Authors Discussion & Sigining:
James Elsener for Reflections of Valour and The Last Road Trip
Rusell Fee for A Dangerous Remedy: (#1) A Sheriff Matt Callahan Mystery, A Dangerous Identity: (#2) A Sheriff Matt Callahan Mystery, and A Dangerous Season: (#3) A Sheriff Matt Callahan Mystery
Date: October 15, 2021
Day: Friday
Time: 5:30 to 7:00 PM
About James Elsener
James Elsener was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in southern Michigan. After high school he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps serving for four and half years on active duty including a tour in Vietnam as a radio operator in an artillery unit. After graduation from Western Michigan University he got his first journalism job as a reporter with the City News Bureau of Chicago and later worked for the Chicago Tribune. He spent 47 years in the newspaper industry as a reporter, columnist, editor, association executive, advertising sales representative and owner/publisher. He is now writing books and living with his wife Patricia in River Forest, Illinois. In his spare time, he plays handball competing in many regional and national tournaments.
Brenda Walker passes slowly by Panel 15-E of "The Wall," the memorial to those who paid the ultimate sacrifice during the Vietnam War. There, etched into the black granite, she spots the name of her college sweetheart, "John Briggs." She had never known his fate until now.
Stub Rowe’s mediocre major league baseball career ended with a ground out to the second baseman. He considered that to be the wimpiest out in baseball. He had never been a star, but he was considered steady and reliable. Some team always needed a third baseman with a little pop in his bat…until the years ran out on him. Now it was time to consider what to do with the rest of his life.
About Russell Fee
Russ Fee was born in Indiana but grew up in Washington D.C. and London. After graduating from the College of William and Mary, he served in the army as an intelligence officer and then became a trial lawyer in Chicago, litigating civil rights and civil liberties cases, before becoming a teacher. A Dangerous Season is Russ’s fourth novel and the third book in his Sheriff Matt Callahan Mystery Series. Kirkus Reviews described the first book in the series, A Dangerous Remedy, as “A well-written mystery about a unique community imbued with a palpable sense of place . . . well-plotted and highly enjoyable.” The second book in the series, A Dangerous Identity, won the Chicago Writers Association’s Book of the Year Award. Russ and his wife are dual citizens of the United States and Ireland. They now live in the Upper Midwest, which they love.
A Dangerous Season
A Sheriff Matt Callahan Mystery
As Sheriff Callahan's island community prepares for the onslaught of winter in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a mysterious young girl is found hiding in the island’s wilderness. Teaming with the Ojibwe tribal police to discover the girl’s identity, Callahan and his two young deputies enter a dangerous season where myth and reality merge and where a haunting malevolence threatens both their island and Indian country. Together with an Ojibwe detective, they work to uncover the source of the threat, facing the peril of a relentless enemy that endangers those they are sworn to protect.
After a horrific mutilation renders former Chicago police detective Matt Callahan a recluse, he is given a second chance at life as sheriff of tiny Nicolet County in the Northwoods of Michigan. Idyllic, peaceful, and sparsely populated, the island community hides a web of secrets Callahan and his young female deputy must uncover before a great city an ocean away explodes in violence and is thrown back into a half century of carnage. Irish paramilitaries, the British Royal Family, a century-old Irish enclave in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the long reach of modern terrorism, and the incendiary effect of a single spark on the lasting peace of a nation combine to make a volatile brew in this engrossing Midwest mystery.
WINNER OF THE CHICAGO WRITERS ASSOCIATION BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD (2019) In this award-winning mystery/thriller, the gruesome death of a young woman pulls Sheriff Matt Callahan into a shifting universe where nothing is as it appears. As his island faces the threat of environmental ruin from the rupture of an oil pipeline under the waters of Lake Michigan and secret drilling along its shores, an unseen and relentless force poses a greater peril to the people of the island and beyond. When Callahan attempts to navigate the maze of deception that conceals those responsible for the danger, he unwittingly draws the innocent into a lethal trap and must confront his greatest fear as he is pushed to his physical and emotional limits.
