The Pool in Bethesda

The Quiet Stranger in the Black Hat returns in an exciting new set of adventures! This time around, the stranger enlists allies to assist him in his quest to subdue evil and when despair hits and hope is almost lost forever, he intervenes, in order to change the course of people's lives for the better. This collection of two novellas, a novelette, and a short story, capture the true essence of Paul John Hausleben's most mysterious character, however, this time around, the author provides the reader with subliminal clues as to the stranger's true identity.

The first story, "680 Kilohertz" is a novella where crime and fantasy mix. An old radio and television repairman, near the end of his career and his humdrum life of running his repair shop, becomes anything but humdrum when the mysterious stranger drops off an antique radio for repair. A radio that not only broadcasts news and events from the future but also changes time when it does so. When the repairman hears a news broadcast of a horrific event broadcasted over the antique radio, the old repairman and a police detective friend are both caught in a tangled web of good versus evil and a heart-racing mission to stop the horrific event in time.

The second story is the novelette, "The Fig and the Thistle." When the quiet stranger pays a visit to a corrupt and evil religious televangelist, to show him the error of his religious ways and to crumble the evil empire, the stranger does so with two missions in mind. Not only to destroy the corrupt religious empire, but more importantly, a little boy's life hangs in the balance.

"Echo of a Requiem" is a short story about an elderly tailor--a proud and talented craftsman of custom men's business suits, who is down to his last gasps in life. Everything goes wrong for him. His wife passes away, he loses his job, and he is down to his last dollar and in desperation, the tailor takes a backbreaking job at a local supermarket. Hope seems lost until the old tailor shares an amazing encounter and a few words with the stranger.

"If Only for a Pause" is a novella of crime and fantasy mixed. Mark Holiday is a geeky, but brilliant video gamer with the gaming handle of, "Winterkill." Mark also happens to be the world's greatest professional video gamer and the owner of a successful and lucrative video game empire. One night, when Mark inexplicably decides to take a break from his introverted world of video games and venture into the real world, he encounters the mysterious stranger and meets a lovely young woman, who he instantly falls in love with. Mark's life takes an incredible turn when the stranger gives Mark a remarkable gift. Mark receives the gift of a super power that enables him to pause the world for ten minutes. Just as he can in a video game. It is then that Mark realizes the stranger's gift is for Mark to assist the stranger in his quest to defeat evil, and Mark realizes that above all, it is to save the life of the woman th...