In the late sixties, integration looms over provincial Miami as Herb Rizer returns home for an ailing dad and secures a position at the university. Trouble starts when he dates Beth Shockett, a professor of English, and unwittingly falls in love with a divorcee who has horrendous psychological hangups. An anti-Semitic vice president at the university intends to topple him and uses moral turpitude as a weapon after stumbling upon his affair with Mrs. Shockett at a motel. His meteoric rise at the university after the death of his father is stymied by a love affair gone haywire and continual harassment from his nemesis VP, nicknamed the Eustis Harpy. This intriguing love story is set during the upheaval of integration and the liberal sexual attitudes that threatened the mossgrown establishment.

Jeffrey Ahrenson, fired from his teaching position in Brooklyn, transforms his disappointment to opportunity. An exceptional young teacher, Jeffrey becomes a disillusioned idealist who takes action against a corrupt and dysfunctional educational system. When the State Board of Regents investigates documented charges against Borough Hall High, a national think-tank, The Center for Educational Progress, hires Jeffrey, the whistle-blower, to go undercover as a student. First a prep school then an inner city school revel to "student" Jeffrey the malpractice, mismanagement, cronyism, fraud, test mania, and other fungi in the crevices of public education. He works toward amelioration, but his mission is threatened while falling in love with his math teacher who unsettles and ultimately unmasks him. Jeff's successes in converting teacher Verna Kimler to his cause are short lived due to inner city riots and Verna's father, a minister who carries unbelievably negative baggage and hell-fire rule over Verna. The characters who people Second Time Around are not unlike friends, neighbors, antagonists, perverts, snobs, conspirators, or control freaks one encounters in daily existence. Jeffrey's interaction with them marks his path to actualization.

The Rabbi's Girl, a startling saga of rejection, revenge, and madness, travels the unmapped roads of the Great Depression. It charts a tossed-off girl's marriage to a Catskill boy to spite his gangster brother. The triangle infects religious values, loyalties, and family stability in an America plagued by the mob, Murder Incorporated, anti-Semitism, and indenture. Abe Rizer tethers his brother Sol to the mob and cheats him out of more than just a wife. Though Minnie comes full circle to a husband who loves her unconditionally-a man used, refused, and abused-it is disastrous. For her, motherhood had seemed alien and the birth of a son frightening. Sol rescues Minnie from herself, from a vengeful, gangster brother, a fundamentalist rabbi, and self-destruction. Minnie's baggage is lightened, but too late to find a happy-ever-after.

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