One day I was walking to work in the morning and I didn’t feel like thinking. So I started counting cigarette butts in the street. I walked 15 blocks and counted 384 cigarette butts on one side of the street and on the boulevard. If you double that to include both sides of the street, you have 768 butts. Multiply that by every 15-block segment in the city and you have some serious cigarette butts. It was at that very moment I came up with my foolproof, three-phase plan to achieve world peace. If the technology were available, we could convert this littering problem into a new fuel source. If every city and county in the country collected their butts, we would no longer have to rely on foreign oil. The second phase would be the development of an alternative-fuel-vehicle that could run on cigarette butts or fast food wrappers or plastic Mountain Dew bottles. Just dump all your litter in the gas tank, push the trash-to-gas button, and take off. With phase one and two in place, certainly phase three world peace would follow. Note: I took a second sampling of cigarette butts two weeks later. However, the city crew had been out with the street sweeper and the butt-count was significantly lower. With the world peace issue solved, I must mention that summer is looming on the horizon. You better get busy and plan out your list of hot novels to read this summer. The following new fiction should definitely be on that list. "The Husband" by Dean Koontz. "We have your wife. You can get her back for two million cash." Landscaper Mitchell Rafferty thinks it must be some kind of joke. He was in the middle of planting impatiens in the yard of one of his clients when his cell phone rang. Now he’s standing in a normal suburban neighborhood on a bright summer day, having a phone conversation out of his darkest nightmare.Whoever is on the other end of the line is dead serious. He has Mitch’s wife and he’s named the price for her safe return. The caller doesn’t care that Mitch runs a small two-man landscaping operation and has no way of raising such a vast sum. He’s confident that Mitch will find a way, if he loves his wife enough. Mitch does love her enough. He loves her more than life itself. He’s got 72 hours to prove it. He has to find the two million by then. But he’ll end up paying a lot more! "Piano Man" by Marcia Preston. With the tragic death of her teenage son, Clair O'Neal lost more than Nathan — she lost her direction. Now, three years after his death, her life remains flat and hopeless. But with the discovery of a long-forgotten letter written by the wife of the man who received Nathan's heart, Claire feels as if she has been given a chance to connect again with her son. According to the letter, Mason MacKinnon is a talented violinist and happily married. Perhaps, if she could meet him, her son’s death would have some meaning. But when she finds Mason, he is playing piano in a seedy bar, a cynical, chain-smoking man, down on his luck and in no mood for Claire. What has happened to him in the years since his wife wrote to Claire? How dare he abuse the precious gift given to him by Claire's son? Saving a man who has lost his family, his career and his will to live is no easy task, but Claire is driven with a purpose that borders obsession. And as two lost, lonely people learn to find hope once again, they grow to understand that life's most beautiful music still comes straight from the heart.