Bøger af John Soennichsen

Lance Loomis has a problem. It's not that he's a balding, middle-aged man who is 75 pounds overweight, behind on his rent and in desperate need of female companionship. It's not the fact that nobody takes him seriously as a private detective and his PI license looks like a library card. It's not even that he is forced to work out of a janitorial supply closet while his office is being painted. No, these are just minor annoyances in his everyday life. Loomis's problem is that he's entangled in two unsolved murder cases that would baffle even the cleverest detective, which Lance is most definitely not. Who murdered the beautiful redhead as she pedaled her stationary bike? Who ran over the rich tax accountant as he crossed the street carrying Italian takeout? To solve these two seemingly unrelated crimes, Loomis finds himself interviewing a host of suspects ranging from an egotistical talk show host who calls himself the white man's Oprah, to an elderly janitor who regularly attends meetings of the New German Social Club. Meanwhile, Loomis has been targeted for death by the Norwegian Mafia. As Lance patrols the hot, summer streets of Spokane in his 1978 Renault Le Car, he is intermittently assisted by a slimy street hood named Vinny, whom he never actually hired and who is clearly more trouble than help. Loomis also befriends the captivating Jill Morgan, who first appears at his office vacuum-packed in a little black dress, with a tale of murder to tell. The plot of The Fat Detective recalls the gritty crime stories popularized by writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, while also paying homage to the comic absurdities of movies such as Airplane and The Naked Gun. The world of Lance Loomis is populated by strange characters, bizarre settings and out of the ordinary occurrences. If compared to the work of other contemporary writers, The Fat Detective might be described as resembling a tag team effort by Carl Hiassen and Dave Barry. Lance Loomis will never be another Sam Spade or Alex Cross. But his reverence for detectives of their ilk drives him on to search for clues, develop theories, and narrowly escape death as he attempts to solve two cases at the same time. All while continually grazing through bags of Cheetos and boxes of chocolate coated mini-donuts.

The land between Idaho and the Cascade Mountains is characterized by gullies, coulees, and deserts--in geologic terms, it is a wholly unique place on the earth. Legendary geologist J Harlen Bretz, starting in the 1920s, was the first to explore the area. Bretz, a former science teacher at Franklin High School in Seattle and then a professor at the University of Washington and later the University of Chicago, eventually formed the theory that the land was scoured in a virtual instant by a massive flood. His original thinking was rewarded with various forms of public and academic humiliation. In the mid-twentieth century, his theory sounded a bit too much like the biblical flood, and the scientific world wanting nothing to do with that sort of idea. (Ironically, Bretz was an avowed atheist, so this was hardly his inspiration.) Bretz's Flood tells the dramatic story of this scientific maverick-how he came to study the region, his radical theory that a huge flood created it, and how the mainstream geologic community campaigned to derail him from pursuing an idea that satellite photos would confirm decades later.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was a historic act of legislation that demonstrated how the federal government of the United States once openly condoned racial discrimination. Once the Exclusion Act passed, the door was opened to further limitation of Asians in America during the late 19th century, such as the Scott Act of 1888 and the Geary Act of 1892, and increased hatred towards and violence against Chinese people based on the misguided belief they were to blame for depressed wage levels and unemployment among Caucasians.This title traces the complete evolution of the Exclusion Act, including the history of Chinese immigration to the United States, the factors that served to increase their populations here, and the subsequent efforts to limit further immigration and encourage the departure of the Chinese already in America.