1976: Dr. Colin Sanford, a brilliant, ambitious obstetrician practicing in the Pacific Northwest, resolves to become the first to produce a baby by in vitro fertilization, despite the controversy raging over the ethics of artificially-assisted human reproduction. He recruits Dr. Giselle Hearn, an experienced laboratory geneticist–embryologist at the University who's frustrated by the ultra-conservative policies of her department chairman. Working secretly, they set out to put their names in history books. And, incidentally, to cash in.In due course, a Sanford patient, Joyce Kennett, gives birth to a healthy boy. There is rejoicing all around. So why does Joyce's husband erupt in rage, fatally shooting both Hearn and himself? Emerald Police Detective Bernie Baumgartner doggedly seeks the answer. Soon a double cat-and-mouse game develops between the detective who refuses to be bested and the doctor determined to be the best....

It takes one moment in 2016 for ragtime music expert Alan Chandler to go from sitting in his hotel room in Sedalia, Missouri, to standing beside the King of Ragtime—Scott Joplin—at his upright piano in 1899. Chandler suddenly finds himself more than one hundred years earlier inside the famous Maple Leaf Club with its gas chandeliers, massive walnut bar, gaming tables, and pals surrounding the noted pianist and composer. "What in the hell is going on? Am I dreaming?" Clearly something unexpected is going on for Chandler in the fourth and final Ragtime Mystery by father and son Larry Karp and Casey Karp. A longtime friend Mickey Potash phones Chandler, top ragtime performer and national expert on Joplin, to say that a duffel filled with Joplin's handwritten music has surfaced. Chandler and his grandson, Tom, race from Seattle to Sedalia to evaluate what may be the most important find in popular American music. Potash shows them initial pages which look...