Homelessness is a national problem, that despite the best efforts of many nationally and worldwide continues to escalate. In Throwaways" we go behind the veil to look at homelessness from the inside out. It is a view only known to those that have lived it. By using stories that range from funny to sad to heart wrenching we get an up close and personal look at a world many of us think we no but very few of us actually do.
Two homicide cops come to Lisset Greene's studio to inform her that a man she knows only as a trafficker of boys has been murdered and has left his estate to her. The search for answers forces her into an uneasy alliance with the cops and forces her to confront the traumatic act that defines her. Lisset Greene, survivor, mother, artist, former nude dancer, has been described as volatile, passionate, and as slightly mad. And she does not like or trust cops. But when two boys in her care are shot, she, her daughter, two special friends, and the cops form an edgy partnership to find the shooters. She teams up with a female cop to find a terrified girl being hunted by crooked cops. Her daughter is kidnapped. Finding her depends on excavating information buried in the jumbled psyches of a pair of street people, and on working with Tucker in spite of the zigs and zags of their personal relationship. Finally, in a high dark place she must face the terrors of her past.
In the city of At il there were two laws strictly enforced: Number one, it was against the law to feed the children and number two, it was against the law to leave the city. Fox, the thirteen-year-old son of the governor, had done both. When he and two friends; eight-year-old Hawk and Wolf, age twelve, were invited to visit a family compound outside the city, Fox deliberated hard and long about the situation. Breaking the law, as a loner, was one thing but when it involved others the decision was much more difficult. It brought back memories of his first time outside the city walls; the broad, unending space of earth and sky he experienced had been a shock to his well-being. It had taken him some time before the freedom of boundaries was a comfortable experience. He was afraid this unknown may be too much of an adjustment for his friends since they had never ventured further than the guard-shack steps at the city entrance. True---he and his friends were only children; numbers on the city records. If they were ever found missing, as `Throwaways' they would just be crossed off the list of city residents.
A down-and-out man sleeping under a bridge stumbles upon the body of a murdered young woman stuffed in a trash bag and washed up at his campsite. The killers, seeking to retrieve a telltale item from the corpse, soon arrive at the bridge while following the river in search of the victim. The derelict soon finds himself hiding with the body and wrestling with the need for self-preservation, and the desire to bring the dead woman's murderers to justice. A work of short crime from our Fingerprints line.
"Unlike public education, however, consumer culture deploys the resources of what the author calls technoideological coding, in which survival no longer designates "the fittest" but rather obsolete relics from the past, those left behind by innovations. These relics are throwaways, isolated groups of the population who litter the social landscape and require the moral attention of cleanup crews, the containing apparatus of police and prisons, the financial drain of "safety nets," and the immense bureaucracies of the state. In this coding, narratives of social change are class-as-lifestyle narratives, which locate race and gender as surviving relics of a rapidly disappearing past."--BOOK JACKET.
THROWAWAY (n.) 1. A disposable asset, used for a single mission; 2. A disavowed assassin, meant to die alongside their target. Abby Palmer and Dean Logan are two broken peopleÑAbby a vet with severe PTSD and Dean a burnout trying to escape the shadow of his infamous father when they are thrust into a modern-day MK-ULTRA conspiracy and discover they are both ULTRA's human experiments.
Abby and Dean form an unlikely alliance with Grant Shaw, a former ULTRA operative, and just when they think they've got ULTRA on the run, a new Alpha subject changes everything.
Jump back in time to see how Brad Logan and the Alpha subject known only as Alice met, made an unholy alliance, and in the process ensured that ULTRA would hunt them until they died. The sins of the past have far-reaching repercussions in the present, and it's only a matter of time until Dean and Abby are caught up in the aftermath...
With only 24 hours left to stop the rogue Alpha subject who Dr. Ostrander has positioned to become the next president of the United States, Abby and Dean finally stop running and go on the offensive...but no plan survives contact with the enemy, and before their day is over, everything in their lives will have changed.
As Abby's life hangs on by a thread, Dean confronts his own personal nightmare: his murderous father. Hidden in one of Alice's many safe houses, Brad Logan forces Dean to access his psychokinetic abilitiesÑor die trying. And Alice offers the injured Abby a chance to recover her memories of Camp CheshireÉ if she's willing to become a killer once again, for Alice's agenda. Neither Dean nor Abby has a way out, and when Ostrander and ULTRA draw closer to finding them, the noose can only tightenÉ
