The time was 1959. Walter was a cook at Dawson's Famous Seafood Restaurant supporting his tubercular wife in an inland sanatorium and their daughter, who lived with her mother's parents. He was a loner who minded his own business until Corinne came to work as a waitress and he saw a chance to grab a little moment of happiness with her. But Corinne was a lodestone for dangerous men and he was on a collision course with disaster. "A nearly lost masterpiece is discovered ... modern Southern Gothic," says Shirrel Rhoades, former fiction editor for The Saturday Evening Post.

If the armadillo hadn't crossed the moonlit road at that specific moment in 1967, the newlywed couple would not have died in a car crash. The 3092 search algorithm would not have substituted a perfect clone for the husband in the moment of his fiery death. He would not have been taken out of Time to be trained for a lethal mission by the last, best leader of the Terran Service. But the rule of unintended consequences governs. Cascading anomalies proliferated around that moment on the moonlit highway and the orderly flow of Time would never be the same ... if it ever was to start with.

Up in the Pacific Northwest, folks whisper about big hairy human-like creatures they call skooks. Others might refer to them as sasquatch, or Big Foot. A down-on-his-luck ex-newspaperman lives there on the plateau with his family, not far from the Gorge where strange sightings take place. When his son is kidnapped by one of these mysterious creatures, he hunts it down and retrieves his son. But according to an old mountaineer known as Joe Consonant, the boy is "marked" and the mysterious visitors will come back for him. Is a 30.06, a trusty dog, and an elephant bell enough to protect his...

The seventies in Seattle: XXX-rated theatres on First Avenue and a dramatic economic meltdown that swamped the street activism of the sixties and led to the famous billboard lament: Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights. The blonde with blatant curves sheathed in a green wool dress hired Eddie Hummel for a job that seemed nuttier than a boatload of pecans headed for Brazil. But it was too wet in the Rainy City for any husbands to be straying, and his creditors were making strained noises in their collection departments. Before it was over he would be knee-deep in...

Bill Burkett has spent a good portion of his life hunting ducks. All the while he kept personal diaries that describe those memorable outings along with recalling the high points of his journalistic career. If you are a duck hunter you're sure to identify with the exhilaration of these tales of being out in the fresh air with a good dog and a gun.

"Immolation of someone else's diary was not how I had planned to start my day - it was a mean grey old morning, but I didn't know then that was what to call it ..." From surveillance of a yellow convertible in South Carolina to conversation with a streetwalker on Sunset Boulevard to a visit to Hemingway's grave in Idaho, the writer builds a mural of life in the last half of the twentieth century.