~A Jewish boy born on Christmas Day dares a terrifying act of protest to restore Hanukkah and Christmas to everyone.~
Sammy Itzkowitz was born on Christmas in a hole in the ground, under the home of a brave Polish family who hid his Jewish family from the Nazis.
After coming to Brooklyn at war's end, Sammy awaits with eager anticipation the arrival of the holidays: his birthday, Hanukkah and Christmas. He is dismayed to discover what he sees as indifference to the true meaning of Christmas, and ignorance of Hanukkah in America. After a frustrating incident at school, he stages a shocking protest to make people focus on his favorite time of the year for the real reasons the holidays exist. He becomes a little boy on a moral crusade.
Only an intervention by his favorite Brooklyn Dodger hero can possibly save the day.
~The counterculture lives, and dies hard, as Lenny Schneider gets caught up in murder and politics at a lefty community radio station in Portland, Oregon.~
Portland, Oregon, is about as far from his home turf as New York PI Lenny Schneider can get. Talk about culture shock: the air is fresh and clean, the rain unending, the drivers are (mostly) polite and slow, bagels are fat and fluffy, and everybody's friendly (sort of).
Lenny came to town in search of a baseball hero's missing daughter, and mooched a bed at an old buddy's place. Next thing he knows, he's involved in controversy, intrigue, and murder. Walter, a radio show host with a talent for getting under people's skins, needs Lenny's help in discovering who's trying to frame him.
Trouble is, Lenny starts wondering who's really his friend, who's really telling him the truth, and who's really out to get him, too.
~Lenny Schneider is caught up in a 50-year-old political vendetta.~
Lenny Schneider is hired to protect a client from vague threats delivered with cut-and-paste notes. In the process, he discovers a plot to kill seemingly-random victims connected only by old age. Schneider finds a possible motive in the contents of a long-dead writer's journal, and gets caught in the web of a fifty-year old political vendetta having its roots in the anti-communist hysteria of the 1940s and 1950s. Then, he realizes that all the deaths involve the color red.
As he closes in on the truth, his whole life is threatened with extinction, and the Red Scare ceases to be only a term in the history books.
~A cynical PI agrees to do a favor for an old man. The next thing he knows, he's caught up in a morass of revenge and old murders.~
New York PI, Lenny Schneider, agrees to protect a revenge-seeking Holocaust survivor from killing the concentration-camp guard he seeks. Lenny is caught-up in a web of lies and violence mixed with great food, baseball and music.Lenny's story is told in a hip, sometimes bawdy voice, filled with puns, quips and hilarious one-liners.
