Jan will be reading from the newest offering in her Sylvia Avery Mystery series, set on the southwest Washington coast. In Hook, Line and Sinker, the frolicsome geriatric belly-dancing widows of the North Beach Peninsula are looking for love again, and Sylvia Avery is recruited to help them navigate the hoops, hurdles, and hustles of online dating. Love is in the air, online and elsewhere, but Sheriff Donaldson’s background checks reveal that a few of these internet fellows are up to no good. Can they be stopped before someone gets killed?

Jill will be reading and discussing first chapters, including from her novel, When the Past Comes Calling, which explores the unforeseen consequences of choices we make in the moment:  In 1972, six fraternity brothers meet a girl at a tavern, take her to a nearby apartment, where each has sex with her. In 1999, 27 years later, the child conceived that night comes looking for his father and justice for his mother. The six men, who have since moved on building their lives with wives, families and careers, have repressed or forgotten that night in the apartment.

Matt Love, author/editor of 21 books about Oregon and 2009 winner of the Oregon Literary Arts Legacy Award, calls Alberta & the Spark “the best Pacific Northwest coming-of-age novel since Jim Lynch’s The Highest Tide.”

 Jennifer lives with her husband Holt in Astoria, where her writing is “informed by wind, weather, tides, migratory birds and pinnipeds.

Linda is a retired elementary and special education teacher living in Longview. Her work has been published in The Children’s Ministry magazine, That Holiday Feeling anthology, and the Longview Daily News. Her memoir of friendship and growing up in the Fifties, My Three Friends, was published in 2015.