Kent and Angie Rowen . . . have everything going for them-popular, good jobs, happy children and grandchildren, prominent parents. They are the last couple the people of Newbridge would expect to have a midlife crisis. Trouble on paradise begins when Kent, successful insurance agent, decides to follow his Walter Mitty dream of becoming an author. Not content with one published novel he is at work on a second, With Hoops of Steel. Night after night he secludes himself in his den, slaving away feverishly at his laptop, neglecting his wife. He is a chapter shy of finishing the manuscript when the sky falls: his laptop and backup CD are stolen He sinks into a major life-event depression. No one in the family is spared the grief. His psychotherapist is about to recommend new and dangerous deep brain surgery when there's word that With Hoops of Steel has been spotted in the bookstore. Will this push Kent deeper into his black hole, or will it put him on the road to recovery? But how can he prove the book is his? Hmm. His professor-friend Scott Navano knows. The turn of the millennium seemed to me as good a time as any to leave behind a lifetime of nose-to-the-grindstone adventures as WWII pilot, English teacher, and school superintendent in order to chase my favorite phantom-becoming an author. In the first scene of Manuscript Missing we get an early hint of how devastated amateur writer Kent Rowen would become if somehow his manuscript disappeared. Guess what. It happens. I hasten to mention that Angie, his wife, is also missing. We watch as the Rowens and their families cope with the crisis. We empathize with Kent and Angie in their deep depression, loneliness, and utter despair. We followother characters chasing their phantoms, some similar, by coincidence I'm sure, to may own. We watch a psychoanalyst, a lawyer, and a literary critic at work-fragments, no doubt, of someone's Walter Mitty dreams. The story moves to its climax. Will it be a case of all's well

Returning to India from China on November 3, 1944, WWII i46 #996 calls an ominous "Mayday." The author, himself a Hump pilot on a mission that horrendous night, recalls the violent storms. Nothing more is heard from cargo plane 996. Sixty years later, a Tibetan hunter wanders onto the crashed plane at 14,000 feet An MIA Team based in Hawaii is dispatched to Tibet to excavate and search the crash site. Missing in the Himalayas connects the dots between the i46's crash in 1944 and its excavation in 2004, between a gallant aircrew in WWII and a dedicated MIA recovery team today. The book narrates the high-risk adventure in detail-an anatomy of an MIA mission. Illustrated with dramatic photographs, Missing in the Himalayas is of special interest to pilots and aviation enthusiasts, to mountaineers, and to WWII history buffs. Aficionados of the CBI theater and the Hump will find the book of particular interest.

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