southern California. The terrorists come from five different Muslim countries to exact revenge on the infidels who defiled Muslim lands with their prescence. The plan is to bring as much pain and suffering to the West Coast as the New York Towers attack did to the East Coast. Two American Border Patrol agents are killed when they discover the smuggling operation. Bordeau and Bristol ...

Will socialism replace capitalism? Three Starbucks coffee shops near Washington Square in Lower Manhattan are firebombed early on Saturday morning of a march and rally by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The bombings are intended to start a revolution to replace capitalism with socialism. During the rally rumors are circulated that a 'Big Surprise' is expected somewhere in Manhattan later that afternoon. Only a few members of the DSA know that the surprise is to be the destruction of one of the Trump towers. They plan to float a nuclear weapon under the building through one of ...

All Babies Go to Heaven. Will Seniors?Why are hundreds of seniors in the Denver metropolitan area disappearing? Bordeau and Bristol receive an invitation from the Denver Police Department to assist in the investigation and must decide if they're willing to forgo part of their travels around America to help. Of course, Bordeau always wants to lend a hand, but neither he nor Bristol anticipate the abominable scheme they uncover in Denver. Bordeau invites a reporter from the Denver Post to help, in return for publishing the scheme on the front page of his newspaper. They discover that a new ...

Chairmen Don’t Die, Just Lose their Faculties Bodies of professors from UCLA are turning up in strange places - one in the Le Brea Tar Pits in central LA, another at the Getty Villa near Malibu, and a third in the Avalon Ballroom on Catalina. The second and third were posed to represent some bizarre parody of the victim's teaching specialty. Bordeau and Bristol are requested by their friend, Professor Bixler, Chairman of the UCLA History Department, to assist the LAPD investigate who's killing off members of his department and why. The motive is difficult to determine and, as the clues ...

How High Does the Villainy Go? A group of religious universities and seminaries in St. Louis are being vandalized by a local Antifa group. Bordeau is requested by his friend Luis, a priest at St. Louis University, to find out why the schools are being targeted. An ecumenical council of presidents from several schools wants to know what can be done to stop the culprits. The attackers began by spray painting threats and hate symbols on campus buildings and soon graduated to firebombing a dormitory and some buses. A student was killed at the university and fear spread that the violence would ...

Foreign diplomats are frozen to death clinging to the sides of Chicago skyscrapers, the Chairman of the Economics Department at the University of Chicago is drowned in the Chicago River at the foot of the Sears Tower, and executives from several social media giants in California are tossed off the Golden Gate Bridge. A 'turf war' of sorts has broken out between the faculties at the University of Chicago and the University of California Berkeley over the issue of nationalism versus globalism; borders or no borders; sovereignty or subjection. The celebrated international investigative duo ...