Word: homely
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...introduced in 1987's A Nice Class of Corpse. Having skewered the pretenses of her fellow residents of a retirement hotel in that volume, she returns in Mrs, Presumed Dead (Scribner's; 248 pages; $16.95) to expose the follies of an executive suburb where the previous owner of her home has disappeared. Aiding in her attempts to locate the missing woman are a wry assortment of her late husband's crooked cronies, all of them, like Mrs. Pargeter, now at least semilegit...
...Driving home from dinner two weeks ago, Senator Mark Hatfield was suddenly confronted by a reality that has become commonplace for less exalted residents of Washington. Only six blocks from the gleaming Capitol dome, the Oregon Republican watched as a man 20 yards ahead of him blasted away with a gun at another man. Hatfield zoomed through a red light to flee the scene. He did not call the police. "I assure you if in Washington you tell the police you saw somebody shooting somebody, they'd say, 'So what?' " Hatfield explained...
...audience among the millions of U.S. investors who routinely conduct stock and bond trades over the phone with their brokers. Because it is normal for legitimate brokers to solicit new business by making cold calls, crooks posing as Wall Streeters have talked elderly investors into borrowing heavily against their home equity to buy into schemes touted as surefire. "We are confronted with a national epidemic of truly staggering proportions," says John Baldwin, president of the North American Securities Administrators Association, a group of state officials who regulate brokers and dealers...
...phone at plausible prices, then send products that bear little resemblance to the descriptions. "Car phones," for example, turn out to be cheap telephones in the shape of a car. One "sewing machine" looks more like a stapler, and the "piano" fits in the palm of your hand. "Home stereo entertainment systems" turn out to be tiny radios, and "satellite dishes" look suspiciously like Chinese woks...
Waiting in the Columbus airport were about 100 people, including Adams' mother Mildred, a retired supervisor at a home for retarded children, and friends from her Baptist church with yellow ribbons around their necks. Adams plowed through the crowd to hug his mother and then the teary-eyed Morris. At the press conference, Adams' sister whispered in his ear that Texas had decided not to retry him. He squeezed his mother's hand so tightly his knuckles turned white...