PIs ELVYRA PREZLY AND CHUCK PALADINO TAKE ON A PRO BONO CASE INVOLVING THE ASSAULT OF A YOUNG IMMIGRANT MOTHER, WHO HAS COME TO LAS CRUCES FROM MEXICO ON A VISA TO WORK AS A CAKE DECORATOR IN A COMMERCIAL BAKERY.When Coronada "Dama" Yuen-Padilla fails to pick up her four-year son at the preschool Elvyra and Chuck are considering for their twins, Beverly Eliasun, the administrator, pleads with them to find out what happened to her.A downstairs neighbor tells them Dama is in ...

Investigators Kiera Hunt and Aldis Morgenna have made their home in Las Vegas. The year is 2204; their four-year old daughter, Sofie, classified as a genius at age two with an IQ of 165, is busy making AI robotic pets for friends and family in a small workshop next to her parents' home office. Barney the Beagle is her first creation and gift to Aldis. Others soon follow.Aldis and Kiera are awakened early one morning with the news that their close friend, retired LVPD detective, Fra...

Affliction: The cause of continued pain of body or mind, as sickness, losses, etc.; an event or instance of grievous distress; a pain or grief.These fifteen cautionary tales are about ordinary people encountering unusual problems: a woman diagnosed with a rare disease that requires a DNA transplant; an elderly woman whose strange malady robs her of the joy of baking cookies for her neighbors; a young card dealer who meets a suicidal woman on his first paid...

What do a young farmer turned rebel, an elderly widow under constant surveillance, a woman in an isolated cabin on a mountain top, and a telepathic private investigator from Europa (one of Jupiter's inner moons), have in common? In Sandy Raschke's 4 Women/4 Stories, featuring three short stories and a novella, they all face adversity and/or intense pressure to follow the dictates of societal norms. Are they heroines or heretics for challenging the status quo and the social order? O...

Veronica Eberly woke up in a hospital bed in Santa Barbara with broken bones and a bad concussion. The nurse said she had been hit in a crosswalk by a drunk driver and had undergone surgery to reduce the pressure on her brain. Veronica remembered nothing of the ordeal—or her past.A few days later, the hospital's young social worker, Kevin Lawrence, interviews her and uses her driver's license to find out where she came from so he can search for emergency contacts.

Crime and international intrigue, old friendships and new love, spur the action in The Case of Rocklin Rais.Private investigators Elvyra Prezly and Chuck Paladino, now semi-retired, are lecturing part-time at Dona Ana Community College in Las Cruces. At the end of the year, they will decide whether to continue or end their practice.On May 1, 2084, Chuck receives a disturbing link from El Paso police detective, Tai Vanh. Rocklin Rais...

It is the dawn of a new century—with motor cars, electricity and telephones. The cowboy life is fading away, the days of driving cattle and horses to faraway markets are becoming evermore rare, and in 1901, Chili Wygant, then twenty-one years old, realizes that seven years after his family's death from smallpox, resulting in his nomadic existence as a saddle tramp, he needs to get off the prairies of Wyoming and pursue another way of life.He finds a job as a busboy...

Eden Capiella, a young painter of abstract art, is being stalked by a homeless man; he tells her that her younger brother Lennie, a heroin addict, is dead then two weeks later accosts her again to tell her he is alive and if she pays him, he will tell her where Lennie is.She contacts Elvyra Prezly and Charles "Chuck" Paladino, the private investigators she met at the Organ Mountains Dripping Springs Trail. The Prezly-Paladinos had been behind her on the trail with their five-month ...

Linsee Kang, a part-time researcher for Perennial 23, a start-up in South San Francisco, discovers that the company is hiding the true nature of its work. She contacts the media but is ridiculed. Shortly after, she is fired, shoved into a limo in front of the building by several advanced male humanoids, and awakens in the hold of a cargo jet.She is transported to a remote facility in the Chihuahuan Desert in Northern Mexico, where the Superintendent has been bribed to keep her unde...

June 2077. El Paso PI Elvyra Prezly has been hired to find a statuette, stolen from her client, Hermione Jalisco. "The Golden Monkey" is the only tangible link that Hermione has to her son, Javier, found drowned in a lake within El Paso's Ascarate Park two years ago.Elvyra and her fiancé/colleague, Charles "Chuck" Paladino arrive at Hermione's home, located in a senior community of manufactured homes, to interview her. The door is slightly open. She and Chuck step inside and are both hit w...

Twenty-year-old Marilynne Krasni never thought she was special. She had lived in poverty all of her life and left La Grande, Oregon at her mother's urging to seek her "future and fortune." When she arrived in Portland to look for work as a printer, there were no job openings and she ended up as a cashier in a diner in downtown Portland.She met ninety-year-old retired attorney and widower, Cecil Claybourne, in a nearby park while taking a lunch break. When they shoo...

Pairings is a collection of micro and flash fiction, personal essays, and poetry, taken from life's observations and other-worldly ponderings. Some of these tidbits, both speculative and mainstream, have appeared in other publications.George Ivins, author of Intrigues Among Us, The Homicidal Detective, and Mr. Tomorrow's Last Prophecy, says of Pairings: "Raschke's collection travels familiar pathways of the mind, but it is original and convincing... Personal remembrances enrich Pai...