Take a trip back in time with award winning Star Tribune reporter Peg Meier.

Life stories of ordinary people of Minnesota, through the form of letters, diaries, & photographs. Every day life from the beginning of the 19th century to the dawn of World War II.

Dan Sharp, a gay missing persons investigator, accepts an invitation to a wedding on a yacht in Ontario's Prince Edward County. But the event doesn't go as planned. A member of the wedding party is swept overboard and Dan finds himself deep in troubled waters as he searches for possible killers not only in the present but also 20 years earlier.

In the summer of 1926, the Jean Goldkette jazz band, led by sax player Frankie Trumbauer and featuring 23-year-old cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, landed a season-long gig at the Blue Lantern dance hall on Hudson Lake in rural Indiana. The culture clash that resulted between the gin-swilling band members and the stuffy townspeople, fueled by Indiana Klansmen on one hand and Chicago gangsters on the other, is the subject of Toops' evocative jazz-age novel. At the center of the tale is the mercurial Beiderbecke, whose star shone brightly but briefly in the jazz world.

A newly-wed couple escape a busy confusion of their homeland for a distant and almost uninhabited lakeshore. They plan to lead a simple life there, fishing the lake, trapping the nearby woods and building a house upon the dirt between where they can raise a family. But as their every pregnancy fails, the child-obsessed husband begins to rage at this new world: the song-spun objects somehow created by his wife's beautiful singing voice, the giant and sentient bear that rules the beasts of the woods... A powerful exploration of the limits of parenthood and marriage.

Peg Meier's candid interpretation of the joys and pains of childhood through the decades--at home, at school, at play--reminds us that we were all children once, too.

A TOUCH IGNITES. A FIRE BURNS. AND THE HEAT HAS JUST BEGUN. Deep in the cool green mountains of the Adirondacks, wounded firefighter Connor MacKenzie has come to rebuild the 100-year-old MacKenzie family cabin—and to be alone. A horrific blaze has left him scarred inside and out and certain of two things: He’ll get back on his Hot Shot crew no matter what it takes, and any woman who ventures too close will not stay long. Ginger Sinclair has been burned by a different kind of fire. Having just escaped from a bad marriage, she’s retreated to the safety of the lakeside vacation town in upstate New York to start a new life. She’s done with men, with relationships, with the danger of desires that can rage out of control—until she unexpectedly encounters Connor MacKenzie. As a hot summer on the lake grows ever hotter, they find themselves sharing a cabin and a romance that will swiftly engulf them both.