Unicorn Airlines Flight 739 with no pilot, no crew, and no passengers lands at Anchorage International Airport. As the authorities are wondering what happened, a ransom demand is made for the passengers: $25 million in diamonds. Chief of Detectives for the Sandersonville, North Carolina, Police Department, Captain Heinz Noonan, is visiting his in-laws in Anchorage when he is called onto the case. He has 36 hours to determine how crew and passengers disappeared off Unicorn Airlines Flight 7...

For more than 80 years, bush pilots have carried supplies, delivered mail, and transported emergency personnel over Alaska's rugged terrain. They've flown with felons handcuffed to the seat, with corpses strapped to the wing, and with drugged polar bears sleeping in the cargo compartment. Ever since aviation came to Alaska planes have been far more important than cars or truck to the residents of the far-flung bush communities. In Cowboys of the Sky: The Story of Alaska's Bush Pilots, humo...

How can a Greyhound Bus with four bank robbers, $10 million in cash, the contents of all of the safety deposit boxes and 12 hostages being follow by the San Francisco Police vanish off the Golden Gate Bridge? The police are stumped so a specialist in impossible crimes, Captain Heinz Noonan, the Bearded Holmes, is sent to San Francisco to solve the crime. With the clock ticking, Noonan will have to unravel how the bus was able to disappear – and why there are still hostages if the money has...

It is the land of the Alaska Gold Rush, where nuggets were said to be the size of goose eggs, where men froze to death in search of the elusive yellow metal, and dancehall girls lured overnight millionaire sourdoughs into marriage. Honky-tonk pianos punctuated the howl of the north wind in towns that were half-tent and half-ramshackle collections of driftwood, whalebone, and packing cases. It was a time of whiskey and gold and long, lonely trails behind a dogsled. It was, in a word, ALASKA...

"The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state." So ordered Governor Lilburn Boggs of Missouri on October 27, 1838—issuing one of the only government-sanctioned religious extermination orders in American history. Executive Order 44 remained legally valid until 1976. But this isn't a story about religion. It's a story about money. Through twenty-five voices—Mormon farmers and political advisors, slave owners and abolitionists, land speculators and...

Why Are High Schools Graduating Illiterate Seniors? If you really want to know what is happening in America's schools, do not ask the students. Do not speak with the teachers. Do not eavesdrop on the principals. Do not believe the bureaucrats at the District Education Office. Listen to the substitutes. They are where the rubber meets the road, and they have no loyalty to any one school. In 2:45 Fever, thirty-five substitute teachers tell you what they see. A gifted fifth-grader gets every ...

That the Alaska Railroad was ever built is astonishing. It was constructed over the most treacherous terrain in the world during the most violent political era in US history. The workforce included anarchists, Bolsheviks, socialists, syndicalists, and labor union organizers against the backdrops of the First World War, Spanish Influenza, the Russian Revolution, American troops in Siberia to keep Russian Socialism from our shore, Japan's relentless gobbling of colonies from Southeast Asia t...

Step into Cedar Valley, a town once vibrant with unity, now splintered by fear, whispers of prejudice, and the thunder of division. In this quiet yet emotionally charged narrative, Quiet Echo invites readers to witness the transformation of a fractured community—where loud voices threaten to overshadow the gentle acts of courage and kindness that spark true change. As the lives of six unforgettable characters entwine, you'll feel the weight of their struggles: Meet Teresa, a teacher strivi...

When Detective Heinz Noonan arrives in Spokane to investigate a simple case of double obituaries, he has no idea he's about to uncover the largest legal theft in American history. The "Bearded Holmes" of North Carolina finds himself caught between two seemingly unrelated mysteries: elderly cancer patients dying in Switzerland with their fortunes mysteriously vanished, and a sophisticated mortgage scheme that's somehow completely legal. But when lawyer Pietro Gretler begins targeting Noonan...

Detective Heinz Noonan, the Bearded Homes, is sent to Virginia Beach, North Carolina, to find 30 antique Christian crosses that have vanished. The crosses could not have been stolen because they had no value. So why did they disappear? Who wants them gone and why? There must be a back story that involves money. But what is it? It did not take long for Heinz Noonan to realize he had to solve the back story in less than 24 hours. Can he do it? Follow the breadcrumbs with Detective Heinz Noon...

Impossible Crime Detective Heinz Noonan, the "Bearded Holmes," is ordered to East St. Louis, where a criminal mastermind has made a train with 70 passengers and crew disappear. As the search is on for the hostage, the mastermind loads a railway boxcar with a massive explosive device and abandons it on the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi River between St. Louis, Missouri and East St. Lewis, Illinois. Now the mastermind wants $50 million, or the bridge and portions of both cities of St. Lew...

The Alaska Gold Rush is the least studied era of United States history. If you pull up Alaska Gold Rush on Wikipedia, you will get the Klondike Gold Rush. The Klondike Gold Rush was centered around Dawson in Canada's Yukon Territory and lasted 14 months. The Alaska Gold Rush lasted 40 years, from 1880 to the end of the First World War, and covered an area one-fifth that of the Lower 48 states. Bonfire Saloon is not a work of narrative poetry. It is a book of history disguised as literature...