DIRTY WATER
A dark, high-octane, rock 'n' roll crime novel in the vein of Duane Swierczynski.
The FBI has just taken down James Gigante; crime boss of the crumbling city of Dirty Water and now everyone is gunning to fill the power vacuum.
Nolan Coll is an ex-Marine who has just accepted a two hundred thousand dollar contract to take out Big Bernie, author of one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in history and is currently incarcerated. Jessica, Gigante’s estranged wife, is trying to escape Dirty Water with her life and her lover and Riley Higgins is a young cop who catches a bullet to the face and begins a wild transformation into underworld enforcer.
They all clash in Dirty Water, a city in the grips of moral and economic bankruptcy with a massive cross on a hill for a tombstone.
PARADISE BURNS
Disgraced former detective, Rudy Patchiss, has reinvented himself as a private investigator specializing in missing persons.
He is hired to find college student, Jennifer Acres, and travels to the mountains near the Canadian border to plumb an underground world of sex, drugs, and rock n roll.
What he finds is a deeper, more ancient evil that claims lives without being noticed in our modern day world. His investigation brings him to an urban nightmare city, a club called Paradise, and into a relationship with a tattooed bartender, Stacy, who tries to point him in the right direction. Ultimately, his work leads him deep into the mountains to a place that can truly be called Paradise; a place where there are no boundaries, no rules, no limits. It is a place of ultimate freedom that can be one man's Heaven and another man's Hell.
OLD BOONE BLOOD
Violence grows like a cancer in a small mountain community.
A brutal home invasion leads four individuals on a crash course that turns fatal. Keith seeks revenge; Caitlin seeks refuge; Chief Bouchard seeks answers, and Danny seeks forgiveness. All of them clash in a dance of death deep in Appalachia. A novel in the Southern Gothic tradition of Flannery O’Connor, Old Boone Blood is a haunting look at the brutality that plagues mankind.
SHMEXPERTS
During the BP oil leak of 2010 while the “experts” were frantically working on a solution to stop the flow, thousands of people were offered solutions. One suggestion came from a plumber named Joe Caldart, but since he wasn’t a scientist with a PhD, his plan was dismissed outright. Only when a professor of engineering at Berkeley and former Shell executive recognized the validity of his idea and passed it on to BP, did they listen. Six weeks later a strikingly similar design was lowered onto the Macondo well, and the eighty-seven-day crisis ended.
In this age of technology, experts, studies, and the media, more young people than ever are attending college and more degrees are being conferred every year, but with all the degrees conferred and the numbers in academia soaring, it is prudent to examine not only what is being taught and how, but also its effect on society and the culture.
We are constantly bombarded with studies and so-called expert opinions that are contradictory, controversial, and ineffective. Explanations of current events are accepted at face value by the common man of today because they are informed by “experts in the field.” In Shmexperts: How Ideology and Power Politics are Disguised as Science Marc Fitch examines the modern myth of experts in today’s twenty-four hour media cycle and explains why viewers, readers, and average Joe’s should do their own research too. In understanding the underlying philosophy and motivation of these experts and the media that promote them, we will gain greater insight and critical thinking skills by which to determine whether or not an expert as cited in the media is a true expert or an agenda-driven shmexpert.
In this brilliantly insightful book Fitch warns of the frightening prospect of a society led into intellectual complacency by relying on mass-media manipulation and the bureaucratization of knowledge. Shmexperts explores the philosophy inherent in the media’s reliance on and use of experts and its negative influence on society as a whole. In this truly enlightening book, “average” Americans will learn to trust themselves over the so-called “experts” that have infiltrated the media.
PARANORMAL NATION
This thought-provoking study of paranormal phenomena traces the impact of supernatural beliefs on popular culture and, conversely, examines the influence of new communication technologies on research being conducted in the fi