Common Place

When recovering lawyer Raam Commoner and P.I. partner Kayman Karl begin the extensive renovation of an historic Hollywood mansion with the help of a heavily tattooed performance artist, they never suspect that its ghosts will lead them from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Banks of Geneva as they hunt for a common place from which to fend off the crooked politician who will kill to bury the secrets in the cellar.

When private investigators Raam Commoner and Kayman Karl buy a derelict Hollywood mansion and start out to restore it to its early glory they have no idea that they’ll dig up a fifty-year old family skeleton and the key to a looted fortune. But as Raam watches their money get sucked into the restoration vortex, and an outrageous tattooed performance artist makes a documentary of the project, Raam’s Israeli mother breaks the code and starts them on a trek that takes them from Beverly Hills to Geneva hunting for the mysterious character who is using rapidly escalating maneuvers to take the property away from them – or kill them in the process. Fighting off the politically ambitious grandson of a former owner of the property, avoiding a mafia family with a lot of money at stake, and trying to stay below the radar of the California bureaucracy, Raam and Kayman will need a common place to hide as they retreat before the fatal onslaught of a small blue butterfly.

Richard David Bach was born in New York City and grew up on the south shore of Long Island. He acquired a Civil Engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, where it was claimed that the mechanical and nuclear engineers designed weapons while his fellow civil engineers built targets. ROTC at RPI led to a commission in the Air Force and two years on active duty overseeing design and construction of anti-missile radar sites in the Arctic, after which he accidentally migrated to Portland, Oregon where he studied law at the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College. With law school and the bar exam behind him, he joined Stoel Rives, LLP, one of Portland’s most prestigious law firms, where he founded and chaired the firm’s Environmental Law Practice Group — practicing environmental law until he retired to take up writing. Richard David Bach lives and writes near Portland where he dotes upon his wife (always his first reader), four children, nine grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.