When Molly Carter finally gets hired at a small school on the plains of Colorado, she couldn’t be more thrilled to declare her independence. Now that she’s hours away from friends, family, and the amenities of the big city, she embarks on an emotional roller coaster as she realizes that not everyone in the close-knit town is ready to welcome her with open arms.

Her already vulnerable composure is further shaken when ruggedly compelling cop Jake Runco returns to his hometown after being injured in the line of duty. Their attraction is immediate and intense, but Jake has every intention of going back to L.A. as soon as he recovers. Hoping to protect her heart, Molly tries to fight the inevitable. But their bond grows when the sleepy town is rocked with a scandal that quickly spirals out of control.

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When gumshoe New York City detective Joe Zinski hunts his partner’s killers, he finds his 2047 acid rain world has more dangers than even a top of the line, rain neutralizing Mark IV Zxap Jacket can fend off. As gangs gather in the Toxic Box across the Hudson, Zinski follows his one piece of evidence, an orange Mark IV decorated in ODDS gang graffiti. The trail drags him north into the acid snow, into the complex and dangerous world of mega industrialist Maxwell Zxap and his artificial intelligence empire. Supremely powerful and ambitious, not even Zxap is prepared for the  horrific revelation awaiting an unsuspecting world.

The first in a series of sci-fi novels featuring NYPD Detective Joe Zinski, The Zxap Jacket reveals a future world of new challenges and brave discoveries.

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In spring of 1858 Thompson Grey, a young farmer, travels to his father’s estate seeking funds to expand his holdings. Far overstaying his visit, he returns home to find that his absence has contributed to a devastating family tragedy. Haunted by remorse, Thompson abandons his farm and begins a westward exile in the attempt to outpace his grief. Unwittingly, he finds himself at journey’s end in the one place where his strongest temptations are able to over take him and once again put him to the test. Set against the backdrop of the frontier during the years just preceding the Civil War, Crossing Purgatory tells a story of unprincipled ambition, guilt, and the price one man is willing to pay for atonement.

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Slave Camp Nightclub is a humorous novel about three college students hired off the streets of Boulder, Colorado in the summer of 1976 to work at a rock quarry. Once on the job, they encounter a variety of interesting characters that live and work there during the week and attend the quarry nightclub each night. The guys have full lives back at their vegetarian hippie household and are hesitant to give that up. However, when they finally take the plunge, they experience the magic of the nightclub and try to figure out what is real and what is imagined.

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This is the first comprehensive Operations Manager 2012 technical resource for every IT implementer and administrator. Building on the author’s bestselling OpsMgr 2007 book, three Microsoft System Center Cloud and Data Center Management MVPs thoroughly illuminate major improvements in Microsoft’s newest version–including new enhancements just added in Service Pack 1.

Find all the information you need to efficiently manage cloud and data center applications and services in even the most complex environment. The authors provide up-to-date best practices for planning, installation, migration, configuration, administration, security, compliance, dashboards, forecasting, backup/recovery, management packs, monitoring including .NET monitoring, PowerShell automation, and much more.

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Coin: The Irreverent yet Practical Guide to Money Management for Recent College Graduates is a hilarious yet practical guidebook geared toward those entering the real world that need the skills and information to handle finances. Author Judy McNary (Econ, Geog’81, MBA’91) walks students through all they need to know to build a solid financial foundation in two hours or less — and have fun doing it.

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A book in two parts, Prelude, A Novel and The 1854 Diary of Adeline Elizabeth Hoe by Richard B. Davidson (PhD Engl’73) and Helen Davidson combine research and interpolation in a genealogical study that casts new light upon the interior lives of young women in nineteenth-century America. The book begins with Adeline’s brittle, faded diary, inherited by Helen, a direct descendant. Through years of painstaking research, Helen and Richard transcribed and annotated the diary and brought the teenage Adeline, daughter of a famous nineteenth-century inventor and industrialist Richard March Hoe, back to life.

The result of Helen’s continuing quest to understand her heritage, Prelude, A Novel, is a captivating thriller about the Underground Railroad inspired by the Davidsons’ research into Adeline’s life and times as revealed through her own writing. The title Prelude refers to the piano’s central role in upper-class 1850s social life, the passage to adulthood documented in a teenage girl’s most intimate recollections, and, especially, to the undertones of secession that already dominated 1850s America.

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Join religious studies professor Rodney Taylor to experience the cultural and historical treasures of China and Tibet Oct. 2-17 with our Roaming Buffaloes travel program.

Explore Beijing’s Forbidden City, climb the Great Wall, see the giant pandas and discover the wonders of Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama’s residence.

For more information, e-mail Clark.Oldroyd@colorado.edu, call 303-492-5640 or 800-492-7743 or visit alumni.colorado.edu/travel.

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Toshiko Luckow (MTeleComm’87, MD’10)

Resuscitating a Dormant Dream

Toshiko Luckow’s (MTeleComm’87, MD’10) motto for life came from a professor.

“You can do everything you want to do — you just can’t do it all at once,” she recalls him saying. “So, voilà! That has been my motto.”

When she graduated in 2010, Toshiko was one of the oldest students to earn a medical degree in the history of the University of Colorado. At 53, an age when most professionals are beginning their last decade in the workforce, she began her family medicine residency at the Medical College of Wisconsin, St. Joseph Hospital in Milwaukee.

Toshiko, who was raised in Japan, came to the United States at age 15 as a foreign exchange student. Her English vocabulary consisted of the words “yes,” “no” and “thank you.”

After college Toshiko pursued a career in education, attending CU-Boulder for a teaching certificate in English as a Second Language. She also earned a master’s degree in telecommunications.

When she and her husband, who also is fluent in Japanese, moved to Tokyo, she landed a job downtown at AT&T working as a systems engineer. The couple moved back to the U.S. just as the telecom industry was contracting and launched a successful Japanese technical translation business in Boulder.

“I can confidently say that I have always taken actions that are true to my dreams, and they have led me to challenging and successful careers, volunteer activities and my family,” she says. “At the same time, though, I have always had a feeling that something was not quite complete.”

When she turned 40, she finally acknowledged her deeply rooted desire to become a medical doctor. Both her father and grandfather were doctors, but the cultural norms in Japan when she was a child didn’t encourage girls to become doctors. The dream lay dormant for decades.

Although she will have significant debt from medical school, that doesn’t deter her.

“I will have to work for a long time, or I’ll have to drop dead and have the loan forgiven,” she says.

Odds are, she’s got a long career ahead of her. Toshiko’s father, an internist with a doctorate, just retired last year at age 84.

Toshiko’s commitment to her dreams already has inspired others. Last year, her 54-year-old husband, Mike Luckow (DistSt’84), whom she met at CU-Boulder, became the oldest student to begin medical school at CU. When Toshiko finishes her residency in Wisconsin, she hopes to return to Colorado.

Gail Reitenbach

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Shalaya Kipp became the first CU athlete to win an individual Pac-12 title when she claimed the 3,000-meter steeplechase championship last year.

Runner Shalaya Kipp became the third CU winner in the last five years — and sixth overall — of the College Female Athlete of the Year award presented by the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame. The CU senior will be among those honored at the CSHOF’s annual banquet April 18 at the Denver Marriott City Center.

Kipp became the first CU athlete to win an individual Pac-12 title when she claimed the 3,000-meter steeplechase championship last year. She then won the NCAA title in the event and went undefeated in the steeplechase during the college season.

Kipp continued in the off-season, finishing third in the steeplechase at the U.S. Olympic Trials and running in the London Games, along with CU teammate Emma Coburn. They were just the third and fourth Buff athletes to compete in the Olympics while still having college eligibility remaining.

Last fall Kipp earned All-American status in cross country for the third straight year. She placed 18th in the NCAA Championships.

Previous CU winners of the CSHOF College Female Athlete of the Year award are basketball player Shelley Sheetz (Soc’95) in 1993 and ’95; runner Kara Grgas-Wheeler Goucher (Psych’01) in 2000; and Jenny Barringer Simpson (PolSci’09) in 2008 and ’09.

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