In Ohio my parents divorced, and my mother, brother and I moved to Washington, D.C. Over the next nine years, my father owned an upstate New York weekly newspaper that folded and a herd of cattle that contracted hoof-and-mouth disease, and worked for the New York Daily News and the United Nations news bureau.
He wrote two more books: Ticket to Oblivion in 1950, and Passport to Peril in 1951. Published by Rinehart & Co., they were also brought out in paperback editions by Dell. Reviewed as suspense novels about European espionage, these books were praised by reviewers as “suave, exciting, unusual, and thrilling.”
I think those are the adjectives I would have used as a teenaged daughter about my imagined father. I feel it was a deep loss not to have known him better, and longer.
I, for one, would have loved to know what he would have thought or written about the fall of the Berlin Wall; or the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the ex-KGB spy, now MI6 agent, poisoned by radioactive polonium; or about Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader-turned-fugitive, wanted for international war crimes, who, until he was finally arrested, lived right in Belgrade for a decade disguised as an eccentric monk-like practitioner of alternative medicine.
My father died of a heart attack in 1955, just short of his fiftieth birthday. His was a short life of accomplishment at an early age, a hard-hitting, heavy-drinking, heavy-smoking, stress-filled existence. It was a life of constant deadlines of all sorts. In many ways he lived the life of his fictional protagonists, and like theirs, his wasn’t always a happy one.
During the war years, though, Bobby was just where he wanted to be—where the story was, in a period of great historical upheaval in the world.
Daphne Wolcott Parker Hawkes
Princeton, NJ
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by DOMENIC STANSBERRY
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She was young, beautiful...and dead!
Jake Danser has it alclass="underline" a beautiful wife, a house in the California hills, and a high-profile job as a forensic psychologist. But he’s also got a mistress. And when she’s found strangled to death with his necktie, the police show up at his door. Now it’s up to Jake to prove he didn’t do it. But how can he, when all the evidence says he did?
As Jake’s life crumbles around him, he races to find proof of his innocence. And with every step, the noose is tightening...
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