Little Miss Grouch by James Hopkin Adams is a cute ship romance about a young male love interest and a distraught young brunette. Excerpt: "Several tugs were persuasively nudging the Clan Macgregor out from her pier. Beside the towering flanks of the sea monster, the newest and biggest of her species, they seemed absurdly inadequate for the job. But they made up for their insignificance by self-important and fussy puffings and pipings, while, like an elephant harried by terriers, the vast mass slowly swung outward toward the open. From the pier, there arose a composite clamor of farewell."

As a boy, the author lived with his parents in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation of that region of China in the early 1930s. He recalls scenes fromthat long-ago prelude to World War II: the Chinese wounded being trucked to a hospital through the French quarter where he lvied, the silver Japanese biplanes with their red rising-sun markings lined up a the airport after theri aerial attacks, the sight of a burning Shanghai railway station. As a married adult, Fred resumed his expatriate life as an insurance executive in Latin America. He shares accounts of work at the office and family life with friends in countries where Marxist terrorists and revolutions fill life with problems of a unusual and exciting nature.