Conch Shell Murder keeps you guessing from start to finish. Marvelous characters jump right off the page. The author's great sense of place makes you feel you are there, pulling for Katie Hassworth to solve the murder of Alexa Chitting a colorful, controversial Key West figure. A suspenseful, fun read.

This is a fast-paced read with a real-life
main character. Former teacher-turned-detective
Katie Hasworth must overcome inexperience,
adversity, and even a romance! And what's
not to love about the glamorous backdrop of
Key West, Florida? Unlike too many of the
haunted, super-human sleuths of today's whodunnits,
Katie is someone we can all relate to -- and cheer for.

Though she has partnered with former Miami cop Mac McCartel for two years, former schoolteacher Katie Hasworth has been bonded and licensed as a private detective for a few months. Her confidence is limited so she is hesitant to take on a murder investigation especially with her mentor out of town even though her landlady and friend Diane Dade asks her to look into the death of her mother Alexa Chitting. Reluctantly Katie agrees to investigate the homicide ruled a robbery gone bad by the Key West police and concurred with by Mac.

Katie begins her inquiries at the scene of the crime, Alexa's office, where the culprit killed the victim using a conch shell that ironically symbolizes birth. Katie finds an obscure bullet that the cops overlooked and believes more than just a robbery occurred as Alexa was changing her will. However, she wonders who were the losers if Alexa had signed her revised will and would one of them kill to keep his or her inheritance? Katie learns the answer as she becomes a target when she gets too close.

This engaging private investigative tale hooks readers because the heroine lacks confidence yet courageously seeks to solve the homicide against staggering professional odds. The story line reads more like an amateur sleuth cozy as the violence is left off the pages and Katie is learning on the job. Katie is a delightful individual and the support cast enables the audience to understand her, especially her fears, much better even when they fail to cooperate. Fans will enjoy Dorothy Francis' straightforward Florida (no major whackos) mystery.

Harriet Klausner

This isn't the "bang-bang, shoot-em-up" West, but tales of life where the reality jumps off the pages. They are tales of quiet heroism and patient sympathy, in a language of wonderful imagination. People in these stories are just trying to live, love, and get through the day. I'm grateful to the friend who told me about Dorothy Johnson; her work reads just like yarns told around a campfire, and you can almost hear a grizzled old cowpoke's voice. If only an imaginative publisher would issue them in audio!

THE HANGING TREE is a wonderful collection of frontier tales by a woman who has gotten unfairly short shrift as a very fine American writer. Dorothy Johnson's stories, set mostly in her native Montana, dealt with men and women, frontier riff-raff, lawmen, and Indians. These are no stereotypical westerns, they are stories of the human condition that happen to take place on the frontier. The title story in this collection, THE HANGING TREE, is the best, I think. A haunting tale of an ill-fated frontier doctor -- Joe Frail -- it works as a pure western, as a moving love story, and as a psychological character study. It was the basis for Gary Cooper's last western, one of the finest westerns ever made, the masterful THE HANGING TREE.

Dorothy M. Johnson's stories echo real life. I got the sense that most of her characters came to her from bits and pieces of the people she grew up around. Although she wrote for the 40's and 50's, there is nothing dated about this book.As a people , we haven't changed much.

I thoroughly enjoyed "The Wedding" but "The Living is Easy" is brilliant. Cleo is excellently portrayed....the kind of person that you want to hate but you can't help but admire her determination to attain her goal. Dorothy West skillfully reveals to us the inner woman of Cleo and we see that she is not so cold-hearted but has her share of hurt, pain, vulnerability etc. Her way of dealing with her emotions which to her is a weakness, is incredible. Her anguish when her husband leaves is the most revealing because she has become dependent on his strength.
The story deals with the universal problem of skin color and status in an upper-class society...this ongoing problem brings about such a sadness....such a waste of energy.....will it ever go away?

The main character has little feeling and reading about how she came to be that way was great. The entire plot was wonderful, cleanly written with nothing left hanging and Cleo was endearing but maddening. The author's description of the era and township was flattering and understandable. You will never forget Cleo.

I read this book months ago and it stayed with me. Her characters are fully drawn, not two-dimensional caricatures. The writing displays all sides of this complex heroine and her ultimately devastating impact on everyone associated with her. Also, a fascinating look into a society not portrayed elsewhere.

I was enchanted and educated by the adventures of this fascinating family.
As a member of a later generation that did not personally experience the depression, I feel I now have an understanding of what life would have been like if I had. I thoroughly enjoyed the unique way the two sisters took turn telling the story, sometimes-different take on the same event! Wonderful!

This is a wonderful book. It is very well written and a fast read. I was left wanting to know more. What happened to Aunt Irene & Uncle Grant as they aged? Who did sleep in Giovanni's room? It provides a full portrait of a particular middle class family from 1935 to 1937 as they moved from town to town in the San Joaquin Valley of California to follow their father's work. I loved the clarity of the portrayal of this less complicated culture. One passage sent chills down my spine because of the contrast it draws to our present experience: "In 1935 most children didn't have closets stuffed with clothes, shoes and games." I especially enjoyed all the details of life - food, clothing, styles, manners. The characters were well drawn & varied & left me with a deep longing for a sister of my own.

This is one great book. I love Key West and someday I'm going to move there. It's home. When I discovered this book I didn't expect the reaction it gave me. It brought me back. The characters, the craziness, and the surreal island life of the Keys came rushing back to me like a tidal wave. It reminded me of what I love and miss about Key West. A wonderful read.

Ah, here we are. Here are those oft' cited "glory days of yesteryear" lovingly reprinted by John Boisonault and Tom Corcoran - and the timing couldn't be better. From a literary perspective, it's of course Springtime with various versions of "season" winding down. Jasmine and Cereus perfume the often thunderous nights and a hammock'd or curled-up casual sip'n read offers just the sought after relaxation. Nothing could be finer or more suitable than Key West Collection. With a deft, self-depreciating yet mannered air, Ms. Raymer recounts first-hand adventures and mis-adventures in the "open air asylum" of old Key West. Here is a roustabout Last Resort of costume parties, nudity, famous writers, domestic squabbles, internecine jealousies, street bums, dirtbags, cruise ship passengers, body piercings and arguments over who got here first. Sound familiar? The beauty of the selection, of course, is how little much of our "lifestyle" has changed over the past 50 years. There is, however, one aspect that veritably screams out for notice...and that is humor, ingenuity and tolerance. I've had the pleasure of meeting many of the characters in this book. (The description of Cigarette Willy, alone, brought back a swirl of memories from that place before modernization and AIDS where one "merely had to wish to make it so.") Events like Fantasy Fest, the Suds Run, the Hemingway Festival and the Conch Republic Celebration were hatched in a hazy improvisation long before being certified as "annual events". It is worth noting that all of the events in this book took place in those days often cited as when Key West was "dying" - those days when Duval Street was shuttered and the streets were empty. Well, as the Key West Collection attests, someone was here, and though they may not have been rapaciously gouging the City and its tourists for every last penny they could squeeze out of them, they somehow managed to thrive with renegade humor and world famous alacrity. In fact, they survived so well that they created the "Key West" that so many tourists come here, in vain, to discover. Tom Corcoran's photographs from the near distant past, evoke a time of shrimpers, flop houses, stripper bars, lazy afternoons, grey weatherered buildings and Tennessee Williams - not tricked-up plastic faux once-upon-a-time trinket stands, mind you: the real thing. It's there in the scented evening air, in the smell of fresh Cuban bread and stand-up buche. It's there in a note from 1981 wherein the authoress can't find Tennessee Williams' house because "the streets were being dug up for sewer installation". We even read of a squabble between usurer Juius Stone and "Charlie Ramos" over the location of the "truly southernmost house". Key West Collection is the perfect gift for the newly arrived who'd like to know a bit more about their new "home" before they form an idea of what it ought to be. -Bud Nevero

For over forty years, Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret has photographed Iowa's Amana villages and the people. The 1959 image earliest in the series, originally taken on assignment for The Iowan magazine is of workers eating lunch at the Colony Inn. The most recent images are of the color cover of tulips and trees blooming in South Amana, and of the 1999 Maifest.

The book begins with photographs of the Community of True Inspiration, the religion of the original Amana settlers, their churches and religious followers. The next section is "The Communal Legacy" with villagers, villages and artifacts left over from the days when the colonists followed a system of religious communal life. In 1932 they voted The Great Change to a free enterprise system with a corporation owning the 26,000 acres, mills and various businesses. The people could now own their own homes. A photograph taken in 1982 shows "Those Who Knew the Communal Way," The elderly fifty years after The Great Change. A final section titled "The Winds of Change" shows the traditions of Germany as celebrated in the Maifest and an Oktoberfest. The Amana Heritage Society documents its historic past in several museums. Over 100 black- and- white images are in the book.

The color section, "The Beautiful Amanas, The Amanas in Bloom," has 13 photographs, ending with two views of the Native American Fish Dam on the Iowa river prior to the destruction of the dam in the floods of 1993.

A Foreword by Lanny Haldy, Executive Director of the Amana Heritage Society, and a Preface by Abigail Foerstner, photography critic, contribute to an understanding of the community and the photographs.

In her introduction, Joan writes, "the spirit of love and friendship, religious faith, and traditions continues today even through the vast winds of change in the Colonies and America.

An exhibition of the photographs complements the book.

This book was a big help. My son and I were going to spend 5 days in Phoenix for a football game. We had no idea on what to do. After reading this book, we were able to have an unbelievable get-away.

There's no way to descern from the title and cover page that there are really eight delightful stories in this one little book. My main problem is that they all had to end! They should be expanded and rewritten into their own complete novels. I am a big fan of British writers and this catchet of little ditties proved to be BRILLIANT!

The story of the Lewis and Clark expedition is the one great exploration of the American continent that was actually undertaken by Americans rather than by Europeans visiting the New World. "The Lewis and Clark Trail Then and Now," with text by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent and Photographs by William Munoz, compares the way things have changed along the route almost two hundred years later. When Lewis and Clark left St. Louis in May of 1804 the United States was a land without telephones, railroads, cars, electrical equipment or dozens of other modern conveniences we take for granted. The region of North American between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean was fill of rivers and mountains, native tribes and indigenous animals, all waiting to be "discovered." Today, this entire region has been mapped, and a lot of that uninhabited land is now covered by farms and ranches, towns and cities. Even the mighty Missouri and Columbia Rivers that Lewis and Clark followed have been damned. Still, there are wilderness areas, such as the Rocky Mountains, where what you would see today has changed little from the time Lewis and Clark first trekked through their landscapes.

However, overall the emphasis in this book is more on the "then," even though most of the pictures are of the "now." There is a reproduction of an 1802 map showing the great area of the unexplored American West and some early 19th-century paintings, but the photographs are of contemporary vistas and shots of some of the equipment taken on the expedition. The book does not make an attempt to match up old paintings with new photographs, but rather tries to combine them to give a sense of the places visited and the peoples met along the way. Ultimately, the book fills in the spaces between that unfinished map at the start of the book and the completed map made by Clark that appears at the end. Each chapter is essentially a two-page spread on chronologically arranged topics from Members of the Expedition and Life on the River to Finding the Shoshone and Descending the Might Columbia. The net effect is a concise look at the history making expedition and how it fulfilled President Thomas Jefferson's mandate. Young students assigned to research the topic or simply interested in this part of American history will find "The Lewis and Clark Trail: Now and Then" provides a solid look at the subject.

The harrowing 1804 expedition of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark across the American wilderness has been well-documented on a library full of history books. Western expansion was the dream of then-President Thomas Jefferson, and so the co-commanders Lewis and Clark began a cross-country trip through the pristine wilderness stretching across North America to the Pacific Ocean to not only stake a claim in the west, but also to collect specimens of plants and animals, map the unfamiliar frontier, find a northwest passage for men to follow, and to establish trade with Native American tribes. This informative book for elementary and middle school students touches on all those matters, but takes a unique approach by concentrating on one particular aspect of the expedition: North American flora and fauna. What new and exotic plants did Lewis and Clark see during their cross-country trip through the pristine wilderness? What specimens of plants and animals did they encounter? Why were trees so important to the success of the expedition? What new sources of food did they discover? How did they discover uses for wildflowers? What was the fate of Lewis's specimens? Most species collected were new to science at the time Lewis collected them, so this historical look at the scientific nature of the journey is a valuable one indeed. "Plants on the Trail with Lewis and Clark" will not only instill knowledge in its young readers, but also a healthy desire to preserve the natural and historical places of the western U.S.