In case you haven’t noticed, Cleveland, my old home town, has become a focus of notoriety. First there was the guy who stashed away three women for years and now there’s a serial killer who packs his victims in plastic bags until the odor leads to their discovery.

So what’s new? Serial murdering has been around Northeastern Ohio since the novel Dead End. Okay,the setting is Akron-Canton-Youngstown, but close enough. We don’t know the motivation for the Cleveland killings, but Dead End’s murderer had a genuine agenda, one that is so unique I doubt if you’ll find it anywhere else in life or literature.

Recently, the Shroud of Turin, the controversial cloth which many believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus, went on display in the Cathedral of Turin. In a special TV appearance introduced by Pope Francis, it was announced that, new tests challenge earlier experiments dating it only to the Middle Ages. Instead, dust and pollen which date back earlier

For years The Vatican, tiptoeing carefully, has never claimed that the 14-foot linen cloth was, as some believers claim, used to cover Christ after he was taken from the cross 2,000 years ago. Pope Francis, in line with edicts issued by previous pontiffs, calls the cloth an icon rather than a relic and symbolizes the cruelty of man against man,

I have published a novel “The Shroud” set in modern times in which the Shroud mysteriously disappears from its. vault only to reappear in a remote Italian church—but mutilated. Several segments purportedly containing blood stains have been cut out.By whom and for what purpose? The mystery is pursued and eventually solved by an Interpol detective at a risk to his life.

Careful! Someone has a hand in your pocket. Every day the news contains reports of scams ranging from little more than petty theft to those on the scale of Bernie Madoff .  The deeper the pockets, the greater the reward (and risk.)  In 1931, a team of insurance salesmen, lawyers, doctors, and the thugs they employed, devised a scheme to defraud insurance companies. It was a clever plan and dragged in, by implication, the Dean of Bellevue Hospital Medical School in New York. Eventually, the scammers were caught and punished. Based on these facts I have published a novel “Prescription For Death.” The book is available in paperback and ebook formats