Charles Bechtel: 9 books

Bechtel, a former newspaper publisher and weekly columnist, continued taking oblique looks at things most people took for granted or accepted at face value, and he came up with what he called the "unthoughted."In this book Bechtel explores topics ranging from the impact of a local soldier's...

When is a love story not a romance?When the lives of strangers collide, as they do on a steam-hot August weekend.Don Burbage, the good-looking sheriff deeply in love with his wife Peggy, wrestles with what commitment means as he works out a bloody event that happened in cabin six at...

No Dead People... That's what June said right before she left Nolan. Did he listen? Noooo... Okay, so Drew had to meet a dead man before they went to Santa Anita Park to watch the ponies run. But it wasn't his fault. His sister Annigail made him go. Turned out, their fay...

"An ill wind that bloweth no man to good."A pleasant afternoon: the sky is blue, the grass is green, the company — although to each of them Drew and June had been strangers — willing to share their good humor along with cole slaw, ears of corn and hamburgers, when suddenly the news arrives.And...

The long and the short about "The Long and the short:"Entering any story for the first time is like walking through a doorway into a place you never knew existed. No matter its length, the world of the short story — when done right — provides a traveler with a visit that feels too short,...

Vacationing with an old High School flame on his charter boat in the Caribbean, Nolan sets his hook into something he wishes he hadn’t. The floating bag of stink hauls him into deeper and deeper waters until there’s nowhere to go but down. Drew gets dragged from his home port in...

It begins: “Claude had a mother and two sisters, older, a grandmother — in his memories, a shadow — three angry aunts, (one married with children: a boy in diapers, another boy, and a girl who liked to tickle his testes on occasion) and, for a time, a father.”And so it was... We live,...

Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.That’s what other people might think, but Nolan sees something in the half-eaten corpse lying on an outcrop to a Montana mountain that says differently. And what it says is, “Nolan, you’ve gotten yourself in some kind of mess…...

In a dark hour after midnight in 1938 a volley of shots ring out and a number of Spanish men fall dead. For them, from then on, there are no consequences. But for the women left behind, wives, mothers, daughters and sons, the echo from those gun barrels repeat, repeat, and repeat.This is the...