In Search of America's Heartbeat, by Anacortes resident and retired award-winning journalist Robert H Mottram, is subtitled "Twelve Months on the Road," but that doesn't tell the whole story. He has woven his travel story with that of his father's story.

Writer J.A. Jance, who divides her time between Seattle and Tucson, has turned out her fifth suspense featuring ex-television journalist Ali Reynolds, who takes on a PR job with the Sedona police.

In the heat of the Arizona desert, a raging fire pushes temperatures to a deadly degree, and one woman is left to burn. Pulled naked and barely breathing from the fire, the victim has no idea who she is, let alone who would do this to her -- or why. In her hospital bed she drifts in and out of consciousness, her only means of communicating a blink of the eye. And then an angel appears.

When She Flew is the story of a courageous and independent woman cop and a remarkably insightful feral girl. It will grab you from the start and warm your heart with its originality and honesty.

Police officer Jessica Villareal has always played by the book and tried to do the right thing. But now, she finds herself approaching midlife divorced, estranged from her daughter, alone, and unhappy. And she's wondering if she ever made a right choice in her life.

In The Big Burn, Seattle writer Timothy Egan paints a moving portrait of the people who lived through the largest-ever forest fire in America, which burned 3 million acres.

On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in an eyeblink. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men -- college boys, day-workers, immigrants from mining camps -- to fight the fires. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.

Seattle business journalist Robert Spector makes the point in this book that mom & pop stores aren't about something small, but about something big. He says 90 percent of all US businesses are family owned or controlled.

Mom & pop stores have always brought people together, fostering a sense of neighborhood identity and camaraderie, and are the glue that connects people in big cities and small towns alike, including here in Anacortes.

Long fascinated by the “direct connection” people feel as merchants and customers when they do business in neighborhood shops, and responding to the growing “buy local” movement across the country, Spector sets out to discover the state, and the state of mind, of independent retailing in America.