The Loose Meat Sandwich King of Hamtramck

Publisher Marketing: Terry Starko is hoping for a change in his luck by heading to, of all places, Detroit. This middle-aged, unemployed engineer is returning to the town where he grew up for a job interview. All his life he'd prospered, thanks to a series of fortunate misunderstandings. Now he's split from his wife, and this trip might give him a break from the bill collectors. Nailing the job interview turns out to be the least of his worries. As soon as he sets foot in the town he'd fled twenty years before, everybody is looking for him as if he'd never left: his hot new step-mother, the crack dealer from the old neighborhood, and even the Greek Restaurant Owners Association. It all seems to be connected to the best friend Terry didn't know he had, a guy who'd introduced Harlem Globetrotters trick plays to the Hamtramck Catholic High School Basketball League, and started a street gang war over bootleg beer from Colorado. From one minute to the next Terry doesn't know if he'll end up in a coffin next to his best friend, or end up the new Loose Meat Sandwich King of Hamtramck. Terry's story is a fun, nostalgic adventure in a town where high school garage bands compose songs about Richard Nixon and the Ukrainian national anthem. In the end, it answers the long-pondered question, "What is a loose meat sandwich, anyway?" Contributor Bio:  Kordyban, Tony It was the 1990's and the Internet was erupting like a two-liter bottle of diet cola full of Mentos. Everybody was inventing new electronic devices to go with it, but nobody knew how to keep them from overheating. That's when Tony Kordyban made up a story about some engineers wiring together psychic human brains to build a new communications network. It became the hilariaous framework for teaching heat transfer to the techies laying the foundations of the Internet. That was published as "Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks: Everything You Know About Cooling Electronics Is Wrong" in 1998. That book became an instant classic, finding a home in libraries from Beijing to Los Alamos. Tony's storytelling was influenced by his days on the streets of Detroit, and his nights immersed in "The Twilight Zone," "Green Acres," "Lost in Space," and the works of H. G. and Orson Wells. He learned cooling of electronics in his stints at Stanford and Bell Labs, while honing his creative chops drawing comics and writing short stories. "Hot Air Rises" was quickly followed by a sequel, "More Hot Air," and recently by his first novel, "The Loose Meat Sandwich King of Hamtramck." His newest book is a crime story set in the hidden world of the suburban homeless. Tony lives in the Chicago area with his wife and daughter, and continues to write, teach and engineer electronics.