He's a real Nowhere Man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
For nobody.
(From "Nowhere Man"
by The Beatles)

Barbara Ehrenreich - " Bait and Switch" (2005)

The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

The bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed goes back undercover to do for America’s ailing middle class what she did for the working poor.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible resume of a professional “in transition,” she attempts to land a middle-class job -- undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then trawling a series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She gets an image makeover, works to project a winning attitude, yet is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and -- again and again -- rejected.

Bait and Switch highlights the people who’ve done everything right -- gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive resumes -- yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today’s ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their “surplus” employees -- plunging them, for months or years at a stretch, into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment, where job searching becomes a full-time job in itself. As Ehrenreich discovers, there are few social supports for these newly disposable workers -- and little security even for those who have jobs.

Like the now classic Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch is alternately hilarious and tragic, a searing expose of economic cruelty where we least expect it.

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Barbara Ehrenreich - "Nickel And Dimed" (2001)

The New York Times bestseller, and one of the most talked about books of the year, Nickel and Dimed has already become a classic of undercover reportage.

Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour?

To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the "lowliest" occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.

Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate strategies for survival. Instantly acclaimed for its insight, humor, and passion, this book is changing the way America perceives its working poor.

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Laurell Hamilton

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series

1. Guilty Pleasures (1993)
2. The Laughing Corpse (1994)
3. Circus of the Damned (1995)
4. The Lunatic Cafe (1996)
5. Bloody Bones (1996)
6. The Killing Dance (1997)
7. Burnt Offerings (1998)
8. Blue Moon (1998)
9. Obsidian Butterfly (2000)
10. Narcissus in Chains (2001)
11. Cerulean Sins (2003)
12. Incubus Dreams (2004)

Meredith Gentry series

1. A Kiss of Shadows (2000)
2. A Caress of Twilight (2002)
3. Seduced By Moonlight (2004)

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The Encyclopedia of Money (2004)

The Encyclopedia of Money tells the international stow of currency from early barter commodities to the widely used credit cards of today. More than 300 entries describe the major innovations, experiments, triumphs, and disasters in the development of a viable medium of exchange without technical jargon and complicated mathematical concepts.

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CliffQuickReview - "Writing Grammar Usage And Style" (2001)

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Kathy Reichs - Cross Bones (2005)

(The eighth book in the Temperance Brennan series)

The latest gripping thriller from world class forensic anthropologist, Kathy Reichs, bestselling author of Bare Bones and Monday Mourning Temperance Brennan has a mystifying new case in this eighth novel from New York Times bestselling author and world-class forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs. Tempe is called in to interpret the wounds of a man who was shot in the head, but while she tries to make sense of the fracture patterning, an unknown man slips her a photograph of a skeleton, telling her it holds the answer to the victim's death. Detective Andrew Ryan is also on the case and, as his relationship with Tempe heats up, together they try to figure out who this orthodox Jew in the Israeli "import business" really was. Was he involved in the black market trade in antiquities? And what is the significance of the photo? With the help of Jacob Drum, a biblical archaeologist and old friend from the University of North Carolina, Tempe follows the trail of clues all the way to Israel. In the Holy Land, she learns of a strange ossuary at Masada, a shroud, and a tomb that may have held the remains of Jesus's family. But the further she probes into the identity of the ancient skeleton, the more she seems to be putting herself in danger...

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Erica Spindler - All Fall Down (2000)

Risking her career to convince a troubled FBI profiler that a serial killer is stalking men who have escaped the fingers of justice, smalltown police officer Melanie May soon discovers that the serial killer may be someone close to her, a ruthless murderer who will let nothingand no one stand in the way.

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Jan Burke - "HOCUS" (1997)
(The fifth book in the Irene Kelly series)

Agatha Award (nominee)
Macavity Awards (nominee)

When her detective husband Frank turns up missing, an ominous bloodstain in the trunk of his car and a warning left on the rearview mirror, Irene must determine who has kidnapped him and why so that she can find him before they kill him.

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