“Blind Curves: A Woman, A Motorcycle, And A Journey To Reinvent Herself”

An organizational change expert in the corporate world, Linda Crill (lindacrill.com) found herself, at age 57 and widowed, wondering “What now?”

When her husband was diagnosed with mesothelioma cancer, “in our last eleven months together,” she writes, “we grew closer, bonded by our deeply shared mission of his survival and finding ways to enjoy each day.”

She not only felt grief at his passing, but grief about losing her old self. She tried to patch a new self together: “I redecorated parts of my home—more modern, playful, and colorful—reflecting an expression I had modified when we married. Slowly, I developed new interests—knitting scarves, soul-stirring music, and adventure travel.  On the one-year anniversary of being alone, I was surprised to find myself more miserable than ever. The grief hadn’t subsided. Instead it had grown and was raw and unending.”

What was needed, she found, was not a patch but whole new way of approaching the world. And it turned out to involve a Harley, a group of three companions, and a road trip of 2500 miles from Vancouver to Mendocino and back. It’s all there in “Blind Curves: A Woman, A Motorcycle, And A Journey To Reinvent Herself” ($16.99 in paperback from Skyhorse Publishing; also in audiobook and Amazon Kindle formats).

Now a Chicoan and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute instructor, Crill’s adventures in learning to ride a Harley, and having one fall over on her, are told with humility and grace. Once she passes the DMV test the real test comes in learning to ride with her companions over rough roads and hairpin turns, always looking Fear in the face. Who knows what lies just past that blind curve?

As Crill becomes more skilled as a rider, clad in her leather gear, her chosen watchword is “VROOM!”; the trip, she writes, “changed something inside me as I processed my fears about surviving with the excitement of riding. A resilient ‘new’ Linda was reinvented by riding through the blind curves of this journey.”

Crill’s journey (including being a cancer survivor) is a beautifully-told travelogue of the outer and inner world, a delight and inspiration.

“Government Contracting: Ethical Promises And Perils In Public Procurement (3rd Edition)”

William Sims Curry, the “Principle Consultant” of WSC Consulting in Chico (wsc-consulting.com), found in his research that “95% of the 2021 research participants were using anomalous formulas to evaluate proposed pricing” of goods and services private companies wanted to sell to various government agencies.

So, in the third edition of “Government Contracting: Ethical Promises And Perils In Public Procurement” ($74.95 in hardcover from Routledge; also for Amazon Kindle), Curry proposes 48 best practices for avoiding corruption in the public procurement process, where public institutions spend tax dollars buying from private suppliers.

Curry guides those professionals in government responsible for procurement through each stage of the process, from surveying the field to see what’s available before any bids are requested, through evaluating proposals to awarding, managing, and closing out contracts. Without the proper controls and oversight things can go wrong ethically--and quickly; the book’s “public procurement corruption wall of shame” lists almost 50 issues, including “abuse of power,” “favoritism,” “suicide,” and “slovenly conduct.”

The book is full of bad examples; in 2017 the Justice Department reported that UK-based “manufacturer and distributor of aerospace, defense, marine, and energy power systems Rolls-Royce Plc, agreed to pay approximately $800 million in total to the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil for bribing officials in exchange for the award of government contracts.” This is more than a little oopsie.

Curry points to the use by the Department of Defense, in evaluating proposals, of “adjectival, confidence-assessment, and color-coded scoring” which makes the system ripe for gaming. Government officials can fiddle with their confidence-assessment, for instance, to ensure “a favored contractor wins the contract.”

Instead, Curry advocates for “total weighted scoring” in which proposals are scored numerically and there is “numeric weighting of proposed evaluation criteria.” That, he says, “leads to precise identification of the contractor offering the best value to the government and deters procurement corruption.”

The book also explores the ethical minefield of gratuities. Is it okay for contractors to provide government officials with coffee and pastries? Maybe, but not in government offices. 

Well, how about furniture? Uh, no. 

Escort services? You’ve got to be kidding.

“Red Skies (Aftermath)”

A mystery lies at the heart of the second book in the “Big Joe Carson” trilogy from longtime Chico resident David Dirks, now Brentwood-based. In the first, “Particle Beam (For Such A Time),” by Dirks with Dennis E. Jones, it’s the 1980s, and a tremendous explosion rocks the secret Hans M. Mark National Laboratory near Fort Wayne, Indiana. When the proverbial dust settles, it becomes clear the Department of Energy facility, and its super-secret particle beam weapon, are the victims of treason and espionage.

And so, in “Red Skies (Aftermath)” ($10.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) by David H. Dirks, an investigation results in “apprehending Department of Energy’s HMM Lab lead scientist Horatio Glen Knightsen and accomplice Castle Marks….  While directing one of the decade's most significant Star Wars projects, Knightsen sold the plans for the top-secret Tesla Particle Beam weapon to the Israelis for $15 million.”

Knightsen has cultivated some very powerful friends and while he and Marks remain free the lab itself is on the verge of closing without Congressional approval of a new project. The folks from Grumman, military sticklers who rankle the lab’s engineers with their insistence on weekly psychological tests, are put in charge during the reorganization. A new laser weapon program gets the go-ahead, but Senior Engineer Joe Carson comes to recognize more is going on with Knightsen than meets the eye.

His beautiful neighbors, twins Sunny and Bunny Valencia, undercover US Marshalls (whose father had run a Colombian drug cartel) “found the two traitors on a yacht in the Azores and successfully extradited them back to Fort Wayne to await trial.” Carson, on administrative leave, joins the twins, and private investigator Rick Stone (who is secretly recording Knightsen and Marks), to sail Big Catch, Knightsen’s ship, now US Treasury property, from the Azores to Florida.

Investigators had found $10M dollars in Knighten’s Credit Suisse account, meaning $5M is missing. The ship is attacked and later sunk. Would a rescue operation find the missing money? And, tragically, Stone is found dead—but did he really commit suicide?

While the novel hints at answers, it also sets the scene for more revelations in the final book.

“The Boy Who Earned His Magic”

Three schoolyard bullies hold Howell Evans, twelve (almost thirteen), upside down by his ankles. It’s just another day in the town of Mount Shasta, where Howell lives with his parents and sister. Tormented by Bully Harold Bully, Pug the Pyro, and Sloppy Jack, Howell hears them howling and chanting “Witch, witch, your mother is a witch. Hunt her down, tie her up, and toss her in a ditch.”

This particular day, however, Howell has a series of strange encounters, including a Latino boy who cannot see; a creole girl who cannot hear; a Navajo girl with a great wolf; and an unsettling man in black whose eye patch glows. Then comes news that Howell’s mother, Rhiannon, named after a Welsh princess, has been in a car crash in the Sierras driving home from New Mexico. 

Howell’s eccentric uncle Tal (who drives an old VW van) explains all the weird appearances mean “they” have his mother and Howell must ride with him to find her—and prepare for the mysterious “transfer.” Otherwise the evil Drygoni will win. 

The tale is told in “The Boy Who Earned His Magic” ($15.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) by Chicoan Lynn Elliott, playwright, novelist, Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Chico State. Originally published in 2020 as “The Crossingway,” the book has now also become a teleplay.

The script won monthly honors from the London Indie Film Festival in Best Family/Children’s Film, Best Feature Script, and Best Television/Pilot Program or Series categories. If Elliott “earns his magic” and the series is produced, it will make for a phantasmagorical ride.

Born in Wales, Elliott notes in a talk that when he emigrated to the US in his twenties he wanted to know more of the “magic” of indigenous cultures that seemed to emanate from New Mexico, “a land of desert landscapes, howling wind witches, a ghostly woman in white…. A land where people ... still live with their tales and stories of the battles between good and evil … in this mysterious land with its ancient cliff dwellings and deep, haunting canyons.”

Welcome, dear friends, to “the place between here and there.”

"Sierra Blue"

Though a longtime Reno resident, prolific writer Suzanne Morgan Williams (suzannemorganwilliams.com) has fond California memories of visiting her great aunt in Oroville, and of Redding, where her husband proposed.

In her latest novel (for ages 10-15) a ninth-grader tells her own story--wanting a new start, like a new year, only to realize she brings her “old self” along for the ride. Wanting to escape cruel words, she is fully capable of using cruel words herself.

So it is with fourteen-year-old Magic Kendall. She just wants to hide. At her school in Tillamook, Oregon word is out that Magic is psychic. She sees colorful auras around humans and other animals—from rats to horses—and is plagued with dreams of future events which have a habit of coming to pass. When an opportunity comes to help her great-aunt Leah recover from an accident in the High Sierra town of “Ibis Springs,” she figures time away will let the cruel jokes die down.

But all her psychic powers little prepare her for what lies ahead, and especially the deep connection with a thoroughbred filly named Mountain Rose whom Leah is preparing for the racetrack, and who Magic renames “Sierra Blue” ($15.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle).

Leah is training therapy horses now, and Magic learns to help with riders, each with some form of “differentness.” Then, one stormy day, a terrible vision engulfs Magic as she bicycles out to the highway to get cell service. She is thus on the scene when the horse trailer with Mountain Rose, being transported by sixteen-year-old T.J. and his dad, hits ice and careens off the road, severely injuring the horse.

Magic is able to call 911 and, after the vet arrives, crawls into the overturned trailer to comfort the horse and, sensing her aura, guides even the vet in Blue’s rehabilitation. “I could see that she was a blue roan with a dark mane and tail. And those amazing, blue tinged eyes.” When Blue is well enough to race in Los Angeles, another horrendous premonition means Magic must confront Blue’s uncertain future. 

Williams’ novel is a wonderfully immersive story of self-discovery, friendship--and new directions.