When a landslide kills six people and destroys several expensive homes, Madeline Thomas, principal chief of the Klalos, and geologist Charlie O Neill know something is rotten in Latouche County: the land should never have been built on. Sheriff s investigator Rob Neill uncovers a suppressed hazard warning and evidence of payoffs to county government, with the help of librarian Meg McLean. Rob leads an investigation that implicates local development bigwigs and county personnel, including his boss and mentor, the sheriff. Meanwhile someone will stop at nothing, even murder, to keep the cover-up covered up. Cop, librarian, nurse, sheriff, and even an Indian chief they are all viewpoint characters in Sheila Simonson s engrossing new mystery, An Old Chaos. Expanding our view of the microcosm of a rural Columbia Gorge town introduced in the critically praised Buffalo Bill s Defunct, Simonson portrays heroism as well as corruption in high and low places. And human fallibility s potential for diasaster is joined by the landscape s; as the eponymous Wallace Stevens poem says, We live in an old chaos of the sun.

Jane August, an artist who’s “a refugee from a wealthy family,” is visiting her estranged father and his fifth wife on the Columbia River Gorge. Doing a good turn for a wine maker from neighboring Hawk Farm, she is swept into a morass of family secrets and betrayals—in both the cozy farmhouse and the palatial estate. Call Down the Hawk centers on two victims, Frank August and Bill Hough (pronounced Hawk), both of whom enjoy conflict for its own sake. Hawk Farm, in the flood plain of the Columbia, is one focus of trouble, with the recent suicide of Hough and his daughter’s trial by fire as a soldier in Afghanistan. Another is the August mansion on the bluff above, when Jane August’s father vanishes amid charges of his bank’s fiscal malfeasance. Undersheriff Rob Neill is called to the scene when a bulldozer in the orchard uncovers Frank August’s corpse. Until Chief Madeline Thomas of the Klalos clears the murk of violence from the land, Rob won’t be able to uncover the truth.

The 2008 election is over, and librarian Meg McLean is thrilled that the library levy passed. Despite an economy in free fall, Meg’s personal and professional lives are thriving. Tribal Chief Madeline Thomas of the Klalos offers an inherited farmhouse for a branch library-but Meg’s rival and vengeful enemy plans to contest the will. Disasters begin to strike-the farmhouse is vandalized; the chief’s home is firebombed; and when her rival falls to her death, Meg becomes a murder suspect. Meg and her romantic interest, Undersheriff Rob Neill, must confront religious zealotry, bullying, and troubled mother-daughter relationships to penetrate the morass of bad karma and maze of crimes. “In Simonson’s taut third Latouche County library mystery librarian Margaret “Meg” McLean has her hands full . . . . Simonson’s ambitious plot casts a wide net-from treating themes of racism and religious intolerance to thwarted love and good old-fashioned greed-but she pulls it off with a sure hand.” -Publishers Weekly

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Theater of the Absurd takes on a whole new meaning when former teacher and Byron scholar Grace Hollister is hired as a script doctor for a cable film production. Hollywood wants to film the book Grace wrote about her her past academic (and extracurricular) exploits on location in the Lake District. At first Grace revels in reflected Hollywood glamor and her reunion with boyfriend Peter Fox, antiques dealer and former jewel thief. However, although the film's budget seems boundless, almost no one in the cast or crew seems to have much experience making movies. It's almost comical...until history begins to repeat itself for real, and then it's curtains for more than one of the cast.

Lark Dailey faces a weekend at the mountain lodge of her mother's mentor, poet Dai Llewellyn, without enthusiasm, but Lark's detective-lover Jay finds the proximity of a notorious pot-farm interesting. The setting, a remote Sierra lake, is idyllic, perfect for canoeing and wind-surfing, not to mention fireworks. Neither Lark nor Jay expects the Fourth of July to end in murder.Surrounded by old friends, ex-lovers, devoted servants--and someone who does not love him--the poet collapses. He has been poisoned by tincture of larkspur in his Campari. The irony is not lost on Lark, whose bookstore is called Larkspur Books, nor on Jay, who is tapped to investigate.Jay's investigation is complicated by the murder of two key witnesses and by bizarre embellishments in all three killings. The embellishments suggest that something less straightforward than greed is driving the killer, something like madness. The tangle of suspicion widens to include not only the poet's weekend guests but even Lark's charming, book-loving clerk.Lark worries that her mother, who comes to town after the San Francisco funeral, may be in danger too, because someone does not like poets, and Mary Dailey, a noted poet, is Llewellyn's literary executor. Her co-executor may have his own reasons for wanting to control the relics of Dai Llewellyn's past. As Jay awaits a search warrant, a cocktail party of survivors gathers to honor Lark's mother, and Lark determines to crash it in time to prevent another poisoning. Unfortunately, she's not sure who the murderer is.