# PRESTON PAIRO

> Author


## Posts

- [One Dead Judge](https://prestonpairo.com/2025/06/08/one-dead-judge/): If you loved Ocean City, Maryland in the 1990&#8217;s, have we got a book for you. In the early 1990&#8217;s, Ocean City was a much different (and to some, much better) place than today. One Dead Judge is a fun way to experience that lost decade in the form of a lighthearted mystery with equal doses of laughter and nostalgia. Follow along as former lawyer, current one-star motel operator Dallas Henry and a band of helpers who aren&#8217;t really helping try to find out who ran over cranky Judge Crenshaw. Their efforts are complicated when Dallas&#8217; old law school girlfriend [&hellip;]
- [Launching PRESS](https://prestonpairo.com/2024/06/09/heading-to-substack/): It’s peak travel season, and I’ve packed up the blog to have it hosted through Substack.  Maybe just for the summer.  Maybe longer.  Like any good adventure, I’m setting off not knowing exactly what I’m doing. Any readers interested in my writing or being notified of my new books can subscribe to my quasi-eponymous newsletter, PRESS, and receive emails whenever I post, which will probably only be once or twice a month. Unlike Facebook/Meta and Instagram, PRESS won&#8217;t pepper you with advertising or use algorithms to decide which posts you’ll see.  If you subscribe to PRESS, you’ll get what I [&hellip;]
- [Christmas on Interstate 80](https://prestonpairo.com/2023/12/09/a-christmas-novella-by-john-bensink/): For readers in western Pennsylvania, John Bensink&#8217;s holiday novella should be especially heartwarming. Bonnie Kate Keller—divorced late in life, and still in shock from it—just can’t face Christmas alone in her home this year. When she fails to persuade…then pester…then guilt-trip her adult children to bring the grandchildren home for the holiday, she impulsively hits the highway. Bonnie’s Holiday Road Trip doesn’t start out with a specific itinerary or even destination (she was just doing it for distraction, after all), but she finds herself revisiting the scenes of her family’s happiest memories—all in a looming blizzard. Bonnie’s Christmas wish—which she [&hellip;]
- [Aunt Minna Worries About Heaven - a short story](https://prestonpairo.com/2021/06/13/797/): The blue Tesla Model S, gleaming in springtime sunshine, was clogging traffic, double-parked in front of Sweet Greens in downtown Bethesda as if the occupants were debating whether to eat there or one of the other three—or was it four?—organic-salad-in-a-compostable-bowl places on the block. The vehicular faux pas was no less offensive than the Range Rover with its rear wheel up on the curb in front of Warby Parker, the sidewalk-hogging blockade of yoga-outfitted moms pushing Mima strollers, or an aggressive expletive-muttering panhandler hoping to arouse charitable guilt.&nbsp; But the Tesla caused the most savage reaction.&nbsp; Dozens of drivers leaned [&hellip;]
- [Ebooks for Free or Cheap](https://prestonpairo.com/2020/03/20/great-free-or-cheap-ebook-sources/): [UPDATED December 9, 2023] Libby is a great and easy way to read ebooks for free.  The app syncs with your local library, which provides access to a massive inventory of ebooks, including current bestsellers. Libby is free to download (for Android, IOS) and works on all major devices.  You will need a library card from a participating library system to link to your Libby account.  Once your account is created, login and select the ebooks you’d like to borrow. Libby downloads your chosen titles to your preferred device in one of two ways: via your Amazon account to your [&hellip;]
- [Florida: Forget the Weather, It’s the News](https://prestonpairo.com/2020/02/02/florida-forget-the-weather-its-the-news/): Forget overstated (if not borderline fraudulent) tourism-bureau promises of sunny days, warm temperatures, and other tropical delights that lure vacationers, snowbirds, and down-on-their luck types certain that relocating to Florida will turn around their life.&nbsp; The state that boasts the southern-most point in the continental U.S. shouldn’t market itself on its climate and theme parks, but its ability to generate entertaining news. In the span of a few days in January 2020, the Palm Beach Post reported the following fantastic stories: ● A former West Palm Beach stripper recruited to be a pharma sales exec was sentenced to a year [&hellip;]
- [A Father Sees The Future](https://prestonpairo.com/2019/08/17/a-father-sees-the-future/): In 1977, a father who could glimpse the future told this to his son while fishing off a dock in Ocean City, Maryland: “There will come a day in your lifetime, maybe not when you’re my age, maybe when you’re Pop’s age, that you will feel almost overwhelmed by the accumulation of all that will have changed since today. “As improbable as it may seem, there will be computers, not just in everyone’s house, but in everyone’s hand.&nbsp; Like Dick Tracy’s watch, only beyond. “Kids your age won’t be outside so much like they are today.&nbsp; They won’t play like [&hellip;]
- [Closed For Your Convenience](https://prestonpairo.com/2019/04/01/closed-for-your-convenience/): Five Minute Fiction by Preston Pairo It starts out well enough.&nbsp; The bank teller asks me: “Good morning.&nbsp; Welcome to Bancs of the Americas, how may I assist you?” “Hi.”&nbsp; I slide my deposit slip and endorsed check through the flounder-thin opening in the inches-thick (presumably bulletproof) window that separates us.&nbsp; “I just have a deposit.” “A what?” Assuming my words did not penetrate the protective divider that guards bank employees from criminal elements, I repeat: “Just a deposit.”&nbsp; I point to my paperclipped check and deposit slip which are now on his side of the barrier. “Yes,” the teller [&hellip;]
- [Can Chris Clare Save Baseball?](https://prestonpairo.com/2018/08/20/can-chris-clare-save-baseball/): August 19, 2018 About the time I started losing interest in baseball, Chris Clare, a minor league player in the Baltimore Orioles’ farm system, was assigned to the Frederick Keys from the Delmarva Shorebirds. Clare’s “promotion” in July 2017 likely wasn’t more than a transactional footnote to many beyond his family. A six-two, 175-pound shortstop, Clare was originally drafted by the Orioles in the 21st round of the 2016 amateur draft.&nbsp; He received a signing bonus of $65,000, which doesn’t seem that bad, but frankly Clare may be baseball’s equivalent of military cannon fodder: one of the thousands of kids [&hellip;]

## Pages

- [11. Red, White, &amp; Bullets](https://prestonpairo.com/11-red-white-bullets-a-hitman-jake-story/): “Seems unscrupulous, doesn’t it?” Loiza asked Jake, who didn’t reply because he wasn’t sure what his young helper was referring to, which was nothing new. The generational divide, being what it was, sometimes made Jake’s native English language seem as foreign as many of the faces he now encountered every day.&nbsp; When he was growing up, his neighborhood had been mostly white, black, and a handful of Asians—the latter of whom he used to associate with running carry-outs or dry cleaners, back when people only ate out occasionally and dressed up to go to work. &nbsp;Generational divide again. Perhaps when [&hellip;]
- [10. Judge Mint Day](https://prestonpairo.com/judge-mint-day/): “Where’s the justice in that?” Loiza asked, his question interrupting the silence in Jake’s Cadillac sedan. Jake wasn’t sure what his young assistant was talking about, but assumed it had to do with the man holding the cardboard sign on which uneven magic-marker lettering broadcast a plea to motorists stopped at the traffic light: Homeless.&nbsp; Lost Everything.&nbsp; Please Help.&nbsp; Jake couldn’t help observing that the sign man had not lost his pants, but judging from the way they hung that could happen at any moment.&nbsp; So as not to seem insensitive, Jake did not point this out to Loiza, any [&hellip;]
- [9. Santa Cometh](https://prestonpairo.com/9-santa-cometh/): Normally, Jake didn’t pay much attention to the holiday season other than how the Christmas spirit might impact the difficulty of killing someone he’d been hired to remove from the roster of the living. It could be a busy time of year.&nbsp; For while Christmas was a source of murderous motivation for some, December 31st generally offered even greater impetus for a fed-up person to resolve they’d had enough already and let’s start off the New Year with a literal bang—as in the crack of gunfire Jake would aim at whoever they wanted dead.&nbsp; Sometimes turning the calendar page to [&hellip;]
- [8. The Unmasked Man in Seat 12B](https://prestonpairo.com/8-the-unmasked-man-in-seat-12b/): Jake did not like funerals, which Grace kindly told him may have been because he’d caused so many of them.&nbsp; Which happened when you killed people for a living.&nbsp; Jake didn’t believe in that particular cause and effect.&nbsp; But having determined the best course for pre-marital bliss was not to disagree with his most dearly beloved, he kept his opinions to himself as he kissed Grace goodbye and headed out the door of his Baltimore carriage house. Jake thought funerals were a waste of time and money.&nbsp; The dead were dead.&nbsp; No amount of mourning was going to bring them [&hellip;]
- [5. The Grator Gator Eliminator](https://prestonpairo.com/5-the-grator-gator-eliminator/): Jake didn’t like the idea any more than he liked the heat.&nbsp; Killing someone didn’t bother him—that’s what he did for a living—it was that he’d have to stay in Florida to do it.&nbsp; And all the sunshine and warm weather short-term tourists and longer-term snowbirds flocked south to bathe in Jake found oppressive. “You’re like a native then,” Jack Karupka appreciated, calling from his law office in Baltimore, a locale much cooler (in terms of temperature, not style) than Miami, which was where The Kroop was offering Jake the opportunity to make a large sum of money. &nbsp;“Anyone born [&hellip;]
- [7. The Best I Could Do](https://prestonpairo.com/5-the-best-i-could-do/): While waiting for someone they’d been hired to kill, Loiza said, “Have you noticed when you’re talking to someone and they say, ‘I’ll let you go now,’ they’re actually the ones who want to end the conversation?” Since Jake didn’t care for most conversations he was required to endure, he never paid much attention to or cared why someone ceased talking.&nbsp; That their words stopped was usually good enough—a preference Jake had mentioned multiple times in these early phases of his business relationship with Loiza and yet his young assistant—as he was prone to do—kept talking. “The next time that [&hellip;]
- [6. The Missed Call](https://prestonpairo.com/hitman-jake/6-the-missed-call/): “Do you like baseball?” the man asked. Jake assumed it was a rhetorical question—an ice-breaker before getting to the business at hand, which, given Jake’s line of work, would be the identity of whoever the man wanted Jake to kill. Jake wasn’t much for small talk but was trying to adjust to how the world had changed.&nbsp; Everyone now seemed to want to talk everything to death—in some cases, literally. &nbsp;But Grace was always telling Jake he had to be more understanding.&nbsp; He had to consider customer relations.&nbsp; If someone felt the need to talk a little before hiring him, [&hellip;]
- [LEGAL](https://prestonpairo.com/legal/): This site is maintained by Abercrombie 3, LLC, a publisher of Preston Pairo&#8217;s novels. Inquiries about subsidiary or reprint rights to any works of Preston Pairo or this website may be directed to: Abercrombie 3, LLC, PO Box 394, Lisbon, MD 21765.  Or you may email pres@prestonpairo.com. Links on this site to Amazon and other third-party websites may generate income to Abercrombie 3, LLC through advertising revenue or sales commissions, through the Amazon Associates program or other programs. Click to review the Privacy Policy.
- [Privacy Policy](https://prestonpairo.com/legal/privacy-policy/): This site is produced and maintained by Abercrombie 3, LLC (referred to herein as &#8220;A3&#8221; and/or &#8220;We&#8221;), publishers of Preston Pairo. A3 has designed this site with the intention not to collect or maintain any personally identifiable information about users to this website. An exception would be if a user would request to be added to Preston Pairo&#8217;s mailing list (currently maintained through his blog, PRESS, hosted at a different site by Substack), in which case A3 would maintain (but not sell) the user&#8217;s email address with the purpose of delivering email. Another exception would be that this website does [&hellip;]
- [4. You're Not So Old](https://prestonpairo.com/hitman-jake/4-youre-not-so-old/): Jake and Loiza sat in what the rental car company called a full-size sedan, but was nowhere near as roomy as Jake&#8217;s Cadillac back in Baltimore. Jake had the engine running for the air-conditioning.&nbsp; Five hours and almost a thousand miles ago, he&#8217;d boarded a plane at BWI wearing a cashmere overcoat.&nbsp; The turtleneck he now had on was still too much for 80-degree South Florida sunshine.&nbsp; Then again, being built like a bear, Jake was not made for hot weather. Seated behind Jake and Loiza, leaning forward, was a rich man whose wife was coming out of one of [&hellip;]
- [3. The Crazy Lawyer](https://prestonpairo.com/hitman-jake/3-the-crazy-lawyer/): &#8220;What are you doing?&#8221; Jake asked. Loiza, Jake&#8217;s decades-younger assistant, was preparing a second piece of toast as he had the first: plucking an entire soft knob of butter from the individual container it came in, smoothly distributing it across a crunchy plain of white bread, adding a sprinkle of salt, then turning the toast over—buttered-side down—to take a bite. &#8220;You mean this?&#8221;&nbsp; Handsome Loiza held his lightly-crisped bread slice by one corner, its neat square silhouette now interrupted by the bite he&#8217;d taken. Jake said nothing, as if what else would he have been asking about. &nbsp;In his 52 [&hellip;]
- [2. The Easy Part](https://prestonpairo.com/hitman-jake/2-the-easy-part/): &#8220;It&#8217;s got to be in the city.&#8221; The two men could have been discussing real estate, standing in another of those desolate sections of Baltimore in need of private enterprise to salvage what the city had let fall to ruin, their expensive shoes crunching shards of broken glass and crumbling chips of macadam. The shorter man, Aldous, dressed in a conservative hand-tailored suit and striped club tie, had the same compact frame as when he&#8217;d been a successful wrestler, first at a prestigious local prep school, then at an even more prestigious Ivy League university.&nbsp; In nearly five decades since, [&hellip;]
- [1. The Wrong Lawyer](https://prestonpairo.com/hitman-jake/the-wrong-lawyer-a-hitman-jake-story/): “The wrong lawyer?”&nbsp; Jake Burton squinted.&nbsp; His gloved hand, that expected to have an envelope in it by now, firmly set his empty shot glass on a coaster stuck to the table.&nbsp; “I got the wrong lawyer?” Arnie Keller’s slender eyebrows raised as he nodded. Jake thought Keller plucked his eyebrows into narrow lines to match his pencil-thin moustache.&nbsp; The way Keller did that made him look straight out of a fifties movie with the skinny eyebrows, lip-liner moustache, slick hair, and black turtleneck.&nbsp; Truth was, Keller was right out of Dundalk—high school dropout from the would-be Class of ‘99 [&hellip;]
- [BOOKS](https://prestonpairo.com/book-list/): Money Solves Murders in Amazing (and Funny) Ways Money may not be able to buy happiness (although it doesn&#8217;t hurt), but it sure can solve two South Florida murders the police can&#8217;t crack. Come spend the winter in Palm Beach with rich Aunt Minna and her even richer friends as they bribe, kidnap, and dazzle suspects and unwilling witnesses. Available at Amazon. A Love Story From the first warm days of May until the cool shadows of September, Megan Tyler struggles to reconcile her loyalty to a love that’s fading with her intense feelings for a man she believes she [&hellip;]
- [HITMAN JAKE STORIES](https://prestonpairo.com/hitman-jake/): Hitman Jake is an old-school Baltimore hitman, Jake Burton, who originally appeared in Preston Pairo&#8217;s legal thriller, Her Honor. In his 50&#8217;s, Jake is struggling to keep up with all the changes in technology that make being a hitman so much trickier than when he started (and all he needed was a gun and some bullets). Now, there are cameras and security systems and wifi and cellular signals, not to mention clients who want to pay in something called Bitcoins.  All of which makes Jake grouchy and has him working with a partner for the first time in his career: [&hellip;]
- [ABOUT](https://prestonpairo.com/): &#8220;Perhaps the best writer you&#8217;ve never heard of.&#8221; Preston Pairo is a Maryland lawyer, author, and beach-lover, who has published over 400 short stories and magazine articles, and 14 novels.  His books range from crime and legal thrillers to humorous mysteries and contemporary romance.  Most of his novels are available exclusively at Amazon, and many can be read for free through Amazon&#8217;s Kindle Unlimited Program. His Hitman Jake stories appear on this site. He also regularly publishes new material online which can be read for free by visiting PRESS at SUBSTACK. Featured Title Lots of Money Solves Murders in Amazing Ways [&hellip;]


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