This biography written in formal verse tells the story of Saul Alinsky's life and work as a criminologist, social activist and community organizer--a legacy that Barack Obama drew from in his own work in Chicago. The long narrative poem corrects the misconceptions surrounding Alinsky's name, which some political figures have tried to associate with the far left, socialists and communists. The truth is Alinsky was none of these, and more accurately espoused a grass-roots, democratic process to problem-solving. In the forward, Diamond explains how she came to write her poetic biography after she was associated negatively with Alinsky because of her own views, the insinuation being that because she has her roots in Chicago, that somehow she was contaminated by Alinsky's radicalism. Consequently, she read everything she could about the man and learned he was no more a radical than the Founding Fathers. In Alinsky's vocabulary "radical" is not a derogatory term, but one he proudly adopted. Alinsky did not belong to any political party. The poem is divided into the seven decades of the twentieth century in which Alinsky lived. In the final section, "Missive from the Underworld," Saul Alinsky speaks from hell to the people living today and comments on current American conditions.
Charlotte and Brenda are now facing their second Christmas together. Last year’s Christmas and New Year were spent on a Rhine River cruise with Charlotte’s doctor brother and his minster wife, as told in An Inconvenient Death, but this year the pair are off to a mountain retreat so Brenda can promote a film to movie financiers. Of course all is not smooth sailing for the pair in this small Christmas gift from Olivia, Making Room at Christmas.
When Al Morgan, known in his Washington law firm as "the Reptile," is found murdered in his elegant Watergate apartment, nobody is sorry. His harassment of women and his sleazy manipulation of legal matters had repelled everyone, especially Linda Black, the cool aggressive managing partner of the firm. Tony Fortune, the promising young associate being groomed for partnership, found out at age 12 that he had perfect pitch, not just in music but in sizing up people. He knows the real from the fake. Yet he wrestles with the tensions between ethics and ambition in dealing with an important corporate client. Suzanne, a "do-gooder" lawyer who has been going out with Tony, is desperate to raise money to pay off the debts of her mother, an addictive gambler. In a bar, Suzanne meets two con artists, Bobbie Hunt and Curly Mershaw, who might go along with her insider trading proposal. Bobbie, a self-styled hooker with heart, saw Al Morgan as a regular client, which enraged Curly, a psychopathic redneck. Police Lieutenant Scott Duncan and his seductive African-American partner, Sergeant Melody Sharpe, interview all of the above suspects as they explore motives and suspicions. Their own developing liaison and the police milieu they move in provide added interest. One lingering question hovers over them: For all of Morgan's crudity, why did somebody go to the length of killing him? What did Morgan know? And who knew he knew it? The fast-moving dialogue and engrossing flashbacks offer suspense and insight.
The ninth Charlotte Diamond mystery finds retired FBI senior agent Charlotte Diamond contemplating too many coincidences in what should be two separate mysteries. The mysteries start with two murders and the uncovering of a illegal drug distribution ring in what should be a bucolic, out-of-the-way place, the Curtain Call movie folks retirement community in Hopewell on the Choptank in Maryland that Charlotte owns and operates with her spouse, movie top box-office star, Brenda Brandon. The drugs are distributed in plastic packets with a green palm tree embossed on them. When the two head south for Brenda's singing appearance at the annual Spoleto arts festival in Charleston, South Carolina, the same packets turn up there. The "too many coincidences" continue as the two women find themselves landing in danger by agreeing to stay during Brenda's Spoleto gig at a coastal tea plantation owned by an actress with whom Brenda had appeared in Hollywood movies.
Jacob Wherly, an aging Vietnam veteran, shocked out of his staid existence as an Illinois highway patrolman, begins to live his life as he sees fit outside the established norms of his rural community. This self-styled buffoon befriends a teenage boy who is steeped in religious fundamentalism. Each seeks to convert the other to his world view—young Lenny to lead Jacob toward acceptance of Jesus as his savior and Jacob to nudge Lenny through humor toward an awareness that the unexamined life is not worth living. This comedic novel's protagonist exemplifies what it means to be a baby boomer in the 21st century, suggesting what legacy those post World War II babies might offer to their grandchildren's generation and taking a hard look at the role of war and fundamentalist Christianity in American culture. The reader along the way may also begin to consider parallels between the Vietnam War and our current ventures in Afghanistan through the comic lens of Jacob, who dyes his hair and his house a flaming orange and surrounds himself with cats variously named for persons who figured in the Vietnam era—Madame Nhu, Ho Chi Minh, Melvin Laird and Robert McNamara. This light-hearted yarn on serious subjects will both regale and give the reader pause for thought.
Aboard a ship homeward bound to America from Italy in 1850, Margaret Fuller, the first woman foreign correspondent, narrates the story of her life. The daughter of a Massachusetts congressman who educated her in the classics, she fought to carve out a place for herself in the limited scope reserved for women in the nineteenth century, forging a path for other feminists to follow. A close friend with Thoreau and Emerson, she met many of the prominent figures of her day. She faces a less than warm welcome as she returns to her country with an eighteen-month-old child conceived out-of-wedlock and an Italian husband ten years her junior. If she, a woman born before her time, had lived, she would have continued to be a stranger in her own land. Shipwrecked on a sand bar, Margaret Fuller was forbidden re-entry into the land of her birth. The reach of Margaret Fuller was vast considering her short life span of forty years. To perish at the point at which she had come into her own as a journalist and a woman forms the tragic in this verse-novel told in her own voice. On her death, Horace Greeley wrote, "So passed away the loftiest, bravest soul that has yet irradiated the form of an American woman.
The sixth Charlotte Diamond mystery finds the retired FBI agent and her significant other, movie star Brenda Brandon, on the edge of the Florida Everglades to film a movie within a movie about an old movie. Brenda has taken a cameo role in the reprise of her first film experience, a Vietnam air war film of forty years earlier that was closed down by a brush with espionage, a murder, and the disappearance of the movie's star, White Orchid, factors that combined to pique the interest of the FBI. Charlotte has been hired as a technical consultant to help weave a blockbuster movie script out of the earlier, failed filming. When the mysteries of the earlier film come back to haunt the new film crew and cast after the crash of a company plane in the Everglades, Charlotte finds herself deputized by the FBI to figure out not only what happened then, but what is happening now-and why. In this, she receives the help of another technical expert on the film, Ed Winslow, who always seems to know more than he is revealing and who takes an interest in Charlotte that equals that of Charlotte's former lover and FBI contact, Evan Worthington, who wants Charlotte back in his life. As badly as Charlotte wants to unravel the mysteries of the lost White Orchid, an unknown someone seems even more determined to keep the past buried-even if it means that Charlotte needs to be buried as well.
The third Charlotte Diamond Mystery Retired FBI senior investigator Charlotte Diamond finds herself jetting from murder on one coast of the United States to kidnapping on another in attempts to save both her lover and her former husband. Charlotte follows her new-found companion, the leading movie actress, Brenda Brandon, to Hollywood. Brenda had abruptly abandoned Hollywood and the movies and returned to her hometown of Hopewell on the Choptank, on Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. But a cameo movie role she cannot turn down returns her to the scene of an old murder, for which she now is the leading suspect. Barely having dealt with that mystery on the West Coast, Charlotte is called back to Ocean City, Maryland, where her former husband and his new gambling casino have been targeted by the mob, and his new wife kidnapped. Torn from West Coast to East Coast and thrown into the sphere of an even older and brighter flame than her former husband just when she had thought that her life was settling down, Charlotte is finding out that retirement looks a whole lot similar to when she was working on all cylinders at the FBI
In the second of the Charlotte Diamond mysteries, FBI senior investigator Charlotte has retired to Maryland's eastern shore of the Chesapeake bay only to find high-level international intrigue has sought her out when the abandoned sailboat of spy master Win Engleton washes up against her dock. Charlotte struggles with having to choose between focusing on her new-found significant other, former movie star Brenda Boynton, or a complex espionage mystery of who did what to who and why that reopens ever deeper mysteries again and again like a Matryoshka Russian nesting doll.
The eleventh Charlotte Diamond mystery is one of pulling up the past to clutch at those in the present. The book finds retired FBI senior agent Charlotte Diamond and her spouse, senior movie star Brenda Boynton/Brandon, taking a long-delayed vacation on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina with Charlotte's brother, Chance Diamond, and his wife, Marilyn. Brenda is there to participate in a celebrity golf tournament and attend two film nights in nearby Charleston and Savannah. The real purpose of the "vacation," however, is that Charlotte is helping old friend and beau, Evan Worthington, track down a sex slave operation possibly using the nearby Daufuskie Island.Connections with the past abound in the book-Charlotte and Brenda with former men friends; Marilyn Diamond, in medical distress, with her own historical past; Brenda's son, the actor Tony Trice, with a former lover in the midst of current marital difficulties; and other, local characters with connections to slavery and each other going back to late eighteenth-century South Carolina low country history. As each character struggles with the enslavement of her or his own past, their histories become crossed and the mystery of the sex slave trade in the low country deepens around them and threatens their mere existence.
In the fifth Charlotte Diamond mystery, the retired FBI investigator and her significant other, glamorous senior movie star Brenda Brandon (aka Boynton), return from a murder- and gem-theft-punctuated Christmas cruise down the Rhine River to confusion and catastrophe in their usually quiet retirement village of Hopewell on the Choptank in Maryland. The wooded lot next door to Brenda's historical mansion, a lot that Brenda thought she owned, is being bulldozed by a New York construction firm for a mystery development. All of the homes and land from Charlotte's own riverside cottage to the end of their road are being leveled as well, including Charlotte's neighbors' house, and she has no idea where their dog sitter may have gone with their beloved dogs, Rocket and Sam. The two women and their previously sleepy riverside village are propelled into a hotbed of confusion, with disappearances and murder aplenty. Only Charlotte's experience and skills from her previous life in the FBI and the appearance of an old flame Charlotte has been trying to avoid because of mixed feelings enable them to start unraveling the mystery of what is happening with spymaster Win Engleton's property.
Retired FBI senior investigator Charlotte Diamond is cajoled into taking a Christmas market Rhine river cruise with her partner, glamorous retired queen of the movie screen Brenda Brandon/Boynton. When Brenda invites Charlotte's doctor brother, Chance Diamond, and his minister wife, Marilyn, to join in the trip, Charlotte knows this will be no restful vacation. The "curse of Chance," the travels of whom have always been accompanied by a death or three, does indeed embroil Charlotte and her three travel companions in a complex mix of "inconvenient" robberies and suspicious deaths against a backdrop of quaint German towns, Christmas markets, and Rhine castles. The misadventure of the Rhine river cruise involves an international crime money-laundering Swiss banker and his Italian TV star wife; a "Jack Sprat" pair of elderly spinsters; a doll-fetish Japanese couple; a diamond-dripping, once-kidnapped heiress; a gay novelist and boyfriend; a catatonic mustard dynasty heiress; and assorted other unsavory characters. As the "Rhine Maiden" scenically chugs north from Nurnberg to Amsterdam over Christmas week, Charlotte and Brenda track their bet on whether the "curse of Chance" will meet its quota of mayhem, while Charlotte sinks deeper and deeper into what becomes a working vacation. The fourth book in the Charlotte Diamond mystery series.
In the seventh of the Charlotte Diamond mysteries, retired FBI senior investigator Charlotte and her significant other, box office senior movie star Brenda Boynton, return from a Florida Everglades movie shoot to an economically distressed village, Hopewell on the Choptank, on Maryland's Chesapeake Bay shore. A scheme by New Jersey mobsters to build an illegal casino resort has collapsed but not before half the village has been leveled and the local business owners have committed to overexpansion. Brenda comes with a saving plan to use lottery winnings to establish a retirement community for destitute movie industry retirees in the village. While both Brenda and Charlotte bring this plan to fruition, Charlotte contends with a flurry of auto thefts, a murderess on the loose, a sixty-year old bank heist buried treasure, the return of her former husband and his acidic mother, and a group of old movie folks so ungrateful and motivated by revenge that soon someone swings from a chandelier, threatening to return the village to chaos and Brenda and Charlotte's dreams to dust.
As the eighth book in the Charlotte Diamond Mystery series opens, former FBI senior agent Charlotte and her movie star significant other, Brenda Boynton/Brandon, are taking quick advantage of a recent change in Maryland's same-sex marriage laws to tie the knot. Unfortunately, from the very beginning of the ceremony, the naturally tumultuous life of the two becomes overshadowed by a wedding full of disasters in the form of a freak March snowstorm, the theft of the wedding limousine, and a murder and moves on to the honeymoon from hell. The honeymoon continues to unravel as the two, accompanied by their wedding party of Charlotte's doctor brother, Chance, and his minister wife, Marilyn, and Brenda's movie star son, Tony, and his professional tennis star girlfriend, Michelle, plow through the snow to make their Bahamas honeymoon cruise connection in Baltimore harbor. Once on board, Charlotte becomes steeped in more of the mysteries that seem to attach to her like magnets and Brenda again is wooed back into her movie star mode. As the shipboard disasters and dramas escalate around them Charlotte and Brenda must fight to preserve the true meaning of their brave decision to marry.
Christian Rhodes believes Susie Langtree is the woman for him, but Susie finds Dane irresistible, so Chris plans to charm Susie at Sebastian and Amanda's destination wedding.
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