Fletcher Books

Saddle sore and bone tired, Spur McCoy returned to St. Louis, Missouri, hoping to get reacquainted with some lady friends whilst waiting for his next mission. His plans are interrupted, however, when a master forger started spreading enough funny money to dam up the mighty Mississippi. And if that isn't enough, Spur is assigned a partner...

Dirk Fletcher comes up with a fine read here. The book has a fast pace, tough action, rousing encounters with beautiful women (after all Spur is an adult series) and a great bad guy, one who Spur has difficulty in tracking down.

Giving Spur a partner makes for a different angle to the series although Spur's reluctance to work with someone else and the outcome of this doesn't offer any surprises. The final chase sequence is the highlight of the book.

Fletcher rarely offers any mystery in his plots as his stories are told from the view points of heroes and villains alike so the reader is always aware of what is going on and why but this method doesn't detract from what is a quick, entertaining read.

One of the better entries into the Spur series.

Have you ever wondered how mummies were made? this book has lots of neat fact about them. Lots of neat internet links are included for futher research.

This is my third novel novel that I have read. It was throughly enjoyable. It starts out with Jessica Fletcher being invited to Savannah,Georgia for the reading of the will of her friend Tillie. But as always there a catch in order to get 1 million left to her for the literacy program that they started. She must solve the mystery of her dead fiancee within one month. They are a lot of surprises in this novel. If you are a fan you will enjoy.

this book was rather good except it took a while to get going. i would have liked the beginning to be a little more suspensful but i still thought it was good.

My girls love this book and the colorful pictures. I like the My Little Pony stories because they are upbeat and positive. There is always a positive message/lesson and a happy ending.

I have found this text to provide an excellent review of RTI as it relates to learning disabilities

Most of the text of this book explains the origins and growth of Niman Ranch meats--describing the methods used by the small farms and farmers who raise their meat to be sold under the Niman Ranch label. The book mostly stays away from preachiness, giving well-thought-out descriptions and surprising sidebars (i.e., a discussion of nitrates and their presence in the atmosphere--where most of the nitrates we consume originate). A lot of the text is outright advertising for the Niman brand, but the most interesting parts concern the lives and methods of the small farmers. A small section at the end contains very creative recipes from restaurant customers of Niman Ranch products--mostly from both coasts (inexplicably including a not-very-exciting recipe from "Chipotle"--owned by McDonald's--a chain which I tend to doubt actually uses Niman products).

If you can find it, however, Niman Ranch pork is outstanding.

Fletcher's Remarks is the first, and sadly, one of the only R.E.M. biographies around. Although sparse in information compared to Marcus Gray's It Crawled From The South, the book accomplishes Fletcher's aim of presenting a straight ahead biography. There's a second edition that goes up to 1993, but both editions are still basic biographical information, well-written, and thankfully without any of the silly asides that mar Jim Greer's similar but much more sucky Behind the Mask.

The story of the WW II "Hump" airlift has never been very widely publicized, and one of the more obscure aspects of it - an obscurity inside a vagary, to paraphrase Churchill - was the role played by the Chinese airline CNAC, the China National Aircraft Corporation. For those not up on the background story, China was cut off from its allies by both sea and land for much of the war and was supported solely by an airlift route that funneled supplies through what was then India (now Pakistan and India) to China over the Himalayan Mountains. With the aviation transport technology available at the time this was a severe test of man and machine, even without the complication of Japanese interceptors operating from Burma. The loss rate has been compared to that of the unfriendly skies over "Festung Europa," without exaggeration; over sixty years later hundreds of US and Allied aircrew are still MIA along the route. Among the missing was the mixed American-Chinese crew of CNAC C-53 (Douglas DC-3) # 53, which disappeared on March 11, 1943 on a return flight to India. This book is about one man's quest to find the wreck and determine the fate of its crew: pilot Jim Fox, copilot Thom, radio operator Wong.

The author, Fletcher Hanks, is the very definition of "spry." He was a CNAC pilot during the war, a colleague of the the missing crewmembers, and the fact that he, himself, was on the expedition that walked into the wilderness on the China-Burma border fifty-four years later says volumes about the man. His first-person account of the 1997 expedition provides the foundation of the book, but his background information on, and reminiscences about, CNAC's contributions to the airlift itself are fascinating, often funny, sometimes unsettling, and . . . invaluable. One of the problems facing US aviation historians trying to present a balanced view of these events is that the USAAF portion is well-documented and a comparatively large number of surviving participants are available to interview, but material about CNAC is sketchy. Records were lost or unavailable after the Chinese Civil War, and China itself was closed to Westerners for decades. Although this book alone can't fill the gap, it does bridge it somewhat.

It's quite a story. Imagine:
- Being cleared for takeoff with lightning strikes on the field and instruction to "avoid the B-25 burning at the end of the runway."
- A copilot who's a bear to fly with. No, really, a bear. Named Elmer.
- A proposed monument to Margo, the most accomplished prostitute in Calcutta, featuring statues of her in "four artistic positions" (see "unsettling," above).
- Losing your "kicker" out the cargo door while dropping rice to Chinese troops in the jungle, and having the man show later in Kunming to complain. Odd, because he hadn't been wearing a parachute.

Returning to the expedition itself, after a certain amount of hardship and adventure the joint Chinese-US team did find both the wreckage and, less expected, a reawakened sense of alliance and shared sacrifice. In 2003 a bust of Jim Fox with a dedication written by then-President of China, Jiang Zemin, was unveiled at the George Bush Library and then placed on display in Fox's home town of Dalhart, Texas. This gesture of international goodwill serves as the climax of the book, and a fitting tribute to those who fought the good, but unglamorous and little-known, fight long ago.

A tiny little man named Tor cannot sleep. One day he finds a dragon scale. As he files down the scale's sharp edge, a breeze blows the scale dust into his eyes which results in "a great wave of sleepiness." When he awakens, he determines that the dragon scale sand can be used to help wide awake children fall asleep. Alas, he needs a supply of them to stay in business so he must go to the dragon's lair to get them.

Richard Cowdrey's illustrations called to me the moment I saw the cover. Tor's tiny home furnishings include a thread spool end table, pencil stub window frames, a thimble cup and a soup ladle bathtub. Cowdry was inspired by Tolkien's Smaug for his double page dragon illustration. Dragon lovers will rejoice at his rendering. The dragon scale sand gleams like emeralds and Tor's mouse-drawn cart is just too adorable. There is warmth and a bow to tradition in Cowdrey's artwork. He is the talent that paints the Guardians of Ga'hoole covers.

The Sandman, (like Jack Frost--see The Stanger by Chris Van Allsburg) does not have many stories told about him. In fact, I cannot think of one. This is a nice addition to bedtime canon.