Lost and Found: Bad Money (Lost and Found, #1) (ePub)

Howard Weiner is a recent addition to the literary genre of fiction. Writing mysteries, thrillers, crimes—with a touch of romance—an approach described by one reader as "one bubble off."

Many authors sharing the genre have characters whose fortune is determined by others. They literally have dodged the bullet that otherwise would have killed them. Weiner's characters make their own fortune—good or bad—and they live with the results.

Weiner's own experiences are blessed with no small number of noteworthy characters and events. He brings these slightly off-kilter individuals to life, complete with their own stories and dramas. Like the child prodigy in his first novel, It Is Las Vegas After All, who comes to the starting edge of adulthood and then loses the approval of his doting parents, the sponsorship of one of America's great institutions of higher education, and gains the enmity of his girlfriend's father—an international arms dealer—to become a home-grown terrorist operating on U.S. soil.

A survivor of rich, nuanced bureaucracies in the public and private sector, Weiner writes about characters whose career choices and decisions are morally questionable. A student of personal behavior in complex circumstances, Weiner brings these often cringe-worthy characters to life. Some are amoral, others immoral in a narrow slice of their lives, yet they otherwise look and act like people we all know from work or even childhood. Like one of the female leads in his novel, Serendipity Opportunity, an out-of-the-box thinker who flunks most of life's basic relationship tests, yet she is someone you never want pursuing you in the cause of justice. There's a former foreign security official who uses his protected status as a witness for federal prosecutors to provide cover for his own mayhem and murder in Weiner's third novel, Bad Money.