Philip Garlington: 5 books

After being fired from his last two corporate jobs, the author wonders if, instead of donning somebody's livery again, he can be a modern pioneer on ten worthless acres of desert he purchased at a tax auction for $325. He's broke, and his parcel of land is forbidding, arid and remote. He...

A young couple has graduated from a middling state college, and seeing nothing attractive about the workplace or graduate school, they elect to live in a tent in a public campground, getting by on small remittances from indulgent parents. The slacker narrator says that a work ethic, requiring punctuality,...

From the Editor's Preface: Revolt of the Sergeants: An American Insurgency in Sudan,” as the blowzy title may suggest, is a roman a clef based on an amateurish and ill-fated paramilitary scheme carried out in the impoverished Darfur region of Sudan in the spring of (date deleted). In a word, five...

This one was published in hard cover years ago and had a modest sale. It's noir humor tricked up as a police procedural. William McCann, a San Francisco cop, and his partner, J.R. Henry, met in Vietnam, where they collaborated to earn some prize money by fragging an officer. They invested the money...

A feckless, womanizing politician and his 15-year-old assistant rob the city hall payroll to finance an otherwise hopeless reelection campaign. The insouciant but ethically lax Jay Bodwell has antagonized his main contributor, his moneybags father-in-law, and has lost his sinecure at the university...