Intellectual property attorneys, romance publishers, and librarians—the very last people you'd expect to be mixed up in murder! Add a pinch of authentic Civil War re-enactors and a sparkling tour of Kansas City, and voilà, a classic yet up-to-the-minute crime.Rep and Melissa Pennyworth head west from Indiana to a re-enactment of a Civil War battle in Kansas City, Missouri. Rep is really in quest of a cutting-edge copyright case connected with romance publishing house Jackrabbit Press. He finds a corpse instead.Linda Damon, Melissa's best girlhood friend, worked for the victim, an editor (and womanizer) before his death. Linda's husband, librarian Peter, an enthusiastic Civil War hobbyist, had motive (it must be said that on one recent occasion Linda became a bit too involved in her job), means (a Civil War saber that upon examination proves to be drenched in the victim's blood), and opportunity (a publishing party).Logically, Rep's knowledge of trademark and...

When a frat boy finds himself on trial in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for piracy on the high seas, Lawyer Rep Pennyworth, suspects he's being used as an unwitting accomplice in a cheap publicity stunt. Meanwhile Rep's wife Melissa, a professor, gets caught in the middle of a verbal firefight between two colleagues that soon escalates into burglary, theft, jury-tampering, forgery of an explosive papal document from World War II—and murder.Melissa wants to protect a naïve undergraduate who might be implicated. But when one of the other suspects makes Melissa a cast-iron alibi, her search for the truth leads through a maze of gray lies—including her own.Dealing with an investigative reporter who's still having flashbacks to 1968, a fellow professor whose acute political correctness masks ruthless academic ambition, an engineer whose father's heart attack may have been either suicide or murder, and a brace of cunning lawyers out for blood, Rep and Melissa have to...

Rep Pennyworth, a trademark and copyright lawyer, has loyally followed his wife Melissa to Milwaukee in her quest for an assistant professorship in English Literature at UWM.On the night before the 2008 Army-Navy Game, a midshipman is found stark naked and barely alive in the lobby of a cheap motel near the Naval Academy in Annapolis. The plebe's closest relatives are Ole and Lena Lindstrom, a pair of aging but still scrappy Wisconsin political activists. They want Rep to help them get copyright protection for an audacious package of campaign ideas that put rich and ruthless gambling interests in the crosshairs. The candidate they have in mind heads a think tank at UWM, where she is exploiting the sensitive issue of domestic violence for her own political purposes.Speaking of domestic violence, Ole and Lena have a well-earned reputation for trading punches with each other. When Ole is murdered, Lena becomes an instant suspect. Rep and Melissa are sure that more than...

Attorney Rep Pennyworth has the client from hell....Charlotte Buchanan, author of a mystery of no particular merit, contends her 1997 novel was stolen and used as the basis for a 1999 film. She wants to sue. Rep would blow her off, but Charlotte is the daughter of the CEO of Tavistock, Ltd., the firm's major corporate client. So, aided by his literature-addicted wife Melissa, Rep files suit. By return mail comes a death threat, a grisly version of "Hold Your Tongue...."Then, in talks with the film's director, Hollywood legend Aaron Eastman, Rep discovers the outline of a bizarre scheme to destroy Eastman's credibility—and that of his films. Hoosiers Rep and Melissa aren't prepared for the larger licenses granted to political powerhouses, but they're quick on the uptake and soon armed....

Vance Hayes died while joyriding on a snowmobile late one night and breaking through thin ice near the Wisconsin Dells. The cold-hearted, hard-headed lawyer goes unmourned by clients, colleagues, or anyone else—including his reluctant eulogist, fellow attorney Rep Pennyworth.In fact, interest in Hayes' death is merely perfunctory until it inter-sects with the perils facing charmingly ingenuous Vietnamese-American court reporter Sue Key, tied to Milwaukee's Hmong community. Could it be that Hayes died not because of any of the rotten and vicious things he spent his career doing to literally hundreds of people, but because of the one decent, human endeavor that marked his adult life?The situation is further complicated by deer season when for several weeks in the fall, "up north" is home to 700,000 people carrying loaded firearms. And by the presence of a gaggle of lawyers, patrician and plebian, grouped around Indianapolis and Milwau-kee, not to mention a private...

A dead body in a locked room in a affluent Virginia country house. Nine people present in the house. No confessions and no witnesses.And now a very important document has gone missing—a document that might relate to a CIA scandal in the recent past or to a presidential election in the near future. No one will know exactly what it means until it's found. But would someone be willing to kill for it?The key to this complicated puzzle lies with two sisters who don't quite fit into Washington's high-stakes political arena. Retired Foreign Service agent Richard Michaelson and his friend Marjorie Randolph find themselves at the middle of this whirlwind of political and personal intrigue and must do more than sort clues. Just what secrets is someone trying to bury?

When shadowy gray market hustler and aspiring crony capitalist Jerzy Schroeder is murdered while Josie Kendall is hitting him up for a million dollars to help him cash in on alternative energy funding, the police suspect her of adultery and her husband, Rafe, of homicide. Josie, who works for Majority Values Coalition, an "activist fundraising organization," is a new but passionate DC player. Suave Rafe, long a Washington insider, also a long a widower, is passionate about Josie...