Pemaquid Point, ME Christmas Print

A good man, a skilled and dedicated firefighter, cracks his moral compass, in the best yet from the Seattle firefighter and Shamus Award-winning author. Twenty-four-year old Jason Gum thinks he has his future planned. He likes his job, knows he's got the right stuff for it and is studying for the lieutenant's exam, confident he'll pass. Then a pig, a double-ribbon winner at a county fair, off-loads himself out of an airplane at 11,000 feet and lands on Iola Pederson's roof, starting a conflagration...

An Indiana woman whose world was shattered in one fateful night spends the entirety of this meditative literary debut/sleepy thriller unraveling its events. Twenty-two-year-old Maggie's crumbling marriage takes its final blow when she is beaten nearly to death in her idyllic farmhouse, and Nate, her domineering and abusive husband, is put in prison for the crime. Cross-cutting between the mid-1990s, before the assault, and the novel's present in 2002, Jaskunas weaves a complex mystery: though...

He offered her baby a life of privilege, instead of the abject poverty Mara Rosemond remembered from her own childhood. But at what cost? Brock Barnett had been her husband's best friend. Mara blamed him for her husband's death. Even so, the bond that grew between them was unimaginable—yet undeniable—as both fought a battle with their emotions. Though Mara feared forsaking her late husband's memory, she knew that for her baby the future was everything….