Böcker av Pat Jameson

On opposite sides of the country, two men take to the road, in different, unrelated pursuits. One has abducted his four-year-old stepdaughter after an ugly breakup with his wife, and heads south in Oregon on I-5. The other man has just been fired in Indiana, where he works at the local High Road Truck Plaza, for sexual harassment, a relatively new grounds for dismissal in this year of 1995. He vows revenge against his former employer, and has unfinished business with the object of his desire who got him fired. He plans to sabotage various High Road truck stops in the Midwest in retribution. The vast interstate highway system of the US is the backdrop for the story, where two hired detectives pursue the above two marks, with truck stops as the staging points for the plights of the pursued and pursuers. This book uses the thrill of the chase, vengeful love, and the romance and unknowns of the road as related by the author whose career in the truck stop industry adds authenticity and credibility to the narrative, which builds to an exciting climax in the end.

It''s 1960 America, where optimism abounds, music is fun, cars sport chrome wings, Beats study Kerouac, and residents are secure, working, and happy. And yet in ''Milburn Avenue''s'' fictional city of Sylvania, a family business owner clashes with his patriarch father and mistrusted in-laws; the controller has launched an embezzlement scheme; an out of town cop pursues a factory worker over an old homicide; a high school girl has a crush on a negro student; strip clubs thrive; a college sophomore grapples with his sexuality; a young single woman finds herself pregnant and her boyfriend womanizing; local bars witness human frailties; and teenagers grow up in large inner city high schools where social class, money, race, and academic levels are as varied as the city''s neighborhoods.

Kenny Young has been retired as an aerospace scientist for ten years. Since then he has been haunted by mysterious dreams that resemble scenes from a spacecraft, with characters some of whom Kenny has realized are aliens. Kenny suspects the aliens in his dreams are connected to the flying saucer he witnessed as a boy, in 1956, and a young man in 1963, when slight, big-headed, cloudy-personas stared back at him beneath their hovering, saucer-like spacecraft. Kenny believes the mysterious images in his dreams stem from these two events that occurred decades ago. He and his wife Linda travel cross country to the high desert of the northern Great Basin to find out. In Juniper, long-time citizen Virl Saeger experiences the same thing as Young, although his nightmares began years ago, in the early 1960s. Saeger suspects his dreams are connected to the same 1956 alien spacecraft landing witnessed by both him and Young. His quest to interpret his mysterious dreams parallels that of Kenny Young, only decades apart. The two men's quests take the reader between the 1960s of Virl's time, to Kenny Young's present day Juniper. The dual-era aspect underlines the significant differences between the conditions and citizens of small town America in the 1950s and '60s versus life in the same small town today. Significant in the story is a small group of Juniper residents with peculiar mental and physical traits that make them unique. Called 'Amerans,' these people settled near Juniper in the 1870s, led by the Jame family, still ranching and raising cattle there all these years, and the Sol family. Kenny Young's boyhood schoolmate, Dred Sol, now working for an international consulting service, meets Kenny Young in 2016 Juniper to help him solve the mysteries of his past and his dreams. As Young and Saeger struggle to interpret their dreams, the story introduces several other key characters from both 2016 and 1963, whose trials and achievements bring the town of Juniper to life: Dred Sol, the Ameran operator whose long career in espionage and subterfuge qualifies him to provide unique help to Young's quandary; Mike Berg, owner and publisher of the Juniper Banner and his daughter Amanda, who battle to preserve the integrity of the news and freedom of speech in a changing journalistic universe; teacher Nicole Hanks and administrator Jennifer Murchison, gay lovers whose modern political and social views engage Berg and his paper in ideological battle; Shawn Starr, Hanks' half-brother she hires to find dirt on Berg; Justin Miller, local drug dealer and low-life who makes his living infecting high school kids and millennials with methamphetamine; Tyler Kelley, twenty-two year old would-be law student and half-brother of prominent local attorney Jason Kelley, who hires him for summer help at his law firm; twelve-year-old Aidan Volpe, a product of present-day 'self-esteem' educational systems; and the Jame family, Ameran ranchers who assist Young and Saeger from behind the scenes to uncover the mysteries of their past.