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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Book Notes: Jance lands at Auntie’s for reading of ‘Betrayal’

Mark your calendar now for your J.A. Jance fix.

The best-selling Seattle-based author will be at Auntie’s Bookstore, 402 W. Main Ave., on Aug. 4, 7 p.m.

She’ll be reading from and talking about “Betrayal of Trust” (William Morrow, $25.99), the latest book in her J.P. Beaumont series.

Beaumont is a fictional investigator with the Washington state attorney general’s office. The issue in this book: a snuff film involving a grandson of the governor.

The novel is already high up on the best-seller lists.

It would behoove you to arrive early for this reading, since Jance is very popular.

Poole poetry

A new volume of poetry by Scott Poole, “The Sliding Glass Door” (Colonus Publishing, $17.95), has just arrived in my mailbox.

This has local interest for two reasons. Colonus Publishing is the literary publisher operating out of Spokane, headed by Rich Skalstad. And Poole was the founder of Spokane’s national-class literary festival, Get Lit!, during his time at Eastern Washington University.

He now lives in Vancouver, Wash., and is pursuing both his poetry and a software development career.

Look for the book to be released within the next few months. An official unveiling will take place at Wordstock, the Portland book festival, on Oct. 6-9.

Spokane’s ‘Fat Detective’

Speaking of local authors, John Soennichsen has just produced a comic detective novel that Spokane readers will find particularly entertaining.

It’s titled “The Fat Detective” (CreateSpace, $8.99) and subtitled “A Gruesome Tale of Murder, Mayhem, and Bad Puns from the Crime-Ridden Streets of Spokane, Washington.”

This book is a combination of “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Naked Gun” – a satirical tale starring the mostly hapless Spokane detective Lance Loomis.

“It was his love of classic detective novels that had brought him to Spokane,” says the book. “That, and the fact that he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of actually making a living in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland or Seattle.”

The book is available at Auntie’s and at Rae’s Book Exchange, 6512 N. Division St., where Soennichsen says he “works part time to supplement my meager income from novel writing.”

Soennichsen is best-known as a nonfiction writer, having had considerable success with “Live! From Death Valley: Dispatches from America’s Low Point” (Sasquatch Books, 2005) and “Bretz’s Flood: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World’s Greatest Flood” (Sasquatch, 2009).

He has recently branched out into fiction with both “The Fat Detective” and “Westward Journey: The Incredible Adventures of an American Boy” (CreateSpace, $14.95).