Books

Even the beauty of Northern Michigan can’t put a smile on the face of Emily Kincaid’s perpetually cranky friend Deputy Dolly Wakowski, and when someone tries to destroy the only family Dolly has ever had, her crankiness turns lethal, even as the crime threatens to overwhelm her.

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.

Springtime in northern Michigan: a picture-perfect scene. Until struggling mystery writer Emily Kincaid gets a visit from her foul-weather friend Deputy Dolly, who frantically demands Emily's help. Sandy Lake's receding waters have revealed a bullet-pierced skull, along with a keepsake that could mean serious trouble for a man Dolly once loved.

While an end-of-the-world revivalist group shakes up Leetsville, Emily Kincaid is deep in the northern Michigan woods researching her latest story for the local paper. But her walk gets cut short when she comes upon an eerily motionless woman propped against a tree . . .

Something nasty is afoot in Emily Kincaid's northern Michigan town—besides Emily's increasingly cranky friend Deputy Dolly. When the body of a brutally slain woman turns up in an abandoned farmhouse, Emily and Dolly uncover a disturbing pattern.

In The Colored Car, Jean Alicia Elster, author of the award-winning Who's Jim Hines?, follows another member of the Ford family coming of age in Depression-era Detroit. In the hot summer of 1937, twelve-year-old Patsy takes care of her three younger sisters and helps her mother put up fresh fruits and vegetables in the family's summer kitchen, adjacent to the wood yard that her father, Douglas Ford, owns. Times are tough, and Patsy's mother, May Ford, helps neighborhood families by sharing the food that she preserves.

Who's Jim Hines? is a story based on real events about Douglas Ford Jr., a twelve-year-old African American boy growing up in Detroit in the 1930s. Doug's father owns the Douglas Ford Wood Company, and Doug usually helps his dad around the scrap wood yard located in the side lot next to their house.

Inspired by Foster's first trip to Poland in 1996 and her Polish-American heritage, Amber Necklace from Gdansk explores Polish immigrants' experiences with assimilation in the US, those immigrants' children's attitudes toward their ethnicity, and how these attitudes have been colored by America's typically disinterested view toward Eastern Europe- the other Europe that only recently began to emerge from history's shadow.

Mirroring the human response to the natural world, this book is a rare synthesis of stunning landscape photography and understated haiku poetry.

Linda Nemec Foster writes friom a place of deep passion - vivid, vital, alive to the sizzle of the story and need. Her sounds and images crackle and explode. If these rich "History of the Body" prose poems don't ignite you, nothing will! -Naomi Shihab Nye

Poetry. "A humanist at heart, Linda Nemec Foster has demanded from her poetry an artfulness that engages ordinary life. With each new book her work has continued to mature, deepen, console, surprise, and TALKING DIAMONDS is as wise as it is lovely"--Stuart Dybek.

In this book of personal vignettes, the author discovers hopeful spiritual lessons hidden in difficult situations.

Cindy shares how the spiritual lessons she learned freed her to focus again on her own goals instead of the difficult behavior of others.