Private investigator Melodie Chang thinks her time is up when her doctor tells her, "I think you have ovarian cancer." It depresses her like nothing else ever has. She decides to tell her sister at the private school she operates. When she approaches the front door of the school, she sees a young man with a gun and she decides he is her way out. The kid is scared, nervous and it doesn't take Melodie long to realize he could easily put her out of her misery. She takes him away from the school and asks him to shoot her, but he's so scared of her that he can't. What happens because he is so...

Mike Wainwright's life is about to change radically. It starts when he is laid off as the Assistant Editor of the Riverside Post. He has worked for the newspaper for twenty-five years and it is all he knows. He goes home, tries to find something to do and winds up walking around his home. He picks up an index card, more out ennui than anything meaningful. As much as he wants to ignore it, he can't because the name is familiar. Ibrahim al-Sehedrin. He Googles the name and is reminded of a story that went national not quite a year before. He had strapped a bomb to himself, walked into a Las...