Bøker av Pete O'Brien

Danny Olmstead has lived all his young life with the fact that his klansman father murdered a black man's white wife in cold blood simply because she was riding in the same car with him. He was five-years-old at the time, living in Harrison, Arkansas, and he also witnessed his father's own death that same night. Soon thereafter, his widowed mother moved them to Barstow on US Route 66 in California's Mojave Desert. There, he was constantly exposed to the ideology of his white supremacist uncle, Willis, but throughout his childhood and early adolescence he somehow managed to resist embracing the racial hatreds that fuel everyone in his uncle's circle. All of that is tested when he is framed for the murder of Jamal Kendricks, a black teammate who beat him out as starting quarterback on the Barstow High School football team the summer before his senior year. Evidence is found that appears to be damning, his arrest is imminent, and it is then that Willis encourages him to run, his destination the Southern California white supremacist underground and the company of men and woman of "like mind" who have agreed to shelter him. Left behind is Jennifer Miller, a beautiful Jewish girl he's been infatuated with since grammar school. She is his only alibi, her father believes her to be in danger because of her association with him, and she is shipped her to New York to live with relatives. The journey that our young protagonist embarks on becomes a saga of betrayal, treachery, and unrequited love, but also one of grim determination. Through a series of remarkable events, Danny is able to quite literally re-invent himself just a handful of miles from Barstow but an entire world away, in Los Angeles. Barstow Boy is a tale of honor, friendship, and a refusal to hate that is particularly poignant and appropriate at a time when America struggles to find true north with its moral compass, and where blatant racism seems more manifest than it has been since the mid-1960s.

Twenty-eight-year-old Caitlin Ulmer has just graduated from Stanford with a PhD in Virology and after twenty-one years in academic harness is burned out. When she and her oddball posse of girlfriends visits a Buffalo Wild Wings at a San Jose shopping mall on the 4th of July to watch the annual Nathan's Coney Island hot dog eating contest, she is both amazed and confused by what she witnesses there. Why is it that World Eating League phenom Tommy Filbert manages to ingest an astonishing seventy-six frankfurters in a mere ten minutes while the women's champion can only consume fifty-seven? Cait stands six-foot-two inches tall, won a California state volleyball championship while in high school and a Pac-12 women's rowing crown while an undergrad at Stanford, has always been able to drink most men under the table, and has for years been accused by her friends of having a hollow leg. Suddenly, Cait knows exactly what she wants to do with her immediate future. In spite of the resistance that she knows she will encounter from her controlling parents and plastic-surgeon fiancé, she'll take a year off before returning to the Virology lab at Stanford and dedicate herself to a training regimen that will put her in the position to challenge Tommy Filbert for that Coney Island crown. As has always been the case with Cait, second best won't do. If she does this, she'll need to win it all.

Meet twenty-one-year-old Jeff Land, winner of a national furniture design award in his third year at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. He plays drums and sings for the locally popular band, Whack Job, bears a striking resemblance to Kurt Cobain, and it would seem like the world should be his oyster. But alas, the timing of his birth would tend to suggest differently. Regardless of the wealth of talent he embodies, contemporary society has deemed him and his ilk overrepresented in the current job market. Maybe not in the world of Rock & Roll (which short of winning some cosmic lottery will never pay the bills), but most certainly in the world of furniture manufacture where he seems doomed to labor in the trenches as an underappreciated design minion for the remainder of his productive life. Enter Parsons graduate student Amy Brock, who brings Jeff a business proposition he believes he'd be a fool to reject. The daughter of an immigrant Vietnamese mother and billionaire industrialist Caucasian father, she doesn't have Jeff's talent but does have the advantage of gender, a bold self-confidence, and the kind of bi-racial bonafides currently in high demand in the commercial business world. All those things plus the potential financial backing of her father seem to make her the ideal business partner save for the fact that she also has a Bulgarian stepmother and a stepsister, both hatefully jealous of her. They would do anything to see her venture fail. Whack Job is a rollicking, irreverent romp through Jeff's New York City world of ambition and challenge as he struggles to overcome obstacles constantly thrown in his path while seeking to find a balance between his music and his exciting new enterprise. For a kid from the upstate New York sticks, it's a bigger chunk of life than he'd ever imagined biting off, let alone chewing.

When Theodore "Teddy" Epps-freakishly wounded Gulf War veteran and mayor of Ignorance, Pop. 6587-declares his intention to run for the seat in the United States Congress currently occupied by twenty-term incumbent Jebediah Maxwell, the congressman's wife sends retired FBI agent turned private investigator Pamela Nichols to their home district to engineer some means of discrediting him. Pam's task is simple: Find a weakness she can exploit that will drive a wedge between a blindly ambitious and avaricious Teddy Epps and Ignorance's ultra-conservative electorate.Add to that mix:a) The mayor's miserly and irascible 97-year-old father, Elmer.b) A group of Elmer's one-percenter buddies with a developed penchant for illegal substances, all of whom are determined to live to be a hundred-twenty years old.c) a frustrated local librarian lately divorced from the town's high school football coach and the recent workplace victim of a book banning purge instigated by Ignorance's fundamentalist Christian element.d) Private investigator Pam Nichols' phony offer to pay Elmer ten-million-dollars for two thousand acres of farmland he owns, ostensibly to build a huge organic pig farm just two miles downwind of town, the stench from which would render Ignorance all but uninhabitable. To these specific ingredients add a predictable measure human nature, shake, and pour yourself an adult dose. The resultant cocktail is guaranteed make you either giddy drunk from all the good fun, or apoplectic, depending upon where you sit on either side of the Great American Ideological Divide. As the sign outside the tiny town says...IGNORANCE IS BLISS