Outskirts Press, INC.

Retired New York City teacher and community newspaper editor Howard Schwach is a published author with several young adult educational books and three adult novels under his belt. He spends much of his time when he is not writing on ZOOM facilitating groups of senior citizens who want to fulfill their dream of writing and publishing a novel. This is Schwach’s fourth adult novel, a continuation of his popular Dave Rifkin mysteries. His first was American 587 Heavy, a novel centered on the tragic crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in his hometown of Rockaway (NY) on November 12, 2001. His second, a novel centered on the age-old conflict between Jews and Palestinians in Israel and the consequences of that conflict on a group of aging Jewish tourists from New York City visiting the Holy Land, introduced Dave Rifkin, a retired NYPD detective who seems always to fall unknowingly into international crisis. Entitled The Masada Complex, the book was well-received and led to the second Rifkin mystery, Ain’t Love Enough, set in Music City, Nashville (TN). The Cahokia Conspiracy is the third novel in the Dave Rifkin series and takes Dave and his wife, Linda, to the remains of an ancient Mississippian city on the Mississippi River, following the spread of a virus that rivals COVID-19 that reveals a conspiracy to cover up the genesis of the virus by a greedy pharmaceutical executive who sees big dollars for the company developing a vaccine against the ancient disease.