The author of "Digger" and "The Concrete Inquisition" presents this thriller featuring an ex-cop who solved the murder of the president's first husband and brought the killers to justice, and who himself becomes the first private eye to live in the White House.

Jim McGill, the first private eye to live in the White House, calls himself The President’s Henchman. As the husband of President Patricia Darden Grant, he can call himself pretty much what he wants.But with privilege comes obligation. When Patti travels to a G-8 meeting in England, McGill is fitted for evening wear and drafted to be Patti’s escort at a gilded dinner. He’s okay with that. But while Patti is busy reshaping the world, McGill fears his time will be occupied cutting ribbons.Then Glen Kinnard’s daughter, Emilie, asks for help. McGill knows Kinnard from their days as Chicago cops. They were never friends and once almost came to blows. But McGill is a soft touch for a young woman looking out for her dad, and, oh, does Kinnard need help.Taking the ashes of his late wife to her native Paris, Kinnard got into a fight with the star player of the French national soccer team. The brawl under the Pont d’Iéna, the bridge at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, left Kinnard unconscious and the Frenchman dead. Kinnard swears he was only trying to protect a woman the Frenchman was beating. But the woman has disappeared.The French allow McGill to investigate, provided he accepts Gabriella Casale, a State Department Security Officer as his bodyguard, that he works with the investigating magistrate assigned to the case, and that he wraps things up in a week.In Paris, McGill encounters gypsy con artists, British soccer hooligans and a monstrous brute known as The Undertaker. And he tries to ignore rumors reaching him that the president of France was Patti’s old college boyfriend, and things back in England are heating up once again.Time is short and there’s a lot to do— because at the end of the week McGill still has to don his white tie and tails for dinner with Patti and the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

Somebody in Washington is updating Shakespeare. The first thing he wants to do is kill all the lobbyists. Knocking off three of them in consecutive weeks, he's off to a fast start. On the lapel of each victim, the killer leaves a pin that, arguably, resembles Porky Pig.The Metro police are on the case when Putnam Shady steps forward and identifies the third victim as a friend. Authority averse, Putnam gives the cops only bare bones information -- but he tells Margaret "Sweetie" Sweeney that he thinks he will be the next victim.The reason, he explains, is quite simple. There are two plans afoot to seize control of the federal government. At the center of one plan is the speaker of the House of Representatives. The group behind the other plan consisted of Putnam and his three dead colleagues.Sweetie vows to protect Putnam. She enlists Jim McGill, the president's henchman, to find out who is behind the murders. But then McGill's whole world is turned upside down. His son, Kenny, is diagnosed with leukemia.President Patricia Grant's life is only slightly less tumultuous. Her enemies force her to leave the Republican Party. Erna Godfrey implicates her husband, Reverend Burke Godfrey, in the killing of Patti's first husband, Andrew Hudson Grant. But Reverend Godfrey refuses to go down without a fight.Amidst the turmoil, Welborn Yates and Kira Fahey schedule their marriage -- and inevitably have to deal with wedding crashers.

Tracing unexplored connections between nineteenth-century astronomy and literature, The Starry Sky Within offers a new understanding of literary point of view as essentially multiple, mobile, and comparative. Nineteenth-century astronomy revealed a cosmos of celestial systems in constant motion. Stars, comets, planets, and moons coursed through space in complex and changing relation. As the skies were in motion, so too was the human subject. Astronomers showed that human beings never perceive the world from a stable position. The mobility of our bodies in space and the very structure of stereoscopic vision mean that point of view is neither singular nor stable. We always see the world as an amalgam of fractured perspectives. In this innovative study, Henchman shows that the reconceptualization of the skies gave poets and novelists new spaces in which to indulge their longing to escape the limitations of individual perspective. She links astronomy and optics to the form of the multiplot novel, with its many centers of consciousness, complex systems of relation, and criss-crossing points of view. Accounts of a world and a subject both in relative motion shaped the form of grand-scale narratives such as Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Bleak House, and Daniel Deronda. De Quincey, Tennyson, and Eliot befriended leading astronomers and visited observatories, while Hardy learned about astronomy from the vast popular literature of the day. These writers use cosmic distances to dislodge their readers from the earth, setting human perception against views from high above and then telescoping back to earth again. What results is a new perception of the mobility of point of view in both literature and science.

Joining the MC had never been a question.Raised by an ex-cage-fighting member, Niro hadn't seen any future for himself that didn't involve bikes, guns, violence, and the brotherhood he'd learned to revere above all else. But joining the Henchmen meant he couldn't have the only other thing in life he wanted.Andi.The daughter of one of the OG members of the club. His childhood best friend. The only chink in his otherwise impenetrable armor. For years she was gone. And he did everything he could to forget her, to become the kind of monster she would never look twice at again.The problem was, she was back in town.And new enemies were around every corner.Ones who might set their sights on the only woman who could ever mean anything to him...

A well-received thriller pits a Vietnam veteran named John Fortunato against a killer determined to control his hometown of Elk River, Illinois, using a network of underground tunnels created by Fortunato as a Vietnam memorial. Reprint.

When you win reelection to be president of the United States by one electoral vote, as Patricia Darden Grant has done, you're going to make a lot of people angry. Some of them might even try to change the outcome by violence. The Secret Service fears an assassination attempt at the president's second inauguration, one using drone launched missiles. The president could forsake the public ceremony, but that would tell the terrorists they have her running scared. Her second term would become a lost cause. She refuses to let that happen, and informs the Secret Service it will be up to them to keep her safe. Not entirely up to them, though. James J. McGill, will also be on the case. So will White House Chief of Staff Galia Mindel. Even retired SAC Celsus Crogher is called back to make sure no harm comes to the president. Then McGill's life gets even more complicated. His friends, Investigating Magistrate Yves Pruet and his bodyguard Odo Sacripant, come to town searching for a stolen Renoir painting. Gabbi Casale is already at the White House, finishing up McGill's official portrait. The old gang from Paris is back together. Only McGill feels Pruet is holding out on him. Something more than finding a masterpiece is at stake here. Something that, oddly enough, might tie in with the attempt on the president's life.