Julia Gateswood hires reluctant PI, Mike Angel, to find her missing sister, but Julia's social position and the sordid past of the sister make this anything but a simple case. Julia's a mysterious ex-beauty queen, who married for ambition to congressman Henry Gateswood, a charismatic ex-professor running for a vacated US Senate seat from Illinois in 1962. When Julia's sister Gail, a loose woman with past shady connections, disappears, Julia calls on private eye Mike Angel, who quickly learns his new employer isn't everything she seems to be, but what she is beyond a doubt is a great hypnotist...

In today's publishing world many writers can neither find nor afford a professional writer. The only editing such writers benefit from is self-editing. Fears argues against the common notion that an independent novelist must hire an editor to turn out a good novel and proposes writers learn the skill set of an editor. He points out the advantages a novelist has with his own work and how to avoid the "snow blindness" that often afflicts self-editing. He covers micro-level changes of editing at the word/phrase/sentence level, and macro-level revision of larger elements, such as characters,...

After Mike witnesses a barefoot bank robber who got away in a hail of bullets, an iron-fisted longshoreman union boss hires Mike to find the killer of his granddaughter, a loose-morals woman who slept with both sides of a labor war. A second murder confuses his case, but the bank robbery connects somehow with the murder. Even though directed not to pry into union affairs, every lead takes Mike there, in ever deeper danger, until he's shanghaied in a shipping container en route to Tokyo. His initial theory doesn't fit the limited evidence. Mike is tempted by three different women, one of whom...

Dark Jaws (Mike Angel Mystery series # 13) In 1972 Mike takes on a case searching for a stolen inheritance. The next day his dowager client is killed on a downtown Portland street. Clues she left leads Mike on a meandering case with murder, seduction and twists over three states, chasing a carnival con man and his stolen and counterfeit money. The finale carnival act involves a dangerous dance of death over an alligator tank. A twisted path takes Mike to Hardin Montana for the reenactment of Sitting Bull's victory over Custer at Little Big Horn. Along the way Mike learns his suspect is...

In what Mike hopes will be his last case, he eventually comes face to face with a man he believes is D.B. Cooper, the infamous hijacker of Northwest Airlines Flight 305 on Nov. 24, 1971. When Mike renovates an old house to begin a new career, he uncovers a shrouded corpse. The wrapper turns out to be the very parachute D.B. Cooper jumped with. The FBI at first confirms then denies it was Cooper's chute, revealing a cover-up dictated by the late J. Edgar Hoover. Mike is hired by the dead man's sister to find the killer. The case takes him to Canada and Montana to reunite with irrepressible...

Mike becomes embroiled in the Patty Hearst kidnap case when he discovers the missing man he seeks was invited to join the Symbionese Liberation Army, the ragtag revolutionary group who kidnapped Hearst. Mike navigates feelings for an admired female FBI agent and gets caught in the web of a voracious nymphomaniac, half-sister to the missing man. Mike doctors up murder scenes and chases links from the man-child movement to change age-of-consent laws, precursor to NAMBLA. The 15th in the series, set in Portland and Berkeley, California in 1974.