KDL Recommends

Moving to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to care for an aging family friend, Madeline Stone becomes involved in the lives of the small community and two octogenarian sisters who teach her valuable lessons about love and goodwill.

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.

It’s 1944 and Wink Dutton has returned to Chicago after an unwanted discharge from the military, taking a room at the back of the camera shop run by Sal Chesterton, the wife of one of his service buddies, but when Wink learns that she is making ends meet as a pinup model for the soldier’s favorite girlie magazine, it’s the beginning of an unspoken and powerful romance.

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

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.

Tom McNutt, a wealthy owner of the Northernmost Winery on the Old Mission Peninsula, north of Traverse City, Michigan, and the Grand Marshal of the Cherry Festival Parade is shot in the Parade set-up area. The community is stunned, but the parade and the Festival continue. Lou Searing and Jack Kelly are invited to work with the Traverse City Police to solve the crime. A number of suspects are identified and the investigation ensues. Murder at the Cherry Festival delivers another mystery with Baldwin’s trademarks; interesting characters, exciting scenes including a significant threat on Lou’s life. As always, Justice prevails.

Dr. Janet Reid, a professor at Alma college and a champion hot air balloon pilot, is murdered when her balloon, The Bagpiper, explodes over Battle Creek, Michigan. Lou Searing and Jack Kelly investigate the murder involving a cast of suspects at Alma College and in the ballooning world. Revenge, competition, and suspense figure into the equation as Lou and Jack solve a complex set of circumstances in the novel titled “Murder in Thin Air.”

Harry Moody has been missing for 25 years, and his grandson wants answers. Can Lou Searing and Jack Kelly solve the case…or is it destined to remain cold forever? Join Michigan’s top detectives as they encounter deception and intrigue in Houghton Lake.

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

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.

Growing up on the northern shore of Lake Michigan in the town of Escanaba, Michigan, Robin Hamilton couldn’t wait to get away from the isolation and cold, snowy weather to the bright lights of Chicago and a job with the Tribune. After her fiance Mitch, a suburban Chicago cop, is gunned down while on duty, Robin escapes back to the peace and quiet of her Upper Peninsula hometown, but finds that neither distance nor a job with the local paper can erase the memories, nightmares and questions of who killed Mitch

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.

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

An arson investigator with the Detroit Fire Department, Anya Kalinczyk, who, along with an eccentric team of ghost hunters, pursues malicious spirits, goes up against a supernatural arsonist who is setting fires to summon an ancient entity that will burn Detroit to the ground.

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.

Escaping the city, and her coed-chasing ex-husband, part-time journalist and full-time failed mystery writer Emily Kincaid has moved into a cozy cabin nestled in the woods of northern Michigan. Emily spends her days writing for the local newspaper and crafting her latest forgettable novel. Then one morning her quiet life turns grisly when a severed head tumbles out of her garbage can.

When called to investigate a human bone found on the bank of a lake in northern Michigan, Deputy Dolly Wakowski also finds the dog tags her husband gave her on their wedding day. The bones belong to the young woman in whose company he was last seen 13 years ago. Then a second body is found, and Dolly and local freelance writer Emily Kincaid must dig into Chet Wakowski’s past to find a killer.

Emily and Dolly investigate the murder of a female psychic in the woods after she makes accusations against certain members of an end-of-the-world revivalist group.

Presents a collection of stories that feature rural and working-class characters trying to cope with life in post-industrial America.

Margo Crane, a beauty and uncanny markswoman takes to the Stark River after being complicit in the death of her father and embarks on an odyssey in search of her vanished mother in this novel from the National Book Award finalist

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.

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.

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.

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.

Following the tattoo industry’s latest trend, creating tattoos that include the ashes of a customer’s dead relatives, leads to trouble for Mike, who just began a new relationship with a body piercer, when his tattoos are linked to a serial killer.

Trigger Man is a superb collection of stories capturing the gritty spirit of Detroit and the sometimes grim circumstances of the characters shaped by its industry and economics. Daniels’ characters are resilient and defiant, inhabiting a world that has often placed them on the margins of society, scouring a declining region for spiritual providence.

A collection of stories about men prone to foolishness, trying to make their way in a modern world.

Fiction. NOTHING MORE TO TELL brings together short stories that reflect the combined effects of history, family, and society on the men and women of Michigan’s small towns and big cities. Dila’s prose presents us with a view of middle-aged, middle-class men that is at once ruthlessly honest and understanding. Their lives are tightly woven chains of successes and failures, which culminate in episodes that are occasionally comic, often catastrophic. The pieces in this collection will sometimes cause laughter, sometimes outrage; but they are unflinching in their demand for compassion.

As the Gilded Age comes to a close, Elena Bissette’s once-wealthy family has nearly lost its fortune. The Bissettes still own a home on fashionable Mackinac Island, where they will spend one last summer in the hope of introducing Elena to a wealthy suitor. But Elena is repulsed by the idea of marrying for money.

In the aftermath of a mystery magazine publisher’s untimely murder, Ann Arbor detective Elizabeth Waishkey wonders if David Loogan, a man with a violent past who was having an affair with the victim’s wife, is responsible for the crime or an ally who could help her to solve the case.

Living a quiet life with Detective Elizabeth Waishkey and her daughter, mystery magazine editor David Loogan receives a sinister manuscript that begins with a murder confession and names individuals who are being stalked and killed for their involvement in a notorious robbery years earlier.

McKenna Mapes narrates the darkly comic tale of her sister, Audrey, who eats an entire city in Michigan, in a story where the real tragedy is not the destruction of a city, but rather, the quiet disintegration of a family that just didn’t know how to love.

In The World of a Few Minutes Ago, award-winning author Jack Driscoll renders ten stories from the point of view of characters aged fourteen to seventy-seven with a consistently deep understanding of each character’s internal world and emotional struggles. All of the stories are set against the quiet, powerful northern Michigan landscape and share a sense of longing, amplified by the beautiful but often unforgiving surroundings.

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.

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.

Melvin Eugene Baxter is convinced that his new teacher, Miss Martin, is a martian. It is his mission to stop her before she takes over the planet. After completing his investigation he realizes she isn’t a martian after all. But maybe she’s a superhero from Saturn…

Crime Beat Reporter Mitch Malone’s rules are simple: He never lets the blood and guts he covers bother him. He always works alone and he hates kids. He breaks all three when he unwittingly agrees to transport a potential witness secretly out of a house with two mob-style-hit dead bodies. When the FBI accuses him of the murder, he goes into hiding with a bombshell intern who doesn’t talk and a precocious preschooler. Mitch works his contacts to regain his freedom from his roommates only to find they each hold keys to a bizarre story of disappearances, terrorists and the perfect hamburger recipe.

In the early 1970s, trainer Tommy Hansel attempts a horse racing scam at a small, backwoods track in West Virginia, but nothing goes according to his plan when the horses refuse to cooperate and nearly everyone at the track seems to know his scheme.

A shocking discovery once again sparks fear in the small Michigan town of Starvation Lake—sure to appeal to fans of Harlan Coben and Dennis Lehane.

Investigating a series of burglaries in the homes of Starvation Lake seniors whose personal effects are explored but not stolen, newspaper editor Gus Carpenter teams up with an agenda-driven senior reporter to solve the case when a break-in results in the death of a beloved citizen.

When pieces from a fatal snowmobile accident that ended the life of a legendary youth hockey coach are discovered a decade later five miles from the scene, local paper editor and disgraced former hockey goalie Gus Carpenter hopes to salvage his reputation by attempting to solve the case.

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.

Reverend Robert Vander Laan regularly gets into hot water with his Dutch American denomination because of his offbeat ministry to gang kids, hippies and the bar crowd. That kind of trouble seems minor, however, compared with his discovery of a gang girl’s bloody corpse. Now Rob must decide whether his ministry includes solving the murder and preventing the murders of more of his “congregation.” Death on the Night Watch is a 79,000-word mystery set in 1969 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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.

Two months after a young man commits suicide, Alex McKnight is entreated by an unlikely client to track down a methodical killer in wintry Michigan. By the Edgar Award-winning author of A Cold Day in Paradise.

When her new purchase, an original 1920s Hoosier-brand kitchen cabinet comes with a dead body, vintage cookware and cookbook collector Jaymie Leighton must discover the hidden secrets of the Hoosier before she meets the same fate.

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.

Widow Analisa Weiss needs a husband fast to help pay her land contract. Will her mail order groom arrive before a mysterious new farmhand steals her heart?

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

Investigating a case of contaminated eggs showing up in caviar, Michigan Department of Natural Resources detective Grady Service follows a trail of political corruption and corporate greed that leads from the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to the state capital, the Ukrainian mafia in New York City, and the beaches of Central America.

Struggling with economy-related budget cuts and a territorial new partner, Department of Natural Resources detective Grady Service becomes enmeshed in a centuries-old mystery involving a Native American archaeological site that is being vandalized by looters. By the author of The Domino Conspiracy.

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.

Meet Lute Bapcat, orphan, loner, former cowboy, Rough Rider, beaver trapper, a man who in 1913, with the enthusiastic recommendation by Theodore Roosevelt, himself, becomes one of the Michigan’s first civil service game wardens. His territory: The Keweenaw Peninsula, the state’s industrial center. Featuring a stunning array of characters, fascinating historical detail, and Heywood’s trademark writing about life and work in Michigan’s wild.

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 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.

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

In the wake of a fatal industrial accident in a department he oversees, Will Anderson of 1910 Detroit becomes a chief suspect when the victim proves to be a man engaged to a woman Will loves, a situation that is complicated by a threat on the woman’s life and the victim’s dangerous secret.

A sequel to The Detroit Electric Scheme finds Will Anderson wrongly accused of a murder and stumbling on a vast mafia conspiracy at the height of 1911 Detroit’s first mob war, which he combats with the help of detective Riordan and the future members of the Purple Gang.

A novella set in the House of David religious colony that bubbles with mystery, scandal, and little-known history.

After the death of her mother, Kay Seger abandons her career as a historical consultant to a Los Angeles film company and returns to her childhood home in Michigan. There, she rekindles a teenage love affair with Joe Chase, now a Vietnam War veteran and Ford auto worker. Afflicted by grief and the mysterious symptoms of an unidentified ailment, Kay, at Joe’s urging, begins an investigation of her family’s past.

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.

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.

After losing his son and divorcing his wife, a Detroit native returns home after 25 years and becomes involved with the sister of his murdered high school girlfriend as he tries to put back the pieces of his life.

Heading to her home in Detroit during World War II, passionate art student Bianca Paradise accepts a job drawing portraits of wounded soldiers and experiences a spectrum of emotions that compromise her balance. By the author of The Friends of Freeland.

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

When her teenage son, Luke, kills her husband in a tragic bow-hunting accident, Kate McCall suddenly becomes caught up in a dangerous confrontation with a gang of killers that includes Kate’s old flame, an ex-con desperately trying to convince his former colleagues that he lost the heist money.

The first mistake Karen Delaney made was entrusting $300,000 to her boyfriend, Samir, the head of an illegal bookmaking operation. The second was breaking up with him because Samir holds a $300,000 grudge.

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.

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.

“These stories are linked by the gone and not forgotten: former spouses, dead parents, and missing children. In pursuit of love and its redemptions, these are pilgrims haunted by memory, dogged by desire, made radiant by romance and its denouements.”

Six years ago, Frank Tavohnen accidentally killed his then wife in the basement of their Petoskey, Michigan home. An overzealous prosecutor who believes the killing was no accident uncovers new evidence. Frank is hauled out of his Grosse Pointe home and arrested for murder. But all is not lost…yet. Suzanne Fairchild, the sister of Frank’s new wife tries to recruit her former lover, Burr Lafayette, to defend Frank. Burr, in his late forties and recently divorced, is the deposed head of the litigation department of a major Detroit law firm. He is a reluctant advocate having no interest or experience in this or any criminal case. A man at loose ends, Burr much prefers duck hunting with his yellow lab, fly fishing with his law partner, and the pleasures of good red wine. Nontheless, he is a brilliant litigator and Suzanne finally persuades him to take the case. To prepare for the trial, Burr moves his office to his leaky sailboat in Harbor Springs, just across Little Traverse Bay from Petoskey. He soon discovers there are more secrets buried in Frank’s basement and hidden in Petoskey than Suzanne ever let on. The case turns out to be more than a murder trial, and Burr finds his own life in danger.

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.

In The Women Were Leaving the Men, Andy Mozina draws readers into the everyday lives of characters who are instantly relatable but intriguingly flawed. Knocked beyond the brink by departed family members, curious obsessions, and unruly physical attributes, Mozina s characters climb and scrape their way toward intimacy, sanity, and redemption against the often-absurd odds of their lives in this unique, humorous, and poetic collection. 2008 GREAT LAKES COLLEGES ASSOCIATION NEW WRITERS AWARD WINNER FOR FICTION

A ghostly presence compels a couple to seek the truth about their home’s unsettling past

Two estranged Vietnamese sisters, each wrestling with their own lives, careers, and romances, are reunited at their father’s American citizenship party, and forge a new relationship.

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…

Sweet Dreams will test your faith and ask the question Is Revenge Worth it?Mark Appleton is a family man with a beautiful daughter and a wonderful wife. When his family is ripped from him in a bombing he joins a group called the WJA and is trained to become an assassin. His faith in God is tested as he must choose to let God take care of his torn heart or take matters into his own hands.

On a snowy December night, twelve women meet for a cookie exchange, where they tell stories of the cookies they baked, tales that are emblematic of the year that has just passed.

While helping out at his family’s B&B in Michigan during the holidays, single dad turned globe-trotting adventurer, Reid Sullivan, falls for a certain guest—California girl Karina Barrett who, unbeknownst to him, is a spy for a company who wants to buy out this popular hotel.

In a novel set during the tense time of the Oklahoma City bombing, Christian/Jewish couple Louise and Richard Shapiro move from California to rural Michigan, where Louise deals with ultraconservative religious beliefs as a guidance counselor at a local high school, and Richard’s new friends begin to form a militia group.

When attorney Alanna Stone returns to her childhood home, she meets up again with her first love, Jonathan, also the first man to betray her, and the two of them try to lay aside the past in order to reconcile.

After seeing what she believes is a angel helping her injured brother, Judith Fischer feels isolated as she tries to explain her experience to her Amish community, trusting only Andrew Lapp, the bishop’s son, who is willing to defend her.

Mirabelle and Max Zielinski’s children have returned home for their parents’ thirtieth anniversary. Mirabelle must tell them that she was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer, but they’re preoccupied with their own crises. Faced with her mortality, Mirabelle is stricken by how her children have diverged from her hippie upbringing and wonders if they still need her. The characters are familiar but not stereotypical, and the quaint setting of Charlevoix, Michigan, a beachfront town, adds to the nostalgic feel. Copyright 2009 Booklist Reviews.

When her fiance’s 14-year-old son Dylan goes missing, 26-year-old Casey finds her new life unraveling before her eyes as a dark secret from her past is revealed and the kids’ volatile mother reenters the picture, throwing everything—and everyone—off balance.

After their friendship shatters over a single indiscretion 20 years ago, former best friends Erica and Claire confront the past and try to rebuild their relationship in this novel from the author of In Love with a Younger Man.

Freshwater Boys is a collection of eleven short stories set in and around the Great Lakes of Michigan. The opening narratives feature adolescent or pre-adolescent boys struggling with their conceptions of manhood.

Twenty-year old Michigan farm boy Will Castor finds his life changed forever as he is thrust into the harsh realities of nineteenth-century combat on the last day of the battle of Chickamauga. Wounded physically and mentally, Will escapes the battlefield aided by a war weary Confederate deserter, but can’t escape the echoes of death and horror that will remain with him for the rest of his life.Returning to Michigan after the war, Will deals with guilt and recurring nightmares from his war experience, finding relief in the numbing effects of a bottle of whiskey and the bawdy houses of East Saginaw. He joins the rough and tumble world of Michigan’s lumber boom as a land looker seeking the majestic white pine. Alone in the vast northern Michigan wilderness, he comes face to face with his demons and must make a decision—life or death

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.

The second title in the P. J. Benton mystery series.

Wire to Wire assembles a cast of train-hopping, drug-dealing, glue-huffing lowlifes, tells a harrowing tale of friendship and loss, and creates a stunning portrait of Northern Michigan in the late 1970s.

It’s a tranquil October morning in northwest lower Michigan, a rural paradise of cherry orchards, blue lakes, and sandy shorelines. The serenity of the day and the season is shattered when an elderly woman walking her dogs along the beach stumbles upon the bodies of a brutally murdered couple.

In this third book in this series, Sheriff Ray Elkins confronts both the dark history of his own department and powerful and wealthy adversaries who try to control the direction and reach of his investigation.

Sheriff Ray Elkins searches for the possible links between the four victims. As he probes into their tangled lives and dark histories, he finds both the motive and the possible murderer.

Brief encounters with the suffering and triumphs of characters living in northern Michigan by Phillip Sterling.

When tragedy strikes, Cain Black returns home to Crystal Lake where he decides that it is time to settle down and sets his sights on newcomer and single mother Maggie O’Rourke who is not familiar with his bad boy reputation.

Funny, frightening, friendly, and feared; ghosts and the houses they haunt make for fascinating stories. Told around campfires, circulated amongst friends, and brought to life on film, the stories captivate believers and non-believers. This collection of 12 tales reflects the efforts of editors Taylor and Kasischke (English and fine arts, U. of Michigan) to find new ghost stories. The haunting tales are written by Michigan poets and storytellers and visit lighthouses, museums, farm houses, mansions, and all the usual ghostly hideouts to take the reader on a journey through the State’s history and geography. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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.

When the strongest earthquake in U.S. history occurs just north of their St. Louis home, Kate and Jeremy find the disaster further complicated by Kate’s self-proclaimed medium twin’s prediction about a more powerful earthquake, a situation that places Kate under public scrutiny and reveals her own psychic abilities. By the author of American Wife.

Following the fiftieth anniversary of Anatomy of a Murder, another Michigan jurist has written a deeply layered courtroom drama about murder, sex, corruption, and politics.

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.

Apostle Bay is the scene for a sled dog race, but someone is booby-trapping community trails, endangering tourists and snowmobilers. Vince is possibly the only one who can solve these dilemmas, but he’s more concerned with his wife’s illness than solvingriddles of Apostle Bay’s past.

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.

Rich with detail and brimming with feeling, Zadoorian’s deceptively simple stories lead readers into the inner lives of those making the best of their flawed surroundings and their own imperfections.