Standing Here Alive

Vance Collins, on the verge of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on a series of demanding investigative searches: for his past, using Internet search tools to find his lost brother and the former lover with whom he has possibly had a child; for information on the foes of his employer, an enigmatic power broker named Tenzing Horowitz; and for the future, in the strange and embattled ground of the public school system. Vance encounters a wide range of characters: among them a victim of street violence living in a half-way house, a crazed candidate for the California governorship, a sexy circus performer, a Bolivian prince and a released felon making a fortune as a meth dealer. Standing Here Alive is the poignant story of one man's attempt to bring meaning to a world beset by environmental hazards, the shameless exploitation of youth, and the complex and profound emotional minefields that are all too familiar to the millennial generation.