DWD's Reviews

This series returns to its winning ways. Published in 2014 by Hay House Visions Former Buddhist monk and ex-LAPD officer Tenzing "Ten" Norbu returns in the what could be entry #3, #3.5 or #4 following the prequel The Broken Rules of Ten. Ten continues his search for the perfect girl but his professional life has taken off in a big way thanks to the celebrity connections he made in The Second Rule of Ten . Mac Gannon, an aging action hero star who is an ultra-Catholic with a propensity to cheat on his wife and drink too much and the spout racist venom (clearly inspired by Mel Gibson) hires Ten to find a missing illegal alien housekeeper. That's tricky enough with the hazy documentation comes with being an illegal alien, but Ten has to keep it as quiet as possible since Mac is really hiring Ten so that Bets McMurtry, California's answer to Sarah Palin, does not get tied to her (even though she desperately wants her friend found, she is always aware of the poli...

Too Much Plot for Just One Book Published in 2013 by Hay House Visions So, the second book in the Tenzing Norbu series is jam-packed - so jam-packed that it really should have been two books. Tenzing "Ten" Norbu is a welcome addition to the L.A. mystery genre. He is an ex-Tibetan monk and an ex-LAPD officer turned private investigator who is struggling to figure out his place in the world, looking for the right woman and dealing with a poor relationship with his father. In this mystery, Ten is trying to solve the murder of an ex-client, a Hollywood producer with a reputation for making enemies. Along the way, he discovers a much larger plot involving a Latin gang, illegal drugs and a survivor of the Holocaust. I really like the character Ten - he is an active practitioner of meditation but in no way does he have all of his problems solved by meditation - he still gets irritated in traffic jams, can't figure out how to deal with the new lady in his life and he...

A twist on the L.A. detective novel Published in 2012 by  Hay House Visions . For years, Los Angeles has been the home of the detective story. For Raymond Chandler, Dragnet , Robert Crais, Michael Connelly and even videogames like L.A. Noire , Los Angeles has been the seedy, diverse world that has all of the secrets that our intrepid detective heroes must dig up and expose. Tenzing Norbu (he goes by Ten) is a different kind of detective in that he grew up in a monastery and used to be a Buddhist monk but moved to America at the age of 18. His literary hero is Sherlock Holmes and he has just retired from LAPD as a detective because the job was simply getting too bureaucratic - too much paperwork, not enough mystery-solving. Ten may not be a monk any longer but he is still a practicing Buddhist. That's a different twist, and in some ways a refreshing twist on the stereotype of the alcohol-abusing chain smoking detective. Not that Ten is a prude, but he is mindful of wh...