Lost in the Stacks — Ronnie G. Anderson

John Williams Jones lived in an old brownstone where in the thirties two mobs shot it out over millions of dollars stolen from the nearby Philadelphia mint. John just happened to find the new hundred dollar bills and hid them in his library of a home in order to keep the money from collecting mold. The fact was as an avid reader John's brownstone was filled with bookcase after bookcase of books that the man had already read. As a writer, the man was prolific; but, also as a writer, when it came time to actually put things on paper, his home was not the place to do it. On one side of his home the people gave trumpet lessons - actually anything brass. On the other side of his home was a donut shop. If he stayed home he would be deaf and fat in no time; so when a story had coalesced inside his brain he moved into a nearby hotel for a couple of weeks to have the peace of mind to be creative. Brianna Cole worked at the hotel and over the years the two became friends. When in jest she suggested that he just rent one of the plush upper two bedroom apartments and leave one of the rooms for her, she never expected the man to do that very thing; but he did, and thus began a romance between the strangely racial family of the Jones and the lovely French Creole dark Brianna Cole. Brianna had no idea that John was very slowly dying of a brain cancer that had in his youth robbed him of the ability to make children. All of this came to light when she and John visited his family in Saint Augustine, Florida. John was the son of an Australian-Taiwanese whore and a Japanese man. She had John when the man took her pregnant off the streets in Hong Kong and brought her two America. There she delivered a half black son and she and her husband had two half Japanese daughters. One would not think that the racial diversity of this family could become more tangled; but it does.