Title/Author: Nightcrawlers/Rosecrans Baldwin, The Two Million Dollar Intern/David Gauvey Herbert, Bad Therapist/Evan Wright, Ms. Mirage/Joe Tone, King of Dreams/Christie Thompson, The Officer and the Entrepreneur/Dan Slater
Genre: Non-fiction
I just love these Amazon short stories. I have read Disorder collection, The One collection, Black Stars collection, Faraway Collection, Nameless, Foreward, Out of Line, and Hush. All have been outstanding. This collection was unlike the others. These stories were journalistic investigations. I could easily see each story as its own podcast. Each one, aside from Nightcrawlers, which is actually an uplifting story, tells the story of a person being exposed for being as bad as you think they are. From city corruption to misrepresentation to outright lies, these stories dig deep into the truth.
From Goodreads: Nightcrawlers: It’s a Darien, Connecticut, tradition: an emergency medical service managed by adolescents. One kid is a varsity soccer captain. There’s a future doctor, a band dork, a theater geek. Theirs is a view of town without the niceties. A drunken spouse turned violent. Lonely old people stuck in the bath. A midlife suicide. How do these kids process the sometimes shocking and violent life-and-death secrets of their community? The answer is a story of high stress and uncommon high school lives, told by a writer who spent his own youth on the night shift. Welcome to Post 53.
The Two Million Dollar Intern: A Ponzi scheme was exposed, and a prominent Manhattan hedge fund imploded. Enterprising intern and financial wizard-in-training Gerti Muho saw it as an opportunity. He had insider knowledge and a knack for fraud, embezzlement, and identity theft. His steady supply of speed helped. Muho was on a luxury high. His luck seemed bottomless. Considering what was to come, he’d need it.
Bad Therapist: Chris Bathum was a respected therapist, addiction specialist, and founder of one of the fastest-growing rehabilitation chains in America. But Bathum was a total fraud: he was a meth-head with a history of sexually abusing his patients, scamming insurance companies, and eliminating whistle-blowers. Like Rose Stahl. But this intended victim would be his last. Stahl would risk her life to bring down the monster she and so many other people in need had once trusted for their salvation.
Ms. Mirage: In the era of Watergate and rising feminist awareness, reporter Pam Zekman was queen of the muckrakers. Her biggest investigation: buy a bar, document the inevitable city department shakedowns and bribes, and publicly document Chicago’s institutionalized corruption. Her epic story changed Chicago and also raised serious questions about the future of journalism.
King of Dreams: Peter Candlewood understood the system. That’s how he could commute prison sentences and reunite hopeless families with incarcerated loved ones. For a price. Except there was no Candlewood. No hope. Just a lowly Texas con artist who bet on the desperate—and won. And he wasn’t working alone. The multimillion-dollar deception cost the betrayed more than their savings.
The Officer and the Entrepreneur: After Kevin Corley’s military career came to an ill-fated end, he answered another call of duty, unaware that he was walking into a ruse orchestrated by one of the government’s most enterprising agents. John Leonard was posing online as an underworld figure to entrap those who were predisposed to crime. When he lured Lieutenant Corley into his scheme, he didn’t know how wrong it would go. And Corley had no idea he had so much left to lose.
Nightcrawlers was really great and will give you hope. These teenagers who run Post are just outstanding people, and I really loved reading their stories. All the others are ones where the bad people definitely get outed, and you can’t wait for that to happen. Some of these are longer than a usual short story, more like a novella. But all were really interesting.
Pleasant Nights 