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Recommended Reading

The lives, loves, fates, and fortunes of the colorful inhabitants of Weneshkeen, a resort town on the shore of Lake Michigan, intertwine over the course of a single tumultuous summer.

Blaze, the sheriff in a backwoods community of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, is petitioning to become his mother Gertie’s legal guardian, but Gertie, a sassy sixty-six-year-old widow with a taste for detective work, has got bigger fish to fry: solving the murder of Chester Lampi who was shot dead in his deer blind.

When his father disappears along with several other men from their blue-collar Detroit neighborhood, sixteen-year-old Michael Smolij witnesses the effects of large-scale abandonment on the community’s wives and mothers.

The debut mystery launches appealing new sleuth Robin Hamilton, who uses her reporter’s skills and small-town savvy to unmask a wily murderer.

A collection of vignettes set in a coffee shop explores the subtle movements of love between ordinary people.

A seemingly happy domestic scene is turned upside down by the obsessive attentions of a troubled sixteen-year-old boy.

In 1992 Kalamazoo, Michigan, teenager Vim Sweeney confronts the rapid approach of adulthood as he deals with the end of high school, the repercussions of the first Gulf War, a long-absent father, Kurt Cobain, and local hero Derek Jeter.

After the disappearance of a plane carrying her husband and son, Bree Nichols starts her own investigation and discovers a link to a violent crime that threatens to tear apart the peaceful town of Rock Harbor.

Increasingly dismayed by her raucous family, seventeen-year-old Suzan VanderZee dreams of running away, while her fifteen-year-old brother, Evan, finds himself mesmerized by a new girl at school despite his hopes to travel the world.

Unable to return to her home after the sudden death of her husband, Anna Rainey seeks solace in a respective number of friends’ homes, where she receives different kinds of support and advice before finding the courage to persevere.

Convalescing after a near-fatal shooting, hard-boiled detective Amos Walker learns that the smuggler who had saved his life has gone missing, a case that is complicated by the man’s suspected involvement in a counterfeiting operation with ties to terrorism.

Despised after a massive layoff at his company, corporate CEO Nick Conover protects his two children from local hostilities but finds things spinning out of control when a stalker threatens his family and Nick is blamed for a murder.

When a murderer ends the lives of Edward and Paige Norbois and their four children, Sheriff Hugh DeWitt investigates the husband’s extramarital affair, a thieving business partner, and the killer’s possible motives.

With convicted murderer Maximilian Rose locked away in jail, ex-Detroit police officer Alex McKnight is puzzled when a series of murders, similar to Rose’s style, start to happen again and a trademark rose is left on his doorstep in his quiet town of Paradise.

Michigan Conservation Officer Grady Service is on the case when the leader of a notorious family of poachers is released from prison and something begins to stink in the forests of Michigan’s Northern Peninsula.

Ursula Wong, a racially mixed child, falls down a mine shaft and rescue efforts go on against a background of stories about her remarkable ancestors.

When the son of summer residents at the exclusive Shawanok Club turns up dead, constable John McIntire embarks on a search for the killer, in a mystery set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 1950.

When one of his small town’s leading citizens, Paul Passoja, is killed in an apparent bear attack, Lakota Deputy Sheriff Steve Martinez becomes suspicious and launches an unofficial investigation.

When party games go murderously wrong, Detroit detective Frank Delsa finds himself with a double homicide on his hands.

Simon Geewa, recently released from prison, and Swanton Robey, grieving for his late wife, struggle to make peace with the past, until a discovery in Swanton’s orchard sends them both on a journey of redemption.

A mysterious document that could make or break a Native American tribe’s bid to build a casino north of Grand Rapids sends the Rev. Calvin Turkstra on a breakneck journey from his rural church near Grand Rapids to the dangerous streets of Detroit and back.

When Dr. Barbara Wilson fails to pick up her daughter from school and then does not show up for rounds at the hospital, the Leelanau County sheriff’s department initially treats her disappearance as a carjacking, but then her strangled and scalped body is discovered.

Reporter Vince Marshall finds to his dismay that a lot can happen in a few days in a small town on Lake Superior. His mother witnesses a woman’s fatal fall off Eagle’s Cliff, several high school students are arrested for illegal drug possession, and Vince suspects his wife is having an affair. Nothing is what it seems, and Vince’s world is about to fall apart.

This second book in the Yooper Mystery series features the unpredictable, unflappable, and unstoppable amateur sleuth Gertie Johnson.

The second mystery novel in Nancy Barr’s series centers on Robin Hamilton, a newspaper reporter, who stumbles across the 1974 tale of a missing girl. She discovers that four other teens have similarly vanished without a trace and Robin scours the length of the U.P. to track their fate. The girls remain hidden until Robin encounters the truth.

Search and rescue K-9 handler Bree Nicholls encounters plenty of missing persons and mysteries in the untamed wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Bree grieves her husband’s death. . . and that their son blames her. But when a basement remodeling project uncovers a skeleton — and frightening attacks threaten her family — she’ll need more than her dog to find the truth!

A dogfighting ring is operating in the U.P., and they have their sights set on Samson. When Samson is taken, Bree is frantic to find him — and to save her newfound sister in the process. The thrilling conclusion of the romance between Bree and Kade will leave you breathless as they finally team up to save Samson — and discover their own future.

A serial killer mutilates his victims, leaving the bodies at various geocaching sites with obscure religious references. When the killer targets Eve Andreakos, a woman he holds responsible for his wife’s death, she barely escapes with her life. Eve flees to Rock Harbor with 2 year old Keri. Eve has just begun to relax when she and her friend Bree stumble on a mutilated body at a geocaching site. Eve knows the killer has found her again. Events spiral out of control when her ex-husband shows up and her long lost sister appears. Before it’s all over, Eve will need to reach inside and find the strength to fight back before the killer destroys everything she loves.

Hired by former Detroit Tigers pitcher Darius Fuller to break up his daughter’s romance with Hilary Bairn, a presumed fortune-hunter, Amos Walker gets more than he bargained for when Fuller’s daughter turns up dead, he discovers that Bairn had been in debt to a loan shark, Bairn vanishes, and he must tangle with crooked cops and dangerous gangsters to find the truth.

In the aftermath of a Chippewa-Finnish man’s death from Lou Gehrig’s disease, his wife, daughter, and brother-in-law read the family history he has left behind, study his philosophies about death, and struggle to redeem their own pasts.

The son of a wealthy family of timber barons struggles to reconcile himself with the damage his family has done to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula — a scarring that cuts deeply into the fabric of his own family.

Events in the life of Hemingway’s memorable character are presented chronologically in this arrangement of the stories.

Winter of 1950 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and snow is the least of the problems…

The peace and quiet of Porcupine City, a tiny town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, is destroyed forever by the discovery of a headless corpse, wrapped in plastic and accompanied by clues to another headless corpse, and Deputy Steve Martinez finds himself embroiled in a twisted treasure hunt, matching wits with a vicious sociopath.

A series of interlinked short stories chronicles one family’s search for love and a new life over the course of a year, as Annie and her little brother, Gus, watch as her free-spirited mother, Paige, embarks on a new relationship with the steadfast, well-meaning Shepherd.

Recently widowed, thirty-three-year-old real estate agent Whiskey Mattimoe is adjusting to a new life with a purse-snatching, mischievous Afghan hound, but when a client turns up dead at one of her property listings, she becomes caught in the middle of a dangerous scheme involving identity fraud, the theft of priceless artworks, and murder.

Thirty-something realtor Whiskey Mattimoe and her purse-stealing Afghan hound are drawn into the lives of the eccentric characters of the resort town of Magnet Springs, Michigan, after nearly drowning in an icy lake, finding the body of the local mayor during the town’s annual Ice Fishing Jamboree, and searching for her precocious runaway charge, Chester.

Part-time sleuth Whiskey Mattimore investigates the curse of the Miss Blossom pageant as the newly crowned winner winds up in the hospital and the former Miss Blossom ends up dead.

An eccentric antique dealer and her fifteen-year-old niece struggle to find healing in this Mitford-type novel.

When a fisherman is found dead on his boat, constable John McIntire questions whether it was truly an accident, in a mystery set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 1950.

When Township Constable John McIntire investigates the mysterious murder of Reuben Hofer, he uncovers startling revelations about the victim, a newcomer to town, including his incarceration in a Civilian Public Service camp for rebellious conscientious objectors and a stretch in prison, and finds that Hofer’s young daughter Claire could hold the key to the crime.

When P. J. Benson takes a walk in her woods with her Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy, she doesn’t expect to be shot at or to find a man dying in her dining room. It’s early April — tax time — and she has a stack of returns to finish if she wants her home-based accounting business to succeed. She doesn’t have time to be hunting for a mysterious box taken from her neighbor’s pole barn, and she doesn’t have time for the hunky homicide detective assigned to the case. But like it or not, she’s involved with both, and if strange things don’t stop happening, she may end up as crazy as her mother.

In a remote corner of the Michigan woods, behind rusted iron gates and crumbling stone walls, lie one of the country’s most notorious sanitariums and its forgotten cemetery. The sprawling ruin is empty now, and the bulldozers have come to raze it. But as they do, a terrifying secret begins to emerge…

Longing to escape the perpetual responsibility of caring for her autistic older sister, eighteen-year-old Rebecca, a member of her Prohibition-era Detroit lakeshore community’s only Jewish family, discovers a bootleggers’ yacht filled with illegal liquor that she attempts to sell to pay her way through college.