Bookseller Recommendation for Spring: A new Northwoods Mystery

 

 

Karen Casebeer’s third book, the latest in her Northwoods Mystery series, is a sure-fire winner. Set in northwest lower Michigan, with action stretching from the Platte River in the south to Cathead Bay in the north, and featuring various parts of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Wayfinding is a tight, cohesive story of a few months in the life of forensic detective Quinn Macarthy. 

On medical leave following a traumatic incident with career criminals, Quinn rents an A-frame cottage on Sleeping Bear Bay, planning to rest, hike with her dog, and take time to heal, but her plan is interrupted when her dog, Ruby, trained in search and rescue as well as drug detection, discovers a human hand in the dunes, uncovered by an overnight storm. Will Quinn be able to remain uninvolved as the mystery of the skeleton’s identity and cause of death are investigated? (What do you think?)

Wayfinding has several plot lines: the investigation following the finding of the skeleton; Quinn’s therapy sessions dealing with multiple past traumas; the gentle beginnings of a new romantic relationship; and quite a lot of recent developments in genealogical research. All are masterfully woven together by the author. Case never drops a single thread in her story, and eventually everything comes together in surprising ways not at all apparent beforehand. 

As with every good mystery series, it isn’t necessary to have read the preceding two books before diving right into this third novel. An added enticement for locals and annual visitors is that anyone familiar with Benzie, Grand Traverse, and Leelanau counties will recognize the territory and its landmarks, which is always fun. 

Poetry at an Indie!

 

What better way to celebrate Indie Bookstore Day (always the last Saturday in April--and April is National Poetry Month!) than with a Michigan poet as my bookstore guest? We will convene at noon and sit in a congenial circle, which worked so well for Fleda's last visit to Dog Ears Books that I'm doing it again. Please join us!

Mark Your Calendar: Saturday, April 25

 

Fleda Brown, former poet laureate of the state of Delaware, back home in Michigan now for several years, will give a reading of her new work in person in Northport on Indie Bookstore Day, Saturday, April 25! We will convene at noon, but anyone is welcome to come as early as my 11 a.m. bookshop opening to be sure of a good seat and/or to spend time browsing.

And here's another idea: A few months ago a group of women in my shop told me they had decided to make a switch from wine tasting to book shopping. They came north for a weekend to visit every bookshop in Traverse City and Leelanau County, each of them buying at least one book in each shop. Road trip with friends! What a great way to celebrate Indie Day!

Leelanau Indies: Photos by Karen Mulvahill

The last Saturday in April is always Indie Bookstore Day. For several years, I was away from my shop on that day, and the last couple of years I just didn't get on the ball soon enough to do anything special. This year, for once, I'm ahead of the curve--and pleased as punch, too, about my literary guest for the day.

Fleda Brown was my guest last May, also.

Re-Opening July 1

Author Robert Giles came in Saturday morning to sign copies of his book, When Truth Mattered: The Kent State Shootings 50 Years Later (see my review here). A couple copies are being held for customers as special orders, but I have more available, so contact me if you're interested.

Emita Hill came in earlier in the week to sign her Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming, and copies of that book (my review here) have been so much in demand that I'll be ordering another carton for July, but I have a few still available now.


So now, the plan as July looms is THIS: 

The bookstore will re-open officially on Wednesday, July 1 (at present I am only taking deliveries and allowing customers to come in to pick up special orders), with these COVID-19 precautions: 

(1) You must wear a mask. I will not be providing masks, as you should all have your own already to be out in public at all. 

(2) Number of people in the store at once will be limited to six. If you are part of a large group, plan accordingly.

(3) Hand sanitizer will be available, and its use will be encouraged as you enter and again as you leave.

For now, this Saturday, June 27, book-hungry people without special orders to pick up may browse the sidewalk cart, where a wide variety of books are available (as are bags). The price there is $9.43 for three books, which works out to $10 with the sales tax. I will continue the cart throughout the summer for sidewalk perusal and for the special comfort of those not yet ready to go into stores.

I thank you for your loyalty and for your patience and hope we can all manage to have a safe, healthy, fun- and book-filled summer!

Michigan Historian to Visit This Saturday

I met Larry Massie a few decades ago, when he was Assistant Director of the Michigan Regional Archives, housed in the library of Western Michigan University, and I was a lowly, aging undergraduate research assistant. The professor for whom I worked was studying farm ownership and rental patterns in the lower tier of townships (four altogether) in Kalamazoo County. The U.S. population census and agriculture census, county tax rolls, and plat maps were the tools I learned to use, becoming familiar enough that I was able to do a little personal sleuthing relative to the Barry County farmhouse where I lived at the time. (Often my son would be with me, sitting under my desk and reading Greek tragedy. Precocious little fellow, he was!) None of that has anything to do with this weekend's book signing, but looking forward to having Larry Massie at Dog Ears Books brings back a lot of memories for me.

Back to my visiting author:

In the intervening years since those old Kalamazoo days, Larry Massie launched himself as an independent historian, making his home in Allegan County. He is the author of 20 books of Michigan history and the first-ever recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Historical Society of Michigan. His personal collection of Michigan books grew so large that he is now a bookseller -- by appointment only.

So I'm looking forward to this Saturday! An author, a bookseller, a book collector, and someone from the "old days" in Kalamazoo. I hope you will be able to join us on Saturday. Larry will be happy to sign his books when you buy them here, too.

What Does It Take?

What does it take, that is, for a Leelanau near-native (her parents came to Leland when she was 12 years old) to make a living and raise a family at the same time, right here in Leelanau, rather than moving away and only returning in retirement? Michelle White is someone who knows the answer first-hand, because she has what it takes. And it makes sense, growing up where she did, that cherries were Michelle’s inspiration. 

Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone, but readers can learn how one woman launched an award-winning startup here in northern Michigan — her struggles, hard work, determination and perseverance, and the lessons she learned along the way. 

On a Pit and a Prayer: How I Grew a Business, Lost a Business, and Found Faith, Family and Love

by Michelle White

Traverse City: Mission Point Press, paper 154pp.

$16.95

More Action WAY Up North

Whether you already know Grady Service from earlier Woods Cop novels or approach this book innocent of preconceptions, there’s no way Joseph Heywood’s Bad Optics will disappoint. All you need by way of background the author lays out for you at the beginning: Woods cop Grady Service has been suspended but is determined to go on protecting his Upper Peninsula wilderness. Grab it and go! When you reach the last page, if you haven’t read earlier Woods Cop stories, you’ll want to go back and catch up to yourself.

Bad Optics: A Woods Cop Mystery

by Joseph Heywood

Hardcover, 300pp, $$27.95

Clear Your Head and Lighten Your Heart

You have probably heard Karen Anderson on Interlochen Public Radio, and maybe you remember her column in the Traverse City Record-Eagle, too. Now we have a collection of 155 of Karen’s short essays in book form. 

Casual dipping into Gradual Clearing: Weather Reports From the Heart is irresistible, as no piece in it is more than a page in length, and themes are simple and generally positive in tone — but never sappy. The author’s light offerings feel important without feeling heavy. We are grateful for her reminders and insights. 

Karen Anderson will be our TEA guest at Dog Ears Books on August 9, 7 p.m. This week’s guests (July 19) are Lynne Rae Perkins, Anne-Marie Oomen, and Linda Nemec-Foster, with Dennis Turner on July 26 and Virginia Johnson on August 2.

Gradual Clearing: Weather Reports From the Heart

Traverse City: Arbutus Press, 2018

Paper, 160pp., $16.95

Mr. Rochester Came Back!

Not that he ever left Northport or Dog Ears Books since our big launch in May of 2017, but Sarah Shoemaker’s novel, Mr. Rochester, my bestseller of 2017, is now out in paperback. And I have signed copies available! So attention book clubs: Read both Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre and double your discussion fun!

Here I must digress to share a story someone told me in the bookstore last week. A customer browsing the dog books read aloud the title, Bad Dogs Have More Fun, and I couldn’t let it pass without a remark. I said I was skeptical. After all, there aren’t many places you can expect a welcome for a badly behaved dog, while a well-behaved dog can enjoy many more aspects of life with its resident human beings. The woman agreed. Then she told me that her family had once had such a bad dog that they spoke of the dog to each other as — not, I think, its given name — Mrs. Rochester. “Because,” she went on to explain, “whenever we had company, we had to lock her upstairs.” 

Sarah Shoemaker, what do you think of that?

Mr. Rochester

by Sarah Shoemaker

Paper, $14.99

Books of Waters Salty and Fresh

Two beautiful and exciting new books this season for readers from ‘tweens through adult in age (and heart) come from northern Michigan writers. 

Newbery author Lynne-Rae Perkins, with her characteristic gentle but offbeat humor, introduces her young characters and readers to the ocean in Secret Sisters of the Salty Sea, capturing once again the wonder of first-time experience, as she does so well. Secret Sisters is a “chapter book” that also includes charming black-and-white illustrations by the author.

Linda Nemec Foster and Anne-Marie Oomen, for their part, decided that freshwater should have mermaids as well as saltwater, adding illustrator Meredith Ridl to their team, with most delightful results. The Lake Michigan Mermaid: A Tale in Poems offers a complex story in compelling verse and images and a wonderful souvenir of Up North vacation.

Secret Sisters of the Salty Sea, by Lynne-Rae Perkins. Greenwillow Books, hardcover with dust jacket, $16.99

The Lake Michigan Mermaid: A Tale in Poems, by Linda Nemec Foster and Anne-Marie Oomen. Wayne State University Press, hardcover with illustrated boards, $16.99

Postscript 6/2: Lynne-Rae and Anne-Marie will both be Thursday Evening Author guests on July 19 at 7 p.m.! WOW!

Introducing TEA at Dog Ears Books

First TEA guest - June 21

As we celebrate our 25th bookstore anniversary this summer, Dog Ears Books will offer a new feature called Thursday Evening Authors, or TEA. Our "tea" will probably be iced and served from a punch bowl, or it may be punch, and we’re not planning china-cup formality in other ways, either, but we hope that holding TEA as a regular weekly event will make it easier for our friends to remember. 

Each Thursday, beginning on June 21, the bookstore will be open from 6:30 to 9 p.m., with each evening’s author scheduled from 7 to 9 p.m. Presentation format will probably vary from simple conversation and book signings to prepared talks. If we have a Thursday in July or August with no author scheduled, we’ll still be open from 6:30 to 9. So remember -- 

TEA stands for -- 

Thursday Evening Authors 

at Dog Ears Books,

106 Waukazoo Street 

Northport, Michigan

beginning June 21, 2018

First TEA guest, on Thursday, June 21, will be Rachel May, author of An American Quilt. That's from 7 - 9 p.m.

An American Quilt: Unfolding a Story of Family and Slavery, by Rachel May. New York: Pegasus Books, hardcover release May 2018, $27.95

More about this book and the Marquette, Michigan, author soon!

Jim's Only Children's Book

Jim Harrison wrote only one book for children, and he wrote it for his grandson, but anyone who wants to understand this outstanding Michigan poet’s background and inspiration will learn a lot from The Boy Who Ran to the Woods.

At the age of seven, a fight with a little girl put Jimmy in the hospital for a month. He was tied to the bed at night. Both eyes were bandaged for a full week, but the sight in his injured eye could not be saved.

It took months for the blind eye to heal and by the time he entered second grade he was sure that all the other boys and girls were staring at him. His father bought him a young dog and Jimmy would hide in the thickets with his dog for days at a time. He became a wild and unruly boy....

He does not want to learn to read – does not want to be in school at all -- but finally, thanks to a father's understanding, a love for the birds and other wildlife he encounters in nature begin to cure the boy’s unhappiness and give him a hunger for learning.

The Boy Who Ran to the Woods,

by Jim Harrison; illustrated by Jim Pohrt

Harcover with dust jacket, $18.95

All Kinds of Mothers

Know the Mother is another book in Wayne State University’s excellent “Made in Michigan” series. This book of short stories by Desiree Cooper, as the title indicates, explores motherhood from a variety of perspectives, both black and white and from different generations as well. Cooper, a former attorney, is also a Pulitzer nominee, a Detroit community activist, and a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow.  

Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Callaloo, Detroit Noir, Best African American Fiction 2010, and Tidal Basin Review, among other online and print publications. Her first collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, was published by Wayne State University Press in March 2016. Cooper was a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for emerging black poets. She is currently a Kimbilio fellow, a national residency for African American fiction writers. (from online biography)  

Know the Mother

Desiree Cooper

Wayne State University Press, 2016

Paper, 112pp, $15.99

WINDIGO MOON from Robert Downes

You know Robert Downes as one of the original co-creators of Traverse City’s Northern Express and, since then, as a traveler, blogger, and writer of travel books. Downes has now published his first novel, set in the Upper Great Lakes and spanning 31 years, from 1588  into the onset of the Little Ice Age. Native American culture is blended with love story and the real dangers brought by explorers from Europe.

Windigo Moon: A Novel of Native America

by Robert Downes

Blank Slate Press, paper, 304pp

$17.95

AND HERE is Here!

A new collection of writing from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, edited by Ron Riekki, with foreword by Thomas Lynch, has been published by Michigan State University Press. Writings collected go back as far as 1918 and include a wide diversity of works. You’ll find Ernest Hemingway and Jim Harrison here, and you’ll also find Janet Lewis, Iola Fuller, Steve Hamilton, Michael Delp, and many more. This is a book for everyone’s Michigan collection, one you will be re-reading for years to come.

And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017, ed. Ronald Riekki

East Lansing: Michigan State University Press

Paper, 347pp, $29.95

New Series from Up North’s Own Elizabeth Buzzelli

You loved her DEAD series (set in northern Michigan), and you laughed your way through the NUT HOUSE murders (set in Riverville, Texas, and published under her pen name, Elizabeth Lee). Now Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli has a new series bound to prove irresistible to booklovers. With the LITTLE LIBRARY mysteries, we are back on home (Michigan) ground again.

A Most Curious Murder introduces us to Jenny Weston, Zoe Zola, Adam Crane, and a whole cast of intriguing characters in Bear Falls, Michigan, and in the second novel, She Stopped for Death, we come back to Bear Falls for another quirky tale. Summer vacation is the perfect time for mysteries, and now is the perfect time to begin collecting this new series by Elizabeth Buzzelli and anticipating Book Number Three. What will she think up next?!

A Most Curious Murder &

She Stopped for Death

by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

Hardcover, $25.99 

The first book is also available in paperback, but I need to restock!

Tuesday is the BIG DAY!

Northport author Sarah Shoemaker’s debut novel, Mr. Rochester, inspired by Charlotte Bronte's classic Jane Eyre, will be officially released, simultaneously in the U.S., England, and Australia, by Grand Central Publishing in New York on May 9, 2017, and offered for sale by Dog Ears Books beginning at 7 p.m. that Tuesday at a world premiere book launch. The launch will take place Spice World Cafe in Northport, across Waukazoo Street from the bookstore, and Shoemaker will be on hand for the celebration and to sign books for purchasers. Dessert and punch will be served.

(Book price is $27 + sales tax, for a total of $28.62. Payment by cash or check only, please. For your convenience, I am accepting prepaid orders now.)

To whet your appetite for the book, read this review/interview by Mary Sharratt of the Historical Novel Society. Sharratt calls the novel a "tour de force." That's what I've been saying all along!

Author Sarah Shoemaker

Another Generous Meal Comes Our Way

When a beloved poet dies, it's sad for his friends not to be able to meet him again for drinks. A rich part of our life is missing and will for as long as we live. But when the poet was also a writer of novels and novellas and nonfiction essays, we have those treasures forever, as well as his books of poetry, and when his publisher finds enough previously uncollected essays to gather into a posthumous volume, it's like being served, unexpectedly, a second dessert -- or a whole 'nother meal.

Because A Really Big Lunch serves up much more than dessert. All the essays in this collection treat of food but never predictably and never uniformly. This is food as it was in the life of Jim Harrison. Additionally surprising and delightful are photographs throughout the pages of Jim with friends, family, and dogs. This is the Jim Harrison I knew. This book is another gift to the world.

A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life

by Jim Harrison, with an introduction by Mario Batali

Hardcover, illustrated, 275pp, $26

Light Up Your Heart

I love books that sample a favorite writer’s old poems and also present new ones. Ted Kooser introduces The Woods Are on Fire: New and Selected Poems, by Fleda Brown, and you can’t go wrong with this collection. Open it anywhere. Read the poem on that page. Sink into it, and let it sink into you. Worth the price of admission! Thank you, Fleda!

The Woods Are on Fire: New and Selected Poems

by Fleda Brown

Paper, 275pp

$19.95

Visit Montana, Stay in Michigan – or Both?

This little anthology from Elk River Books is called by Pete Fromm “the most important book you’ll buy this year, or maybe any other.” I’ll just say that it’s a collection of essays, fiction, and poetry by a stunning cast of writers. You’ll recognize many of the names, including that of Leelanau County's most famous author, Jim Harrison. Other than showcasing beautiful writing, however, Unearthing Paradise is a call to arms at a time when public natural resources are more than ever in need of protection from destructive private exploitation. You don't want to miss this book.

Unearthing Paradise: Montana Writers

      In Defense of Greater Yellowstone

edited by Marc Beaudin, Seabring Davis,

      And Max Hjortsberg

with Foreword by Terry Tempest Williams

Paper, 179pp, $15

And if staying here to face Michigan cold with Up North courage (not to say sisu and steal a march from the Yoopers), while at the same time catching up with fictional Sheriff Ray Elkins, you’ll want to pick up the latest Aaron Stander novel, Gales of November. What dangers and puzzles will the sheriff meet this time? Read and find out!

Gales of November

by Aaron Stander

Paper, 25pp, $17.95

My advice is to buy and read both books, because by now we've barely gotten started on winter, and there is going to be a lot of good reading weather ahead.

Thursday afternoon excitement: sunshine!