The Gambling Master of Shanghai and Other Tales of Suspense is a collection of seventeen stories that will take the reader on a suspenseful journey to places near and far -- to Shanghai and Prague, Africa, Cambodia, and the United States. The title story starts out in Las Vegas, but spirals its way back in time, to a hidden cave in Shanghai where a child was lost, and a longed-for rendezvous is darkly doubtful. In Love and Death in Africa an American returns to Nairobi, and by sheer chance sees someone he had been hoping to see again. Things turn sinister, when a murder occurs. Elsewhere in Africa, The Prisoner of Zemu Island takes place on a tropical island in the Indian Ocean, near Zanzibar. On her arrival a young American woman seeks out a childhood friend with whom she had played marbles and drank orange fanta in the quiet shade of a mango tree, and finds herself caught up in a revolution. Recipe Secrets is set in an upscale neighborhood of Philadelphia, where a recent widower is planning to sell his house. Deeply troubled by his wife's unexplained suicide, he wanders from room to room, reliving old memories. A life of deception and betrayal unfolds, with unexpected and explosive consequences. The Dance of the Apsara takes place in Cambodia, twenty years after the brutal terror of Pol Pot's regime, amidst the trauma that still lingers. The Apsara is an icon in Cambodia, a dancer who performed in the courts of kings. Images of Apsaras are carved on the walls of the ancient temples of Angor Wat. Two American journalists, a man and a woman, travel upcountry together, in search of clues that will provide some answers to a mystery that confounds them both, and find more than they had bargained for. The Oak's Long Shadow is a story set in the American South. A young woman who has gone to work in New York City, receives news that her aging father has died. As she flies to her family home in North Carolina, where she grew up, the ords of her old nanny echo in her ears. "Your Daddy didn't die no natural death." Other authors comment: Stanley Meisler: Joan Richter conjures up mysterious tales of puzzlement, of heartfelt realism, of exotic twists and turns." Ann McLaughlin: "Memorable characters people these scenes, as the author wraps the joy and sorrow of each story in a veil of intriguing mystery."
About the Author: Joan Richter is an award-winning short story writer, whose fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and anthologies. She is a member of Mystery Writers of America, International Association of Crime Writers, and Pacific Northwest Writers Association. Raised and educated in New York City, she has a BA from Hunter College, and went on the study at Georgetown University and Sarah Lawrence College. She lived in East Africa for two years, when her husband was deputy director of the Peace Corps program in Kenya. She consulted for Peace Corps Washington on the role of staff wives overseas. Along with their two small sons, the couple visited volunteers in remote villages, and traveled extensively in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. On her return to her hometown of New York, Joan Richter worked as a freelance writer and editor. She was a contributing editor to Westchester Magazine and a stringer for The New York Times metropolitan section, and wrote feature stories for the suburban section. She became travel editor of The Trib and then joined American Express, publishers of Travel & Leisure and Food & Wine, where she became director of public affairs. She was the company's delegate to the United Nations World Tourism Organization. Well-remembered conferences were in in Manila, Rome, Paris, Madrid, New Delhi, and Beijing. She has been to more than sixty countries throughout Africa, Asia and the Arab world. She has a soft spot for Africa, and has not forgotten the exotic experience of staying on a houseboat in Kashmir, surrounded by the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas. Most recently from Washington DC, she and her husband, Dick Richter, now live in Issaquah, a suburb of Seattle.