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LITERARY

Herda, D. J.

Big-Bang Baby Boomer Electric Shock Sex Machine: How three women changed the face of literature and reinvented the world France’s Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette fights the Battle for Sexual Rights as New York’s Dorothy Parker confronts her own emerging sexuality during her quest for truth, justice, and a new American Way of life. Along the way, Anais Nin, resting in the wings with her recently acquired sexual gauntlet, batters literature into a new Sexual Revelation—each remarkable woman influenced by the successes and the failures, the joys and the heartbreaks of the others.

Ghosts at the Round Table: A Telling Alliance--
Sacco and Vanzetti at the Gonk Dorothy Parker is the most unlikely of radicals. But the author who pens “Men don’t make passes / at girls who wear glasses” has much more on her mind than clever witticisms when she lobbies fellow Round Tablers to the defense of accused killers Sacco and Vanzetti. For more than six years, she carries the banner against America’s paranoia and disgrace. In the end, it is Parker—and not two Italian-born anarchist immigrants—who pays the greatest price of all for her integrity.

The Devil Within When a man makes a pact with the devil, he does so not in exchange for untold wealth, health, love, or longevity, but in order to stimulate his mind (he loathes boredom and despises boring people). The devil agrees to grant him the intelligence to survive in a hostile world, and soon the man stands in the very shadow of God, presiding over decisions that spell life and death for virtually every human being on the face of Mother Earth.

But “Mother” soon turns to “Mutha” as Markinson fails to anticipate his still human weaknesses and eventually falls in lust bordering on love. The only problem: the woman is a Central European Command (CEC) operative who has been assigned to paranormal investigations into terrorist links. When she learns from her lover who he really is and where he gets his power—and, worse, that he knows who she really is--she sets out to do the only thing her conscience will allow her to do. She must destroy him, even if it means making her own pact with the devil to do so!

Three Days of the Covenant When an investigative reporter falls head-over-heels in love, it’s a good thing. When the target of his affections is a classy/sassy blonde charged with protecting the world’s most valuable book, it’s a bad thing. Or, at least, it is if the reporter is determined to steal the book from under her nose.

When Lainie Davis finally rounds up enough evidence to put the guy away for life, he neatly sidesteps her attempts by proving that he couldn’t have stolen The Lost Covenant because it was never really stolen in the first place. As the undercover insurance cop digs deeper into Daryl Dartanian’s background, she learns that he works for Central Intelligence…but not ours. He’s dirt poor but owns a mansion in Puerto Vallarta and a seaside villa in Carmel. He’s a college dropout who enjoys playing with radioactive isotopes. He bicycles around town but he owns a stable of the most exotic collectible cars in the world.

By the time she falls under the growing scrutiny of the police for being an accomplice to the Covenant’s mysterious “theft,” Dartanian is laying plans for a future of unbridled debauchery in yet another new estate by the sea. This time, he plans on bringing a friend.

She just doesn't know it yet.

"HYMIE STIEHL"

Four-Book Series

Bk. 1 - Stiehl on the Loose - The Death and Life of Hymie Stiehl When Yiddish Bulldog Hymie Stiehl learns that his friend, Jungle Jim Alavera of the Chicago White Sox, has disappeared, he knows he has to act fast. Realizing that Alavera is still alive but in great danger, Stiehl and his young, rakish college-professor sidekick seek to locate him before the Mob does. But when bodies begin turning up like dead flies at a bad delicatessen, Stiehl calls upon the local D.A. and the members of the venerable Twelfth Precinct to step in to help solve the case ... and very nearly ends up a statistic, himself.

Bk. 2 - Courting Stiehl As Hymie Stiehl and sidekick D. J. Shanahan arrive in Trinidad, Colorado, to ensnare whoever sent Stiehl's close contractor friend to prison, Stiehl has a revelation. He sets the kid up as a contractor to work underground. But when the "kid" gets charged with passing bad checks, contractor fraud, and finally murder, things get ugly. Stiehl goes underground while the kid bails out, and the two of them meet to uncover the worst in human society--from a dirty District Court Judge right on down to drug-pushing, drug-crazed local vice cops gone wild.

Things look bleak for D.J.'s upcoming trial when suddenly Stiehl has a revelation. Halfway through the preliminary hearing to bind the kid over for murder one, Stiehl shows up with three Federal officers--and the kid gets a change of venue ... much to the chagrin of the judge. When the judge goes to step down and the FBI clasps him in cuffs, he pulls a gun from beneath his robes and shoots his own bailiff in the head. As the judge is hauled away, Stiehl reveals the real savior behind the scenes in an ending as touching as it is creative.

Bk. 3 - Stiehl Stalkings A Caribbean cruise goes sour when a wealthy German industrialist turns up dead during an attempted robbery--murdered with his own gun. The plot thickens when Yiddish Bulldog Hymie Stiehl learns that the man's stepson had lost more than $20 thousand at the tables the night before. The man's wife, too, stands to gain financially from her husband's death, although she voluntarily takes a polygraph test and passes with ease. When links to a Belizean woman emerge, Hymie grows restless. The deceased industrialist had been having an affair, and his wife found out. What better peg to the murder than a spurned wife? But when the wife's own son is killed, all eyes fall elsewhere, and it's up to Hymie to unravel the most bizarre and twisted tale of murder and chicanery ever.

Bk. 4 - Stiehl by Default Ronald Deus has an ax to grind. In fact, he has several. The sharpest is reserved for his beloved mother—the only person standing between Deus and a fortune in family stocks and bonds. But when he takes aim at committing the perfect crime, little does he realize that it’s he, himself, who is standing in his own crosshairs.