Town Manager

This is the story of a local government manager who got hired by a small mountain town in the Colorado Rocky Mountains in his first city manager job. The job got complicated from the first day and developed into more and more complexity.

I guess trying to catch the bus with your laces undone isn’t such a smart decision after all… One fatal collision later, and I’m facing my judgment. As it turns out, I’ve been a lazy sob, and my short, uneventful life of playing games and getting up late wasn’t worth much. And so I don’t qualify to move on to the afterlife. I try to argue to the goddess in front of me that I do have skills, that it was hard work playing those simulation and management games. But she will not concede. In the end, I manage to get the benefit of the doubt, and a wager is made. 

Odette Marchetti counted the floors of the Prosper Building on her way up every morning for twelve years. One at the landing. Two at the turn. Three where the fixture hums. Four at the roof hatch, which stayed locked, because she carried the key. On a Tuesday in April the leasing packet came back in the mail. Unit 3C, the corner loft with the good windows. Twelve hundred and forty a month, six hundred under the rate Odette had set herself in January with a tape measure and three comparables. Tenant, twenty-six years old. Emergency contact, C. Marchetti, at a cell number Odette had been ...

They don't use my name here. They call me the operator. The last one lasted nine weeks. I have one season to make a failing Montana guest lodge earn a dead man's tax payment, and my contract ends the day I succeed. That isn't the tragedy. That's the arrangement. It's every arrangement I have ever had. Four properties. Fourteen years. I have never once unpacked. Soren Halvorsen voted against hiring me. Five to one. He runs the cattle, raises his daughter alone, and has spent all spring making sure I know which side of the fence is his. Then a calving goes wrong at four in the morning. Three ...

A resort manager who chose loyalty over love. Her ex-lover who's now her competitor. A second-chance small-town romance decades in the making. Emmaline Brown has spent decades hoping her ex would become soft in the middle (and hopefully bald), anything to take away from his dashing smile. So when she discovers the years have left him annoyingly intact, she's less than thrilled. To add insult to injury, he's the new manager of her family resort's main competitor, which is right on Emmaline's doorstep. Miles McClintock lost everything in one honest decision, including his family's honor and ...

I couldn't put this book down. Loved the characters and what a thrill to have it in Scotland! Bookbub reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ WAS Aunt Claire murdered? When Daisy (a 5' 2" judo black belt) suggests Aunt Claire's death may have been more than an accident - her best friend, a recently bequeathed hotel owner, is sceptical. But as they dig through local gossip and investigate further, Sam and Daisy become aware that something more sinister is afoot. Can they uncover the truth before the murderer strikes again? If you enjoy gentle "who-dun-it"s, you'll love The Murder Hotel. Follow Daisy and ...

Manager Kenjiro Tanaka has successfully transformed the Plum Blossom Bathhouse into the beating heart of a booming frontier town, but his pristine establishment is about to face its greatest threat yet: the Imperial Revenue Service. When a corrupt High Auditor arrives with an army of heavily armored Sentinels and a fraudulent four-million-gold tax assessment designed to force a hostile takeover, Kenjiro must use an S-Rank rubber eraser and his absolute sanitation skills to literally scrub the magical extortion from the ledgers. The administrative nightmare quickly escalates into a full-...

Sixty-six million years. One season to get her out of the ground. Dean Callahan spent the last decade keeping a rock band alive on the road. Now the doctors have handed him a number, and Dean has gone home — to forty-two thousand acres of Montana shortgrass, a family he hasn't told yet, and the woman he left at the rim of Dino Valley half a lifetime ago. Then a spring storm peels open a cutbank, and Dean's flashlight finds a skull five feet long — matching the biggest ever found. A Tyrannosaurus rex, nearly complete, beyond price, and impossible to keep secret. Because Silas Krueger has...

She inherited a ranch. He came with it. Neither expected to fall in love. When Liv Hartley returns to Maple Creek, Montana for her grandmother's funeral, she has one plan: fulfill the will's requirements, sell the ranch, and get back to her real life in Seattle. Six months managing a property she knows nothing about? She can do that standing on her head. What she didn't count on was Donovan Reed. Grumpy, gorgeous, and convinced she's just another city girl playing cowgirl, Donovan has been running the Hartley Ranch for three years. He loved Liv's grandmother like family, and he's not about ...

The brutal transition from winter to spring brings the ultimate enemy to the Plum Blossom Bathhouse: a town-wide plague of highly adhesive, unsanitary mud. To combat this infrastructural nightmare and enforce a strict dress code of clean cotton yukatas, Manager Kenjiro Tanaka and his mercantile partner Isabella organize a massive Hot Springs Festival. However, their logistical masterpiece is interrupted when the Demon Lord dispatches the terrifying Second Legion, led by the ruthless Orc Warlord Gorefang, to burn Springwater to the ground. Fortunately, military discipline is no match for the...

College student Ada has found the one thing that really revs her engine: Coffee. And she's found the perfect coffee shop in Perk Me Up. She likes the baristas, the other customers, and she especially likes their lattes. She likes it so much, she decides to apply for a job. But that's when the perfect brew turns cold. The owner of the place, Nate, is a real pain in the coffeepot. He's a bit older than Ada, a bit wiser, but a whole lot grumpier. But on top of those hunched, overworked shoulders is a big brain with big dreams. His secrets threaten to take the whole café down with him if he ...

Some doors don't need a lock to keep the truth out. Three months after the tragedy at Rancho Sereno, Maren Ostlund has started over as the manager of Aspen Hollow, a gated mountain community tucked into the pines outside Flagstaff, Arizona. It's supposed to be a fresh start. Quiet, orderly, far from anything resembling danger. Then an early ice storm knocks out power during the community's Winter Gala, and by morning, the HOA treasurer is found dead inside the Ice House, a historic stone building that's been serving, for years, as the community's private wine cellar. The door was barred ...

When a wary wedding planner and a people-pleasing mayor clash over a historic noise ordinance, their enemies-to-lovers battle might just rewrite the rules of romance. Paige There are exactly forty-two things that can go wrong at a wedding, and I track them all in my color-coded spreadsheet. Opening The Vow, our new Pacific Northwest venue, is my chance to prove that perfect planning prevents heartbreak. But when Juniper Springs' infuriatingly charming mayor delivers a century-old noise ordinance that threatens my marquee event, my perfectly scheduled life spirals into chaos. Ben Calloway is...

Do you know how to lead a project that someone else started? You know taking over an existing project is not the same as starting from scratch. Despite a recent global survey revealing that 67% of projects finish with a different Project Manager that they started with, almost all Project Management methodologies and books assume a fresh project start. The reality is that few PMs have full control over the triple constraints (scope/quality, budget, and schedule) when joining an existing project team. Are you frustrated by PM books that assume that the PM has a blank canvas, when most of the ...

Bradley “Blum” Bloom never wanted to be the band’s accidental manager. He just wanted everyone to stop making things worse. Kenny Whitman never wanted to be a headline, either—but as Dalton’s mayor, he’s learned that leadership means taking the hit first. When label pressure escalates into a full-blown showdown and the paparazzi come back louder, Dalton’s peace becomes collateral damage. Blum is forced into public negotiations he hates, and Kenny is forced to defend a town that refuses to be turned into content. They’re both competent. They’re both exhausted. And they’re...

Enjoy this sweet firemen novel by small-town romance author Erin K. Wright… A man of integrity with a heart of gold… Everyone in Sawyer expects Moose Garrett to woo and wed the town beauty queen. Moose’s parents have all but signed a marriage contract with the revered patriarch of another wealthy Sawyer family. Moose wants to do the right thing. Really. But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s had a secret crush on Georgia Rowland since high school. It’s not like he would ever act on it, though. He knows Georgia is strictly off limits. But matters of the heart are about as ...