Common Denominator

When smart young private investigator Kayman Karl reluctantly agrees to sell her P.I. firm to a sleazy competitor, neither she nor new husband Raam Commoner have any idea the decision will plunge them into a desperate search for a manuscript that could expose the lethal operations of an underworld employment agency - a hiring hall for hit men. Clues left by the manuscript's elusive author lead Raam and Kayman from Beverly Hills to San Miguel de Allende and back to Los Angeles where they find themselves caught in a crossfire between the cold-blooded operator who hunts for the manuscript to keep himself out of the gas chamber, and the obsessed movie producer who sees the screenplay as a ticket to the Oscars - all the while trying to stay out of the way of a homicidal psychopath who wants to do them a favor and a government agent on a national security mission. Raam and Kayman are on a mission of their own - they want a honeymoon. But first things first, and as the bodies pile up the newlyweds will need a common ground from which to protect the manuscript and stay ahead of a determined killer.

When private investigators Raam Commoner and Kayman Karl buy a derelict Hollywood mansion and start out to restore it to its early glory they have no idea that they'll dig up a fifty-year old family skeleton and the key to a looted fortune. But as Raam watches their money get sucked into the restoration vortex, and an outrageous tattooed performance artist makes a documentary of the project, Raam's Israeli mother breaks the code and starts them on a trek that takes them from Beverly Hills to Geneva hunting for the mysterious character who is using rapidly escalating maneuvers to take the property away from them – or kill them in the process. Fighting off the politically ambitious grandson of a former owner of the property, avoiding a mafia family with a lot of money at stake, and trying to stay below the radar of the California bureaucracy, Raam and Kayman will need a common place to hide as they retreat before the fatal onslaught of a small blue butterfly.

Someone is kidnapping amnesiacs. Newly-wed private detectives Raam Commoner and Kayman Karl are hired to find out how and why. Raam (rhymes with bomb) is a recovering lawyer who joined his wife's PI firm after they married, and Kayman (named after a south American alligator when her mother's water broke in front of the crocodile exhibit at the zoo) is fast earning a reputation as the best white collar detective in the LA Basin. Raam goes undercover pretending to be suffering from memory loss, is kidnapped and taken to a laboratory where a (probably mad) neuroscientist is working on a mechanism to reprogram human brains with new personas in order to create a for-profit private witness protection program. Kayman follows Raam, and in a shootout with the scientist's henchmen the laboratory burns down, the scientist and all his notes and equipment are lost, the henchmen go to jail and Raam and Kayman go back to their core practice of corporate espionage and security with a nice fee from the client whose husband had gone missing and from the insurance company he was defrauding. When Raam and Kayman get back to their office after their mad scientist episode they find a new client waiting for them-Eddie Warden, Raam's coach back when he was playing college baseball and now the manager of the leading team in Major League Baseball. Coach Warden is being blackmailed for the murder of a woman he had been having an affair with, and Raam and Kayman must find the real murderer/blackmailer before the opening of the fast approaching World Series-except their client is lying to them and the cops are closing in. Baseball, money and hot sex drag them from Los Angeles to New York City to Las Vegas as they discover that the murdered woman was a setup in a scheme to fix the Series, that prostitution is a lucrative business in Vegas, and that Major League Baseball will do a lot to keep itself clean.