Grandma Was a Bag Lady

(Proceeds from the sale of this book go to homeless charities)
A pet supplies traveling saleswoman, aged twenty-eight, picks up a seventy year old woman hitchhiker on the Interstate in the dead of night. They recount their life stories. The younger woman, committed to an orphanage in her early years, later charged with assault and battery, divorced, is now fleeing from society. The older woman, witnessing the murder of her daughter and husband became a police officer so to execute their killer mob-style, later serving as an undercover police informer in the guise of a homeless crone, is now a hitchhiking and freight train riding vagabond.

They have much in common. Neither has any known living relatives. Both had lost loved ones tragically, have serious second thoughts about God, and long for family. They decide to become travel-mates, adopting each other as surrogate grandmother and granddaughter. An odd couple, as they travel about the southwest in a van, sleeping in motels, smoking cigarillos, and sipping brandy. But their nomad way of life leads them into one adventure after another in which the old woman is not hesitant to use the .25 caliber pistol strapped to her thigh, while the young woman is inclined to demonstrate her martial arts skills.

Over the course of two and a half years they end the carnage of a serial killer, encounter sixteenth century ghosts, elude a Navaho myth, save a cat refuge, find out who is murdering pets at a sanatorium, get caught up in the murder of a Nazi war criminal, solve a mysterious poisoning, and settle for eight Spanish doubloons in lieu of one million dollars.