Jesse W Thompson: 8 books

In the hard times of the 1930s, Fin Barker sends Casey Carpenter to find his son who has run away to avoid prosecution for murder.

Mike MacDougal sails from Seattle for the Philippines with a group of scientists, they to learn more about Dr. Minerva Booger, brain surgeon, and her work with cannibals, he to learn what has happened to his mother who was sent to interview the doctor and has disappeared.

This book has a truckload of villains, but no lone protagonist who fights the odds against success, so you can't call it a novel. Rather, it's a series of stories about biblical heroes from Adam and Eve to Peter, with fictional characters who show up when I need them to make things clear and tie the stories together.

Widower Pete Erickson resurrects an abandoned sailboat and sets out for Alaska with a rich widow and her son as paying passengers. He's ignorant as a clam, but she knows about the valuable cargo the villain hid in his boat and will stop at nothing to recover.

This brief treatise asks and answers the question "Does God Smoke?" As it does so, it sets forth the three great boons of life, how they have blessed humanity, and with missionary zeal, have been scattered worldwide.

Molly Malone, from San Francisco, goes to Iowa to learn something of her family's roots. After she graduates from the University, she agrees to teach for two years in the corn-fed town of Hoover with its generally bigoted eye on life and a particularly sharp eye on its teachers. Miss Malone breaks the mold.

Annabelle and Delilah Lovland inherit Grandpa's run-down log lodge in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento. They lack money for renovation and face a $280,000 mortgage plastered on them by Cleo's husband Percy, who wants to steal the property.

At the end of "North to Alaska," after Pete Erickson has been married for fifteen minutes, Mrs. Reverend Helgesen convinces herself that he wishes he had married her instead of "that foreign-looking woman." She's right.