"VILLA MARCKWALD" is a love story set in the immediate aftermath of the unification of East and West Germany. Alice Marckwald and Adam Bell, both fifty-eight and born in Berlin, meet under adversarial conditions arising from counter restitution claims for the return of an architecturally significant urban mansion in the heart of Berlin. Alice, a widow with two grown daughters, was born in the mansion but remembers it only as a child. The Nazis had forced her Jewish family to sell the residence in the 1930's. Adam, whose "Aryan" family purchased the mansion, grew up there and was in his early twenties at the time the building was seized by the communist regime in the 1950's.

Both found their way to America. Alice works as a mathematician in Santa Monica, California, and Adam is a professor of archaeology at a small college in central Pennsylvania. Both, for their own reasons, greet news of the possibility of recovering the mansion as a welcome development in their respective lives and file the necessary papers seeking its return.

The shock to each after being informed the other has filed a competing claim strengthens their resolve. Eventually, they meet face to face where their initial animosity is slowly worn away as they come to know one another. A week-long sojourn on the island of Sardinia brings their relationship to a new level and poses a dilemma that each must resolve if a satisfactory outcome is to be achieved.

"POSTSTRASSE 16" tells the story of a young college graduate anxious to succeed in the fast-pace world of internet entrepreneurship who commits to a business relationship not knowing the dangers it poses. Claire Berman is a twenty-seven year old Harvard educated woman who possesses special skills in the hot new field of crowd-sourcing analysis. Working out of a dot-com incubator in Alexandria, Virginia, she's approached by Lawrence Appleton, who identifies himself as a representative of the Clearfield Institute of New York City. The Institute's mission, he explains, is to promote world peace through assisting governments in Eastern Europe in their fight against smuggling.

Stopping off in Berlin, Germany, after a brief business trip to Belgrade on behalf of the Institute, Claire visits her grandmother, Alice Marckwald, who lives there after gaining possession of an urban mansion in a restitution claim shortly after the unification of East and West Germany. The visit becomes open-ended as she doggedly pursues the objectives of the Institute using her crowd-sourcing expertise. Gradually, she discovers the true identity of her employer and the full extent of the danger she's been exposed to.

The action is fast-paced, with Claire finding herself buffeted by criminal threats as she pursues her work through the capitals of Eastern Europe.

FRENCH DIAMONDS is the third action-thriller novel to feature WILLIAM CHURCH, the freelance recovery specialist based in San Francisco. In this novel CHURCH is retained by a New York insurance company to recover fifteen-million dollars worth of diamond jewelry stolen during a violent robbery at a Las Vegas hotel. The jewelry was stolen from a French jewelry designer attending an international diamond show. The five men who committed the robbery are hardened criminals belonging to an eastern European syndicate. CHURCH, in his effort to unravel the elaborate criminal network supporting the operation, clashes with leaders of the gang in both Las Vegas and Los Angeles. A ransom of twenty-million dollars is demanded in exchange for the return of the jewelry. A deadline of one week compels CHURCH to move fast in pursuit of the diamonds. Aided by a female FBI agent and a Russian mixed martial arts expert, CHURCH's quest for the diamonds takes him from the international diamond bourses of Antwerp and Amsterdam to the gang's headquarters on the Adriatic coast. Along the way, deadly exchanges of gunfire leave bodies from Las Vegas to Trieste.

Twenty-year-old Will Porter doesn't want his parents to get divorced, even though his newborn brother may not be his father's. But when he seeks to keep his mother and father together, he's thrown out of the house and disinherited. His college education cut short, Will strikes out on his own, traveling through various towns of the South during the 1890s before heading west to seek his fortune. A member of one of the more prominent families of historic Virginia, Will trades on his gentlemanly Southern manners and his sense of entitlement to carve out a living and start a family of his own. But even with his pedigree, he turns egalitarian and populist as the Great Depression takes its toll. He begins to write poetry in his older years-satirical, muckraking diatribes that target those with economic power and political influence. Yet in the face of his past hardships, Will maintains a deep sense of optimism symbolic of a generation that confronted a rapidly changing America.

Church by novelist Joseph W. Michels follows William Church, ex-FBI agent turned freelance recovery specialist, as he is called from his comfortable life in San Francisco to pursue ruthless art thieves who steal priceless masters from a private residence, thus sparking an adventure of cat and mouse across Europe, with deadly results. Church is tested to his limits and finds his considerable talents pushed to the edge as the body count rises and the paintings grow more distant. This book is author Michels' first installment in the ongoing adventures of William Church. Written in the best tradition of hard-boiled heist fiction, Church will please thriller and crime-adventure aficionados, and anyone who just loves a good story well told. This is the birth of a new anti-hero in a novel that moves fast and furious, while being populated with rich and multi-dimensional characters.

Joseph W Michels takes a regional perspective to examine Aksumite sites (the Horn of Africa) from 700 BC to 850 AD in their spatial and behavioural contexts. The fieldwork introduced a regional approach to archaeological survey in Ethiopia that was unique in its methodological thoroughness and analytical rigour. The models of change and development in political organization from Pre-Aksumite through Post Aksumite times provide valuable hypothetical models.