Seattle author mystery

As a longtime resident of the area, I love a good mystery set in our corner of the world. Beaumont, an aging detective, finally faces knee replacement. Waking in a drug-induced state after surgery, he finds himself visited by ghosts. Both the lieutenant from his Vietnam days and the victim of an unsolved case make appearances, pushing Beaumont to dig into his painful past.

Jance brings the past into the present through the convention of drug-induced hallucinations. Though this is a trip down memory lane, the dead speak directly to Beaumont, a haunting reminder of how often past events inform the future. A rash of recent killings brings Archie Sheridan, a damaged police detective, back from medical leave and he invites Susan, a young, pink-haired newspaper reporter, along for the ride.

The desperate parents of a missing teen come to Nora for help. The wild Northwestern U. Lumber roads cut through like scar tissue up mountains inaccessible in the winter without a hardy soul with a snowplow to clear them. Show less. Let Me Go. Portland detective Archie Sheridan, already with a full case load involving a drug empire, has another nightmarish run-in on Halloween with his nemesis, serial killer Gretchen Lowell.

All copies in use Availability details. He's Gone. When Dani Keller wakes up in her Seattle houseboat one morning, her husband Ian is gone. The Big Chihuahua. Pepe, the talking Chihuahua, uses his top dog status at the Dogawanda Center to infiltrate the dog-worshipping cult and help his PI-in-training Geri Sullivan search for a missing Seattle woman.

The Alpine Yeoman. Emma Lord, newspaper publisher in the fictional Washington town of Alpine, just got married, but wedded bliss will have to wait as a car wreck and a murder intervene.

Available in some locations. Animal, Vegetable, Murder. Dead Float. Uncomfortable trade-offs between environmental preservation and the survival of traditional industries—frequent fodder for Seattle editorialists—can be equally useful as a source for topical mysteries.

Chain Saw St. The novel captures the regrets most Northwesterners feel when viewing acreage denuded by decades of over-logging. A forest community without a forest. Five blocks on either side of the highway. Ten blocks long… One of everything except taverns.

Those numbered three. Not all local crime novelists so fully or finely integrate the Seattle environs into their works.

But those who do employ Seattle as a framework for their fiction have, over the years, contributed to a more interesting, idiosyncratic depiction of this place. One that goes beyond the Jetsons-like Space Needle, Pike Place Market, or other postcard-worthy sights, and occasionally teaches natives something new about their city. Jance, who writes a series about SPD homicide detective J. A puzzling thing, when you consider that this burg has at various points hosted raucous gold seekers, rich bootleggers, and feuding power brokers.

But this is an appropriate time to ask the question. As the mystery genre moves into its third decade of close association with the Emerald City, changes are in the offing. Prominent authors like G. Ford and Earl Emerson are abandoning their detective series at least temporarily in favor of stand-alone thrillers, and readers are coming to expect more from these mysteries than the sheer novelty of their setting.

For Seattle to maintain its standing in this field, authors must prove that tales of the Big Nice can be more novel—and maybe nastier—than anyone expected. Kingston Pierce is the crime fiction editor of January Magazine , an online literary journal. She had skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony. The very sound of it—EH-bone-ee—was intoxicating enough. In that moment, I fell in love with words, and I have never fallen out of it.

Growing up I lived on a boat, a foot fish tender named the Celtic, that spent her winters tied up to the old fuel dock in Seldovia. It was low tide that Monday night the October I was eight years old, when my mother dragged me forty feet up the ice-encrusted, barnacle-infested ladder to the dock and down the boardwalk to the city hall.

In the basement of the building was one small, musty room, crammed to overflowing with books, books and more books. There were two kids spelling out The Cat in the Hat. Raban has lived in Seattle since She lives in Oregon with her husband, son and many animals. The Rands picture books include the Salty Dog series. Rand also co-founded the long-running Graphic Studios and taught illustration at the University of Washington in Seattle before he died in at the age of For two decades, Relin focused on reporting about social issues and their effect on children, both in the United States, and around the world.

His interviews with child soldiers including a profile of teenager Ishmael Beah, who would later write the bestseller A Long Way Gone have been included in Amnesty International reports.

His investigation into the way the INS abused children in its custody contributed to the reorganization of that agency. He died in A native of Twin Lake, Michigan, he has an apartment in Brooklyn, New York, and a moldy fishing and hunting shack on an island in Alaska. A lifetime journalist beginning as a UCLA magazine staff member, JoAnn Roe writes features for magazines and newspapers worldwide on topics that range from western cowboys to city profiles.

Joanna Rose is the author of the award-winning novel Little Miss Strange , which was honored by the independent booksellers of the Pacific Northwest in She is also known to readers of The Oregonian as a regular reviewer on the books page.

She and her teaching partner Stevan Allred host the regular Pinewood Table prose critique group, and she teaches in schools in Oregon and Washington. Roxanna Rose lives with her family and a menagerie of animals. Fascinated by myths and legends from cultures around the world, she uses them as a base for Young Adult paranormal and fantasy novels: Desires , Malevolence , and Sacrifices.

Her Legacy Novel series is based on Celtic legends. Roxanna divides most of her time between her writing and her career as a veterinary technician and rehabilitating native wildlife. He lives with his wife, Lisa, a rare-book dealer, in Seattle.

Putter and Tabby, for instance. Rylant lives in Lake Oswego, Oregon. When Archie Satterfield decided he wanted to write a book about canoeing on the Yukon River, he packed up his wife and four small children and headed north, says his obituary in The Seattle Times.

He wrote 40 books, many set in Alaska. Seattle: An Asahel Curtis Portfolio was honored by the independent booksellers of the Northwest in He died in at the age of Savage was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Migael Scherer is the author of four books and numerous essays that range from the literary to the practical. An experienced mariner, Scherer wrote the first comprehensive cruising guide to the Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands.

Scherer and her husband lived aboard a sailboat for more than thirty-five years, cruising the Pacific Northwest, Southeast Alaska and the 1,mile Inside Passage.

Mary Dodds Schlick is author of Columbia River Basketry: Gift of the Ancestors, Gift of the Earth , which is based on a study of the distinctive baskets of the region and was honored by the independent booksellers of the Northwest in She lives in Mount Hood. Carlos Schwantes is the St. He holds a doctorate in American History from the University of Michigan. In total he has authored or edited fifteen books about various facets of the American West and transportation, including The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History and Railroad Signatures Across the Pacific Northwest , honored by the independent booksellers of the Northwest in He is an avid landscape photographer and teaches at the University of Missouri-St.

Barbara Scot, a public school teacher for twenty-five years, began to write after a tour with the Peace Corps in Nepal in An avid fan of the outdoors, she has spent much of her life climbing mountains, backpacking, running, and bird watching. She and her husband live in a houseboat on the Willamette River. Lynda Sexson is Professor of Humanities at Montana State University in Bozeman and the co-director of Corona Productions, a series of projects and events promoting interdisciplinary events and reflections.

Among her awards, honors and affiliations, Sexson received Humanities Montana grants for the planning and production of My Book and Heart Shall Never Part, a film she wrote and directed in Seth Sjostrom began writing thrillers, Blood in the Snow being his first completed and published novel. He was surprised when his first holiday romance sprang from his mind and keyboard tapping fingertips, releasing Finding Christmas. He lives in Camas, WA. Born in Brooklyn, he has been an Oregonian since He and his wife, Beverly, lived in a cedar yurt in rural Amity before moving back to Portland, where they currently live.

Diane Smith is a writer specializing in science and the environment. Her first novel, Letters from Yellowstone , was honored with a award from the independent booksellers of the Northwest and was the One Book Montana book of The novel uses letters to tell the story of the lone woman on a botanical research expedition to Yellowstone National Park in Smith has lived most of her adult life in Montana, and in her free time, she visits national parks, volunteers on archaeological and paleontological digs, explores back roads and tries to learn all she can about the natural history of the West.

Roland Smith was born and raised in Portland, where he worked at a zoo until becoming a full-time writer. Smith lives on a small farm south of Portland with his wife, Marie. He lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and has taught at the University of California, Davis since Sonneman picked fruit for sixteen years and currently teaches journalism and writing at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington.

Frank Soos has published several books including the essay collection Bamboo Fly Rod Suite: Reflections on Fishing and the Geography of Grace and the short story collections Early Yet and Unified Field Theory , which was honored by the independent booksellers of the Northwest in He lives in Fairbanks with the artist Margo Klass. Jeanine Soriano lives in the beautiful Central Oregon desert and mountains.

Jeanine loves history, mystery, and romance. Her books will always be about history, mystery, and romance. The Mending Place was published in He lives, writes and teaches in Portland Oregon.

He tells the story of the tragic retreat of the Nez Perce from Wallowa Lake, Oregon to Bear Paw, Montana from the perspective of the Nez Perce, their pursuers and those who found themselves in the path of the chase. Stadius is a native of the West with more than twenty years experience in the book business. Kim Stafford is a writer and teacher living in Portland, Oregon. Poet and pacifist William Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, in During the Second World War, Stafford was a conscientious objector and worked in the civilian public service camps—an experience he recorded in the prose memoir Down in My Heart: Peace Witness in War Time.

In Stafford moved to Oregon to teach at Lewis and Clark College, where he worked until his retirement in He went on to publish more than sixty-five volumes of poetry and prose, including An Oregon Message , which was honored by PNBA in Clemens Starck is the author of several books of poetry, including China Basin and Traveling Incognito.

Born in Rochester, N. He lives on forty-some acres in the country outside of Dallas, Oregon. Stein worked as a documentary film maker in New York for several years. He grew up in Seattle, where he currently lives with his family. The praise for Wild was uniformly ecstatic. She lives in Portland with her husband and two children. Anthony Swofford served in a U. His sophomore novel, Blankets , won several industry awards and has been published in almost twenty languages.

Habibi should take its place alongside groundbreaking classics, such as Maus and Persepolis. Thompson lives in Portland. Six years in the making, the project was first a book and then a show at the Portland Art Museum, where Toedtemeier had been photography curator since Kathleen Tyau was raised in Hawaii and began writing at the age of 13 with the publication of an essay in the Honolulu Star Bulletin.

She plays bluegrass guitar and mandolin and is the author of the novels Makai and A Little Too Much Is Enough , which was honored in by the independent booksellers of the Northwest. Tyau has taught creative writing at Pacific University and Fishtrap and currently lives on 52 acre evergreen forest near Gaston, Oregon. His most recent book is a collection of short stories, Looking for War and Other Stories. In addition to teaching and writing, Unger is the Interim Chair of the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and travels extensively in support of literary activism around the world.

Wagoner is the author of ten novels, including The Escape Artist , which was adapted into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola, though he is best known for his poetry and his teaching.

Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems was honored by the independent booksellers of the Northwest in Velma Wallis is an Athabaskan Indian who grew up in a remote Alaskan village. Years later, she moved into an old trapping cabin and survived for almost twelve years on what she gathered from hunting, fishing and trapping. Highly praised by readers and critics from around the world, the novel has sold more than , copies and has been optioned by Fox Searchlight Pictures for a major feature film.

She divides her time between Fort Yukon and Fairbanks. He lives with his wife and children in his hometown, Spokane, Washington. Born in Browning, Montana to a father who was a member of the Blackfeet tribe and a mother who was a member of the Gros Ventre tribe, James Welch attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations. Although Welch began his career as a poet, he became famous for fiction and is considered a founding author of the Native American Renaissance literary movement.

She has a Ph. She lives in Indianola, Washington, and Pleasanton, California, and is a freelance editor. Whittaker grew up in Seattle, where he got his start climbing Mount Rainier. He and his wife, Dianne Roberts, along with their two sons, made a four-year, 20,mile sailing journey to Australia and back to their home in Port Townsend, aboard their foot steel ketch, Impossible. Virginia Euwer Wolff was born in Portland, Oregon. Her family lived on an apple and pear orchard near Mount Hood.