Tony Schmidt joins the Central Hotline in sunny Bonita Beach, California to improve his listening skills. Shahla Lawton joins the Hotline to fulfill a volunteering requirement for her high school. Neither one expects to get mixed up in a murder investigation.But that is before Shahla's best friend, Joy, also a listener, is murdered. Tony and Shahla discover that they are able to uncover information that the police can't. Information about the "inappropriate" callers who haunt the Hotline, and information about other people with a connection to the Hotline who may have hidden motives to kill the beautiful Joy. Questions arise. Will the murderer strike the Hotline again? And if the murderer does strike again, will Shahla be the next target?Although he has been out of college for years, Tony still lives with his college roommate, Josh, and his lifestyle might be described as extended fraternity. Faced with the responsibility of taking calls from people who range from disabled to obsessive to abused to suicidal, and also of helping to solve a murder, Tony finds he has to mature fast. Since this involves admitting that girls like Shahla can be smart and dedicated, and not just underage sex objects, as Josh sees them, the relationship between Tony and Josh may suffer.Tony and Shahla have harrowing adventures together in venues ranging from Southern California to Las Vegas, as they try to distinguish the annoying-but-harmless callers from the dangerous, and figure out whether the murderer might just be somebody not connected with the Hotline. After spending more than a quarter of a century as a pioneer in the computer industry, Alan Cook is well into his second career as a writer.ROCKY ROAD TO DENVERThe death of Roger McAllister's wife in 1984 prompts him to take a break from his accounting firm and join a walk from Los Angeles to Denver, sponsored by Zeus Shoes. The people he encounters will shake him out of his comfort zone, providing comedy, peril and sexual temptation. In addition, his dead wife appears to be keeping an eye on him. Roger's life will never be the same.DEATH AT MONKSREST--Charlie and Liz No. 3Liz Reid flies to England in the 1960s because of a poem about an ancient curse that her coworker, Charlie Ebersole, has sent her, which may have led to the murder of the sister of Charlie's English friend, Reggie, whose father is the owner of the hereditary estate of Monksrest. Liz works with Lord Wheatley to find clues in spite of the risks involved.EAST OF THE WALL--Charlie and Liz No. 2Charlie Ebersole and Liz Reid are recruited by the CIA to go into East Germany in June 1963, to attempt to obtain intelligence about a secret project of the Germans during World War II, about which information has been lost. The Berlin Wall and the Stasi (East German secret police) make this a perilous mission, but the two suspect that they are the most appropriate people for the job.TRUST ME IF YOU DARE--Charlie and Liz No. 1Charlie Ebersole is good at his job as a securities analyst for International Industries in Los Angeles in the year 1962, but he is also somewhat bored at being tied to a desk most of the time. He jumps at the chance to join the fraud section of II, and is immediately put on a case that will take him and another employee, Elizabeth Reid, to Buffalo, Fort Lauderdale, and possibly to Fidel Castro's Cuba, although the Bay of Pigs fiasco is a recent memory, and relations between Cuba and the United States are not good. Charlie and Liz find out that uncovering a Ponzi scheme isn't all just fun and games, but it can be dangerous too, especially when somebody is intent on them not discovering the truth. Before they are through they may wish they were back at their nice safe desks in Los Angeles.YOUR MOVE--CAROL GOLDEN NO. 7Carol looks for a serial killer who likes to play games. As she attempts to figure out the game and its significance for the killer she realizes that events oc...
