Is Dave Barry going mature on us? Well, no. But in Dave Barry Turns 40, he does do some thinking out loud about the aging process, aiming his thoughts at his "career-pursuing, insurance-buying, fitness-observing, Lamaze-class-taking, breast-feeding, data-processing, mortgage-paying, Parents'-Night-attending, business-card-exchanging, compact-disc-owning, tooth-flossing" contemporaries. Funny and true-to-life, especially if you were born before 1957.
Ex-military policeman Jack Reacher is lying low in Key West, digging up swimming pools by hand. He is not at all pleased when a private detective starts asking questions about him. But when the detective, Costello, turns up dead with his fingertips sliced off, Reacher realizes it is time to move on.
'Your unquestioning obedience. You will be my man.' Such is Manfred's demand when he offers Rod Ironsides the general managership of the Sonder Ditch gold mine.
For Rod, ambitious and hard-living but totally gripped by the life of the mine, it is the chance of a lifetime. Manfred Steyner is neurotic and ruthless, a compulsive gambler who treats people as counters in a private game and his beautiful, frustrated wife Terry as a social prop and source of cash.
Orrie Cather, one of Wolfe's operatives, has been secretly seeing a wealthy man's kept mistress at her secret lovenest. He is arrested when she turns up dead.
