Local & Regional
Abundance to Share With the Birds
An Indelible Journey
Birdman of Koshkonong: The Life of Naturalist Thure Kumlien
Death at Gills Rock: A Dave Cubiak Door County Mystery
Death in Cold Water (#3)
Death Stalks Door County (#1)
Forced to confront the past, the morose Cubiak moves beyond his own heartache and starts investigating, even as a popular festival draws more people into possible danger. In a desperate search for clues, Cubiak uncovers a tangled web of greed, betrayal, bitter rivalries, and lost love beneath the peninsula's travel-brochure veneer. Befriended by several locals but unsure whom to trust or to suspect of murder, the one-time cop tracks a clever killer.
In a setting of stunning natural beauty and picturesque waterfront villages, Death Stalks Door County introduces a new detective series, "The Dave Cubiak Door County Mysteries." Finalist, Traditional Fiction 2014 Book of the Year Award, Chicago Writers Association
Deep Dark Secrets
You're invited to visit Deep Lakes, Wisconsin and meet a new friend, Francine "Frankie" Champagne. The 40-something owner of Bubble and Bake-bakery by day, wine lounge by night-Frankie is a spitfire pastry maker, vintner, and budding journalist.
Frankie finds herself on the perimeter of a suspicious death that upends the peaceful winter slumber in Deep Lakes when the local pastor is found dead inside his fishing shanty on Lake Loki. Frankie sticks her curious nose into the investigation, despite warnings from the local sheriff to leave it alone. But she has something to prove, maybe to the newspaper editor who wouldn't hire her as a reporter, maybe to herself as she searches for fulfillment. Regardless, her fierce independence won't allow her to back down. Follow Frankie as she stumbles upon one discovery after another, trails potential suspects, and solves the case!
Gatekeeper: Poems
Winner of a Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement Award
What is the deep web? A locked door. A tool for oppression and for revolution. "An emptying drain, driven by gravity." And in Patrick Johnson's Gatekeeper--selected by Khaled Mattawa as the winner of the 2019 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry--it is the place where connection is darkly transfigured by distance and power.
So we learn as Johnson's speaker descends into his inferno, his Virgil a hacker for whom "nothing to stop him is reason enough to keep going," his Beatrice the elusive Anon, another faceless user of the deep web. Here is unnameable horror--human trafficking, hitmen, terrorism recruitment. And here, too, is the lure of the beloved. But gone are the orderly circles of hell. Instead, Johnson's map of the deep web is recursive and interrogatory, drawing inspiration and forms from the natural world and from science, as his speaker attempts to find a stable grasp on the complexities of this exhilarating and frightening digital world.
Spooky and spare, Gatekeeper is a striking debut collection and a suspenseful odyssey for these troubled times.