Robert a Little

For seven years Bart was a long reliever for the Los Angeles Dodgers. At the beginning of his eighth year his pitching arm was injured in a car accident and the Dodgers released him. He didn't want to play elsewhere so at age 32 he became unemployed at about the same time his divorce was finalized.The following spring the team called him back, but this time it wanted his bat, his very hot bat. For the next two years he played every day, sometimes pitched to one or two batters and invested his earnings instead of blowing them.His social life was also progressing. After helping the Dodgers win the World Series, he appeared on a talk show where he met a famous actress, who after the show, went with him to a local deli.Then, for the second time, the Dodgers let their best home run hitter go, this time with two other teams making offers, setting Bart off on a new journey, one without that actress or indeed, much of a social life, but with the opportunity to play baseball just a little bit longer.Over the next few years he struggled to remain at the top of his game, and in the process he became one of the greatest baseball players in the modern era.

Hoa was many things going for her: she is an extremely intelligent university student, a highly gifted athlete, and the recipient of great physical beauty. She has one attribute that is not always popular, her racial makeup. She has an African-American grandfather who married a Vietnamese woman in Saigon: Her father is a Native American by way of Chihuahua, Mexico, and her mother is mostly white. The result is a young woman who can not be easily pegged in any particular racial category, setting her apart in racially-aware America.One fateful evening her boyfriend takes her to a party hosted and attended by people of color. A skinhead gang entered the home and began shooting, killing her boyfriend as she tried to drag the wounded man to safety. The murder of a young man she had come to care for was devastating. She proved to be a highly accurate and reliable witness and despite threats she testified at the trial of two of the gang, sending them to prison for life.That very evening her father and two older brothers were murdered and Hoa was still in great danger. After selling her father's home she left California, seeking safety. After a year of hiding she began to realize that her life had ended along with those of her father and brothers. She returned to the San Fernando Valley and reentered her university, knowing it was stupid, knowing that this gang continued to want to kill her and knowing she could no longer hide.Inevitably, the gang learned that she had returned and went after her. This time, however, she was no longer an 18 year old girl, she was a year older, she'd learned martial arts and how to shoot firearms. She was emotionally isolated, and still severely wounded, but now she wanted revenge. During a day-long nightmare the gang chased her through the mountains bordering the valley. She survived but at a cost and she is again forced out of school. This gang is highly adept at surviving both the police and finding her. One evening she is kidnapped, assaulted and nearly killed. she again survives, if barely.At every turn her efforts to merely survive and gain an education are crushed, yet she manages, she finds a safe haven in Columbia University in New York, and she finds a boyfriend. Her academic focus shifted to computer sciences, a means of helping her survive, and best of all, her ambitions on the track bear fruit.Unfortunately, the leader of that gang, the one with all those computer skills was never found and he believed that if he could kill her he could rebuild his former gang.

Guy DeMarco grew up on a California Central Valley family farm, sang in the church choir, played football and got great grades. His older sister got most of his parents' attention, but he still did well at pretty much everything. He knew that his parents were not going to keep the large farm, so after high school he enrolled in Berkeley and from there went to U.C. Hastings where he graduated with a law degree. School now out of the way, he began preparing to take the California Bar. One evening at a party, an inebriated film executive took to him and offered him a shot at a small role in a film. He accepted, the offer turned out to be genuine and within a year he was a regular on a Netflix series.He married a women he'd known a very short while and as the book begins he's learning that he badly screwed up.Guy moves on, looking for a woman to love, a child to have and raise. Now licensed to practice law in the State of California, he finds he has little time for it - his acting career just gets better and better.Guy encounters few problems in meeting women, but they don't always like him, and when he finds one who does, she's crazier than his ex-wife.One night he drives right into the middle of a drug war and almost gets killed, starting a chain reaction of weirdness, shooting and car chases. His career is developing but his personal life is a mess, due in large part to the lamentable fact that violence seems to follow him wherever he goes.

John Bourchier is married, has two handsome teenage sons and a beautiful wife. He loves being in love, wishes his wife felt the same. When she makes marriage impossible with her, he files and begins a search. First, nobody seems up to the task of properly pronouncing his last name; second, women in the 21st century are apparently far more complex than when he was a teenager. By comparison, work assignments to Iraq (and Syria) are easy - at least you know where ISIS stands. Whether it's trying to avoid errant Dodge pickup trucks, AK-47's, South Korean fishermen, or Women With Issues, John forges ahead, looking for love in all the wrong places, rarely bothering to correct the pronunciation of his last name. Well, never.