The Fifth Bear Hug is a continuation of the stories in The Bear Hug, The Final Bear Hug, The Third Bear Hug, and The Fourth Bear Hug. The story in the latter book begins with Dr. John James Czermak wanting to start a new life because he was responsible for his third wife getting murdered. He retires from Clemson University, sells his two homes in South Carolina, and moves to Colorado. John then starts working as a part-time professor at the University of Colorado and shares an office with a visiting professor from Moscow. Lara Medvedev and John start traveling together to meetings, and a loving relationship develops. They attend a conference in Sweden, followed by an expedition on a ship down the coast of Norway. From Oslo, they fly to Saint Petersburg, followed by a train ride to Moscow so John can meet Lara's parents. After their arrival in Moscow, John visits a good friend at the Academy of Sciences, where they go to the roof of a tall academy building so John can take some pictures. Then Alexei, who believes Czermak killed his brother and two nephews, shows up and tries to push John off the building, but instead, he falls to his death. Since John now thinks no one is trying to murder him, he asks Lara to marry him. She happily agrees. A few days later, they have a wedding reception at the home of Lara's parents. After the party ends and everyone has left, Lara's ex-husband arrives to kill John but accidentally kills Lara. In The Fifth Bear Hug, John returns to Colorado, sells his home in Nederland, and moves to Denver. Kim Carn, a CIA agent, contacts John and asks for his help on a few missions to gather intelligence for the CIA as he had done when he was at Clemson University. Kim is also on the lookout for the person who murdered her husband, who was the CIA bureau chief at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev. She suspects he was killed because he had obtained embarrassing information concerning a White House request for the Ukraine government to find damaging information on a leading presidential candidate who was a former American ambassador to the Ukraine. The White House knows that Kim now has the information. She narrowly escapes being killed by a CIA-hired assassin who had murdered her husband. The story ends with Kim's car being blown up by the assassin with John inside the car instead of Kim. Globe-trotters should especially enjoy reading about some of the author's travels to various places in the world.
Dr. James D. Navratil was educated as an analytical chemist at the University of Colorado and is now professor emeritus of environmental engineering and earth sciences at Clemson University. His other teaching experiences include serving as a chemical training officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, teaching general chemistry at the University of Colorado, and teaching chemical engineering and extractive metallurgy subjects at the University of New South Wales, Australia, where he also served as head of the Department of Mineral Processing and Extractive Metallurgy. In addition, he was an affiliate professor at Clemson University, the Colorado School of Mines, and the University of Idaho as well as a visiting professor at the Technical University in Prague. Dr. Navratil's industrial experience was acquired primarily at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Rocky Flats Plant and through his assignments with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Chemical Waste Management, DOE's Energy Technology Engineering Center, the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, Rust Federal Services, and Hazen Research, Inc. Dr. Navratil earned numerous honors, including a Dow Chemical Scholarship, the annual award of the Colorado Section of the American Chemical Society (ACS), Rockwell International Engineer of the Year, two IR-100 awards, and three society fellowships. He was a member of the IAEA team awarded the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize and in 2006 received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Commitment to the Waste-management, Education and Research Consortium (WERC) and to WERC's International Environmental Design Contests. Dr. Navratil has four patents to his credit and has given more than 450 presentations, including lectures in more than one hundred countries. He has coedited or coauthored nineteen technical books (most recently with Fedor Macasek, Separations Chemistry, and with Jiri Hala, Radioactivity, Ionizing Radiation, and Nuclear Energy), published more than 250 scientific publications, and has served on the editorial boards of over a dozen journals. He was instrumental in the founding of the journals Solvent Extraction and Ion Exchange (serving as coeditor for many years) and Preparative Chromatography (serving as editor) as well as the ACS's Subdivision of Separation Science and Technology (SST) and its award in SST and DOE's Actinide Separation Conferences and its Glenn Seaborg Award in Actinide Separations. Dr. Navratil has also organized or co-organized many conferences, symposiums, and meetings for the ACS, DOE, and IAEA. He is a diamond member of the Traveler's Century Club (www.travelerscenturyclub.org), having visited 307 countries and territories on the club list of 327. Some of these travels are described herein.
