Amid the horrors of a double murder and a city's annihilation by a neutron bomb, Rudy Waltz, a.k.a. Deadeye Dick, takes the reader on a zany search for absolution and happiness.

Brae Hill Valley is a struggling high school in one the biggest cities in Texas. English teacher Lena Wright, a spoken-word poet, can never seem to truly connect with her students. Hernan D. Hernandez is confident in front of his biology classes, but tongue-tied around the woman he most wants to impress. Down the hall, math teacher Maybelline Galang focuses on the numbers as she struggles to parent her daughter, while Coach Ray hustles his troubled...

"When a reporter breaks the news that "Rats have invaded the toilet bowls" of the halls of Congress, it sparks a national frenzy. Activists see the rats upending "business as usual," and turn the invasion into a symbol against the lobbyists who hold Congress in their sway. A massive citizen uprising follows, which threatens to sweep Congress clean of Wall Street's chokehold of corruption--but the corporate titans have ways of fighting back! Gleefully...

Allergic to group activities of any kind, all her life Serenata has run, swum, and cycled on her lonesome. But now that she's hit 60, all that physical activity has destroyed her knees. As she contemplates surgery with dread, her previously sedentary husband Remington, recently and ignominiously redundant, chooses this precise moment to discover exercise. Which should be good for his health, right? Yet as he joins the cult of fitness that seems increasingly...