I am a romance author with a perpetual case of wanderlust. Though I’m always up for a good road trip, my true passion is visiting other countries. Among my odd travel quirks are collecting hotel soaps (I have over 200 different ones!) and memorizing airline codes. Years ago, I worked as an archaeologist, and was lucky enough to travel through the Mediterranean and the Middle East. These days, I’m more of an armchair traveler, which is why I love writing (and reading!) romances that transport me to a new location.
Years ago, my family took an unforgettable road trip to Utah to visit all the National Parks there. Something Wilderwas the perfect way to revisit this area. In this adventure-romance, Lily Wilder, daughter of the late treasure-hunter Duke Wilder, spends her days leading tourist expeditions on horseback through the beautiful red rock canyons of Utah. When she gets saddled (literally) with her ex on one of these trips, they not only rekindle their feelings for each other, but also get caught up in a treasure hunt with some nasty villains. Not only were the descriptions of canyon country breathtaking, but the puzzles and plot twists in the story reminded me of National Treasure, but with a romance that was far more satisfying.
The “reigning romance queens” (PopSugar) and New York Times bestselling authors of The Soulmate Equation and The Unhoneymooners present a charming and laugh-out-loud funny novel filled with adventure, treasure, and, of course, love.
Growing up the daughter of notorious treasure hunter and absentee father Duke Wilder left Lily without much patience for the profession…or much money in the bank. But Lily is nothing if not resourceful, and now uses Duke’s coveted hand-drawn maps to guide tourists on fake treasure hunts through the red rock canyons of Utah. It pays the bills but doesn’t leave enough to fulfill her dream of…
Long ago, in college in Colorado, I discovered Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire—the classic that grew from journals he kept while a ranger at Utah’s Arches National Park. I’d grown up in the West, visiting national parks and revering park rangers. Abbey gave me the model—live and write in these wild places. After graduating, I snagged jobs myself as a seasonal ranger/naturalist at Arches and Capitol Reef national parks. I was thrilled. Since then, I’ve spent decades exploring and photographing Western landscapes. After working on 25 books about natural history, Native peoples, and conservation, Capitol Reef still remains my “home park” and Utah Canyon Country my spiritual home.
Kevin Jones’s rollicking page-turner takes place in the San Rafael Swell, just north of Capitol Reef—my home territory. All these southern Utah canyons share the same wild beauty and face the same threats. Jones was famously fired as Utah state archaeologist for standing up for Native rights, and his deep love of cultural history and rock art elevate this thriller into the ranks of regional classics. In his yarn, a regular guy—our hero, Stan—stops along the highway with his dog, Speck. A desperate woman, Lily, hides there and needs help. As all three are swept into a chase through the Swell, pursued by armed anti-wilderness extremists, Jones’s characters thoughtfully ponder the future of public lands while racing for their lives. We’re with them all the way.
Anti-wilderness protesters have taken over a portion of eastern Utah. Stan Watson, driving to Moab, stops by the highway to walk his dog Speck, and encounters a woman who begs him for help. When he offers Lily and her injured husband a ride, they are confronted by armed men, and Stan is in for a nightmare he had not anticipated. Chased through the wildlands by rag-tag extremists riding off-road vehicles, Stan, Lily, and Frank, a lost reporter, face dehydration, starvation, and murder at the hands of their pursuers. When Stan and Frank become incapacitated, Lily and Speck lead them through…
Currently, the world seems concerned that artificial intelligence (AI) will destroy the world or at least put many of us out of jobs. Only a few years ago, a significant part of the population believed that COVID-19 was made in a Chinese laboratory and intentionally or accidentally leashed on the world, killing millions. This isn’t just a theme in tech thrillers; it’s a theme in life. Whether it’s nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, AI, or some other type of technology, there’s always a fear that it’ll do more damage than good and, at its worst, bring an end to the world.
I’ve long been fascinated by the mysteries of the Anasazi, or the Pueblo Dwellers of southwestern Utah. How and why did a thriving culture of literally thousands of people who had built stone buildings into cliff faces suddenly and inexplicably disappear? Having read numerous books by archaeologists on the subject, I was really no closer to an answer. But when Preston and Child wrote a novel, a combination of adventure, tech thriller, and mythology, I was completely on board.
Archaeologist Nora Kelly’s father disappeared without a trace 16 years earlier in the remote desert, searching for the legendary Quivira, a city of gold and wonder, the lost city of the Anasazi Indians. Pulling together a team, using some NASA satellite research to find a starting place, Nora leads a team into the desolate canyonlands in search of the city—only to find extraordinary mythology, life-threatening natural events, and a deadly, dangerous…
On a visit to her family's abandoned Santa Fe ranch, archaeologist Nora Kelly discovers an old letter, written from her father to her mother, now both dead. What perplexes Nora is the fact that the faded envelope was mailed and postmarked only a few weeks earlier. Her father had vanished into the remote canyon country of Utah 16 years before, searching for Quivira, the fabled Lost City of Gold, whose legend has captivated explorers since the days of Coronado. Upon reading the letter, Nora learns that her father believed he had, in fact, located the lost city. But what happened…
I am a son of the contemporary American West—born near the Pacific Coast, raised in Texas, and an inveterate traveler of its byways and odd corners. Through the duality of my upbringing, as the son of a well-traveled mother, a suburban sportswriter stepfather, and a father who worked in extractive industries, I’ve seen up close both harmony and dissonance. The work I’m drawn to, whether on the creation end or the consumptive end, goes deep into the lives that play out in these places.
Here, I veer off into nonfiction, but only because nobody would believe any novelist who conjured up the likes of the real-life people Betsy Gaines Quammen talks to in constructing this portrait of how things got so fraught out West.
In my view, it takes a writer of particular skill and empathy to honestly get at the thoughts and motivations of folks with whom she likely disagrees on fundamental questions. Further, it takes a writer of inherent fairness to call balls and strikes on all sides of contentious issues. Quammen, for my money, is such a writer.
“True West disentangles reality from centuries of myth and mystique."
—HAMPTON SIDES, New York Times bestselling author of Blood and Thunder
From the Northern Rockies to the Southwest deserts, Betsy Gaines Quammen explores how myths shape our identities, heighten polarizations, and fracture our shared understanding of the world around us. As she investigates the origins and effects of myths of the American West, Gaines Quammen travels through small towns and big cities, engaging people and building relationships at every stop. Misperceptions about land, politics, liberty, and self-determination threaten the well-being of people and communities across the country, and Gaines Quammen…
By lucky lottery of birth, Missoula, Montana, nestled between forested mountains and sliced through by trout-filled rivers, is where I was born and raised. Public land conservation came into my consciousness naturally as clean, pine-scented air. But when I moved to overcrowded New York City in 2001 to try a career in journalism, homesickness made me begin researching conservation. Why are there public lands in the West? What forces prompted their creation? Who wants public lands, and who opposes them? Can their history teach us about our present and our future? These books began answering my questions.
From this bracing and brilliant biography, I learned about how John Wesley Powell went on an epic Western discovery adventure and became inspired to challenge thousands of years of Anglo dogma about rain, rivers, land, and how humankind must live with them.
Basic conservation is such a part of American life today that, like gravity, which Newton gets credit for discovering, we forget the genius it first took to conceptualize it. No one is more foundational to conservation than one-armed Grand Canyon explorer Powell. His story is here told by an admiring author, Wallace Stegner, who understood that genius because he was one.
From the “dean of Western writers” (The New York Times) and the Pulitzer Prize winning–author of Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety, a fascinating look at the old American West and the man who prophetically warned against the dangers of settling it
In Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Wallace Stegner recounts the sucesses and frustrations of John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of Indian tribes of the American Southwest. A prophet without honor who had a profound understanding of the American West, Powell warned long ago of…
From the time I was a girl, I’ve loved stories that put a lump in my throat even as I’m laughing. As a fiction writer, that funny-sad tone is the one I go for in my own work. I gravitate toward female protagonists of all ages who break the mold—women who are intelligent and strong but who also have unconventional, quirky personalities. Women who can be hilarious, infuriating, and heartbreaking—sometimes all at once. Because they are complex and unique, these women tend to struggle with life’s challenges more than their contemporaries. That’s what makes their stories so interesting, and why I have chosen the books on this list.
I love stories in which the characters are thrust into unusual and unexpected circumstances. This was the case for Samantha Arias, who had to carry a heavier load than most middle-aged moms. Early widowhood, a chronic sleep disorder, a serious lack of self-esteem, and a close friend gravely ill with cancer were just a few of her challenges that made me empathize with her plight.
When Samantha and a third estranged friend embarked on a mission to rescue their sick friend’s dog, they took us on a long road trip that was both comical and action-packed. I laughed and cried as Samantha slowly opened herself up to embracing both new love and old friendship.
A road trip can drive anyone over the edge-especially two former best friends-in bestselling author Ann Garvin's funny and poignant novel about broken bonds, messy histories, and the power of forgiveness.
Widowed Samantha Arias hasn't spoken to Holly Dunfee in forever. It's for the best. Samantha prefers to avoid conflict. The blisteringly honest Holly craves it. What they still have in common puts them both back on speed dial: a mutual love for Katie, their best friend of twenty-five years, now hospitalized with cancer and needing one little errand from her old college roomies.
Finding a voice is something I struggled with since childhood. Always afraid of being invisible or silent, finding common ground with writers who excelled at relating the human condition became a safe haven. I made a choice to focus on creative work that explores what is means to be simply human--to examine the hopes, needs, wants, and energies that make our daily lives move.
Sonic Memories makes the best use of a compact space without losing any of the narrative depth and emotional impact. This small collection of essays uses sound and music as its top note all the while using the silence in between to showcase a rich memoir-like exploration of Black girlhood growing into Black womanhood.
Sonic Memories is a debut collection of personal essays written and designed by the author.
These true stories begin in Utah in the late seventies. The author is two and her parents are hopeful newlyweds in their early twenties. We follow the family back to Maryland where her father's dream to practice law disintegrates when he doesn’t pass the bar after several attempts. His upwardly mobile hopes for his family are dashed, and the fallout from that—a fear of being trapped in a life of poverty and dreams deferred—dogs the author through most of her young adult/adult life. In these…
This gripping crime thriller is more a
‘whichdunnit’ than a ’whodunnit’. The murder victim, a dissident Mormon
patriarch, lived with his three wives in a rundown farmstead in Utah so remote
that the women are the only plausible suspects.
They dislike and resent each
other, and each has a strong motive to kill their tyrannical spouse. Quinn
brilliantly brings her characters to life, each with a very different
backstory, and captures marvelously the feel of the place and the period. I
found the book impossible to put down.
It’s full of twists and turns, with
surprises to the very end. And unlike many thrillers, it has stayed fresh in my
mind for months.
"While Quinn writes with spirit on weighty subjects like domestic abuse, polygamy and religious cults, her primary and most poignant theme seems to be female friendship."-New York Times Book Review
"An absolutely thrilling novel. I devoured it over a weekend, unable to put it down. It's a clever and completely original take on a domestic thriller."-Alex Michaelides, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Silent Patient
"Original, informative, suspenseful-the big three in a literary slam bang."-New York Journal of Books
Blake's dead. They say his wife killed him. If so... which one?
I have a life-long love of Westerns. I’ve researched the period and the events extensively. One of the first things I look for in any book I read is period accuracy. The books I write are historically accurate, though they are fiction. I’m on a mission, through my writing, to save the Western genre.
This was the first Western I read when I was young. It made an impression on me, not only as a Western, but as a classic story of good and evil with sharply drawn characters that make it come alive to the reader. Grey’s writing puts the reader right in the middle of every scene. And it has an ending you don’t see coming, but one that fits perfectly.
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
I’m fascinated by the mountain wilderness and national parks of my home state, Colorado. In my younger days, I hiked to the mountain lakes of the Sangre de Cristo range near my hometown and then later the high-country trails of northern Colorado and Rocky Mountain National Park. When I began writing the Timber Creek K-9 Mysteries, I combined my experience as a veterinarian’s wife with my love of the great outdoors and dogs to create Killing Trail, book one of eight in my series that features Deputy Mattie Cobb, her K-9 partner Robo, and veterinarian Cole Walker. Together they solve mysteries in the fictional mountain community of Timber Creek, Colorado.
I love mysteries that are set in the great outdoors, and Pamela Beason’s books definitely fill that bill.
Endangered was the first book of hers that I’ve read and I immediately fell in love with Summer “Sam” Westin, the protagonist of the Sam Westin Mystery series. Sam’s eclectic background combining experience with animals and wilderness environments has landed her an assignment to report on cougars at a Utah park.
When a young child goes missing, the cougars she’s been observing are blamed and Sam embarks on a quest to save both the child and the big cats she’s come to admire. This book taught me about cougars and their habitat and provided a tense whodunit to enjoy.
Summer "Sam" Westin's assignment to report on cougars in a Utah park goes horribly awry when a child vanishes from a campground and the TV news focuses on the local mountain lions as the likely culprits.
As days tick by with no sign of the missing boy and media coverage continues to inflame the public, pressure grows for the park administration to kill the cougars. But Sam was one of the last people to see the child, and she has good reason to suspect a man she spotted in the shadows as little Zachary Fischer ran away from her.
