Mike Farris – författare

Descriptions and maps to all the major climbing areas in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Two hundred new routes and two new climbing areas have been added for a total of nearly 1,000 routes at 13 areas.

In 2000, CIA director George J. Tenet revealed the identities of some of those who were represented by nameless stars on the CIA’s Memorial Wall at its headquarters. Among those was a Texan named John W. Kearns. John served as a special operations officer in the so-called “secret war” in Laos, the CIA’s paramilitary operation during the Vietnam War. John, whose call sign was, fittingly, “Lone Star,” was killed in action in 1972. He was posthumously awarded the CIA’s highest honor, the Intelligence Star, “in recognition of his courageous performance under hazardous conditions.” For years, John’s story stayed pretty well unknown, shrouded in secrecy by classified government documents and mentioned only in passing in books about the “secret war.” Until now. Paul Heckmann, with the assistance of Mike Farris, tells his own personal story of adoption as a child and struggles with addiction that, later in life, led him to search for his biological family—and to discover a hero half-brother he had never known. While digging deeper into John’s story of heroism, he struggled with new and seemingly insurmountable physical difficulties of his own. Searching for Lone Star tells the story of two brothers, neither of whom knew about the other until long after the heroic death of the older that inspired the younger to overcome his own adversity. It is a story of sacrifice and inspiration, of love and loss, and, ultimately, of family.

Descriptions and maps to all the major climbing areas in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Two hundred new routes and two new climbing areas have been added for a total of nearly 1,000 routes at 13 areas.

Lies, murder, and a legendary courtroom battle threaten to tear apart the Territory of Hawaii.In September of 1931, Thalia Massie, a young naval lieutenant’s wife, claims to have been raped by five Hawaiian men in Honolulu. Following a hung jury in the rape trial, Thalia’s mother, socialite Grace Fortescue, and husband, along with two sailors, kidnap one of the accused in an attempt to coerce a confession. When they are caught after killing him and trying to dump his body in the ocean, Mrs. Fortescue’s society friends raise enough money to hire seventy-four-year-old Clarence Darrow out of retirement to defend the vigilante killers. The result is an epic courtroom battle between Darrow and the Territory of Hawaii’s top prosecutor, John C. Kelley, in a case that threatens to touch off a race war in Hawaii and results in one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in American history.Written in the style of a novel, but meticulously following the historical record, A Death in the Islands weaves a story of lies, deception, mental illness, racism, revenge, and murder—a series of events in the Territory of Hawaii that nearly tore apart the peaceful islands, reverberating from the tenements of Honolulu to the hallowed halls of Congress, and right into the Oval Office itself, and left a stain on the legacy of one of the greatest legal minds of all time.

Bay Muckleroy is a modern-day Diogenes, looking for an honest man. His problem lies not in the object of his search, but in the venue-he is a partner in Black West & Merriam, the largest law firm in Dallas, Texas, where honest men are scarce. Bay came up through the ranks of the firm at a time when honor and integrity did not constitute character flaws. But times have changed with the influx of lawyers the firm hired laterally from other law firms. Lawyers like Tripp Malloy, who brought with him ten million dollars'' worth of legal business and a sacrifice-truth-for-wealth attitude. Infiltrating the power structure of the firm by the threat of taking their clients and moving on if challenged, Malloy and his ilk have brought a new era to the firm, one that Bay finds distasteful. Enter Meg Kelly-a first-year associate who blows the whistle on Malloy''s chronic overbilling of clients. What she couldn''t possibly know was that something far more sinister was lurking beneath of the surface of those bloated fee statements. Something that Tripp and the firm needed to keep hidden. When she is fired for insubordination, Meg turns to Bay, her mentor, for help. Unaware of the tempest they are about to unleash, he champions her wrongful termination lawsuit against his own firm. But when they stumble onto a truth that threatens not only Tripp Malloy, but the entire law firm, they soon find themselves both in danger of being wrongfully terminated.

“Mas. Gill Jamieson, poor innocent lad, has departed for the Unknown, a forlorn ‘Walking Shadow’ in the Great Beyond, where we all go to when the time comes.”Those words, printed in a handwritten letter delivered to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on the morning of September 20, 1928, told the city of Honolulu that 10-year-old Gill Jamieson, the only son of Hawaiian Trust Company vice president Frederick Jamieson, was dead. What had begun as the search for a kidnap victim quickly turned into a search for Gill’s body and for his killer—a 19-year-old Japanese man named Myles Fukunaga. Poor Innocent Lad: The Tragic Death of Gill Jamieson and the Execution of Myles Fukunaga uses trial transcripts and court documents, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, official government records, and a detailed confession from the killer, himself, to tell this tragic story of the kidnapping and murder of young Gill, and the arrest, trial, conviction and execution of Myles.