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.

From the Anacortes Library:

The Anacortes Public Library Foundation invites Foundation Members and all library enthusiasts to the first Annual Foundation Membership meeting on Monday, February 8 at 6:30 PM at the Anacortes Public Library (1220 10th Street).

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.