Common Sense

While they're busy chasing down the mad scientist who's kidnapping amnesiacs to mess with their minds and trying to avoid being the next victims in a plot that could devastate Major League Baseball and kill them in the process, newly-wed private investigators Raam Commoner and Kayman Karl just don't have a lot of time for foreplay. But somehow they manage to take some detours through the bedroom on route from a farmhouse in Montana to a major league baseball stadium to a Las Vegas brothel in a near fatal race to wring some common sense out of a lying client and a well-funded conspiracy.

Someone is kidnapping amnesiacs. Newly-wed private detectives Raam Commoner and Kayman Karl are hired to find out how and why. Raam (rhymes with bomb) is a recovering lawyer who joined his wife's PI firm after they married, and Kayman (named after a south American alligator when her mother's water broke in front of the crocodile exhibit at the zoo) is fast earning a reputation as the best white collar detective in the LA Basin. Raam goes undercover pretending to be suffering from memory loss, is kidnapped and taken to a laboratory where a (probably mad) neuroscientist is working on a mechanism to reprogram human brains with new personas in order to create a for-profit private witness protection program. Kayman follows Raam, and in a shootout with the scientist's henchmen the laboratory burns down, the scientist and all his notes and equipment are lost, the henchmen go to jail and Raam and Kayman go back to their core practice of corporate espionage and security with a nice fee from the client whose husband had gone missing and from the insurance company he was defrauding. When Raam and Kayman get back to their office after their mad scientist episode they find a new client waiting for them-Eddie Warden, Raam's coach back when he was playing college baseball and now the manager of the leading team in Major League Baseball. Coach Warden is being blackmailed for the murder of a woman he had been having an affair with, and Raam and Kayman must find the real murderer/blackmailer before the opening of the fast approaching World Series-except their client is lying to them and the cops are closing in. Baseball, money and hot sex drag them from Los Angeles to New York City to Las Vegas as they discover that the murdered woman was a setup in a scheme to fix the Series, that prostitution is a lucrative business in Vegas, and that Major League Baseball will do a lot to keep itself clean.

Author Richard David Bach was born in New York City, was raised with a younger brother by a widowed mother on the south shore of Long Island, and sleepwalked his way through an uneventful but stable and happy childhood wondering when life would begin. For Richard, life began at 17 when, in a post-war America obsessed with modern technology, he left home for Troy, New York, to pursue a Civil Engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an ROTC commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force. It was the time of the Korean War, and while the mechanical engineers from RPI were building weapons, the civil engineering students were preparing to build targets. College was a hint of freedom from the stifling confines of a structured upbringing, and a two-year active duty tour in the Air Force overseeing design and construction of anti-missile radar sites in the Arctic followed by an uninspiring job as a highway design engineer made him yearn for more adventures. That pursuit of adventure began unexpectedly during an accidental migration to Portland, Oregon. An old friend asked Richard to drive him from New York to Portland where the friend–a recent medical school graduate–was to begin an internship. Richard took his two-week vacation and a week’s leave of absence from his job and drove across country camping out and sightseeing along the way, planning to turn around and head back to NY once he had dropped off his friend. That never happened. Richard fell in love with Portland, called to extend his leave of absence (which he may still be on) and kept putting off going home until his family stopped asking when he’d come back. Years of self-introspection and therapy led him to the realization that he had probably never intended to return. Once in Portland he continued to work as an engineer, first for the Portland Development Commission designing Portland’s first urban renewal project, and then for Pacific Power & Light Company as a right-of-way-agent, where one of the power company’s attorneys encouraged Richard to try studying law. He enrolled in the Northwestern School of Law of Lewis & Clark College’s night-school program, excelled in his studies, and (despite working full time for the power company and trying to help his wife raise their two small children) loved every minute of law school. After passing the Oregon Bar, Richard joined Stoel, Rives, LLP, Portland’s largest and most prestigious law firm, where he founded and chaired its Environmental Law Practice Group, practicing environmental law until he retired to take up writing and spend time with his family–a loving wife, four productive children, nine grandchildren who make him very proud, and one adorable great-granddaughter.