Sweeping changes have taken place in many parts of the world in the provision and organization of health care, welfare, and other "public" services. The UK's National Health Service (NHS) has been a prime example of this. This book presents a detailed analysis of these changes, focusing in particular on the management and organization, and strengths and weaknesses of the "contract" culture.

Robert Flynn's second novel tracks a day in the life of Pat Shahan, minister of a Protestant church in a large city. Young, devout, and honest, Shahan seeks revelation--and is offered a revolving neon cross for the church steeple; he seeks vision--and gets a pep talk from the church treasurer. Striving to serve the Lord, he is dragged into a "Great Crusade" which is nothing more than a publicity stunt that ends disastrously. Shahan's day sees him ministering to the sick and dying, pacifying angry parishioners and counseling troubled ones, seeking inspiration for a sermon, trying to calm his...

Hyenas are scavengers and predators. They prey on the weak and the helpless and even their fellow predators, the lions. Like lions, the people in Robert Flynn's stories learn to make accommodations to the hyenas and to a society that tolerates them. Sometimes accommodation is painful, as in "A Boy and His Dog," the story of a Marine and his dog trained to sniff out mines and booby-traps in the Vietnam War.
Sometimes the process of accommodation is comic, bringing out Flynn's characteristic wit, as in "At Play in the Sewers of the Lord," which juxtaposes theology and sewage treatment. But...

What if post-Soviet Union Russia sent biological warfare missiles to the United States, only this time the missiles were animals infected with a virulent form of rickettsia? That's the premise behind this suspense-filled novel from one of Texas' best-known authors.
Hunter Jacob Trace is peacefully trapping mountain lions miles away in the Big Bend when violent turbulence rocks a DC-10 on a cross-Atlantic flight. Just as Trace is unaware of the strange turns his life is about to take, the crew is unaware that three rare Siberian tigers in the hold, being sent to U.S. zoos in Houston, San...

Robert Flynn's new novel, Echoes of Glory centers on a fictitious Texas county that embraces its legends, but not its actual history. Set in the Reagan era, the novel exposes shared myths as lies and the truth, lacking all comfort. In his inimitable style Flynn paints a portrait of the denizens of the county who tacitly embrace the legend as all too human and all too frail. Overshadowed by the accomplishments of adjacent Doss County, Mills County clings to its legends--the legendary Mills brothers. One brother had died at the Alamo, one at Goliad, three had fought at San Jacinto. The three...

The tangled relationships of Robert Flynn's award- winning novel "Wanderer Springs" surface again in "Tie- Fast Country," this time centered around an elderly ranch woman, whose father raised her to be a cowboy, and her grandson, who doesn't know her and has been raised to hate her.
When Chance Carter, general manager of a TV station in Florida, gets a telephone call that his grandmother's health is failing and that he must do something about her, he knows only that he is heir to a million-dollar ranch and that his grandmother may have killed his grandfather and the man who was perhaps...