Dancing to Mozart is a satire of Hollywood values and fantasies, Latin American dictatorships, Da Vinci Code conspirators, movie violence, magical realism, televangelists, mixed wrestling, extreme cosmetic surgery, and a host of other sensational idiocies that thrive on 21st century self-delusion. This whimsical contemporary "Candide" offers a trip through the world of out-of-control egos to a nal revelation of ordinary common sense. The send-up is a mix of shrewd perception, lampoon, and wacko action that includes the Society of the Crystal Skull, the Opus Dopus, a female wrestling Amazon...

In Flamingo Desires Laureen Metcalf, an African American journalist, uncovers a seventeen-million-dollar scandal in the politics of suburbia. Then one of the guilty politicians, Tom Flynn, is found dead in his office. Laureen stands to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, but she needs to find out if Flynn's death was a suicide or something else. Her secret informer, the suave political leader Frank Van Dam, once her boyfriend in high school, might have been using her to get at Flynn. Or maybe he'd just been trying to win her back. The man is a player, who crosses racial lines with ease, and is...