The Reader's Shelf: Maryland, My Maryland

One only needs to consider the web site Biblio Travel (www.bibliotravel.com) to know that finding books that evoke place is a constant quest for readers. Those looking for great stories and an interesting setting should consider Maryland and its authors. Although small, it is a state with a distinctive personality: historic, literary, quirky, and varied in topology and population. Maryland even has its own literary legend—a mysterious stranger who yearly brings a rose to Edgar Allen Poe's grave in Baltimore.

Marcia Talley sets her fifth Hannah Ives mystery, This Enemy Town (Avon. 2005. ISBN 978-0-06-058739-0. pap. $6.99), at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, a site she knows well, having worked there as a librarian. During a staging of the musical Sweeney Todd, a dead body is found in a trunk. The victim is a woman who once accused Hannah's husband of sexual harassment, and the likely murder weapon has Hannah's fingerprints on it. Now Hannah must clear her name and find the true killer. Talley's touches of local color and authentic descriptions will give readers a sense of the academic campus and the surrounding city.

In Charm City (Avon. 1997. ISBN 978-0-380-78876-7. pap. $6.99), former Baltimore Sun reporter Laura Lippman, makes good use of Baltimore's pulsing atmosphere. A vicious attack on Tess Monaghan's Uncle Spike leads to the ex-reporter-turned-PI's involvement in a breaking story about a prominent and corrupt businessman named Wink Wynkowski, found dead in his garage. While spinning a clever and compelling mystery, Lippman takes readers on a full tour of the streets and neighborhoods of Charm City. She is the 2004 recipient of the Maryland Library Association Maryland Author Award. For a list of winners since 1996, visit www.mdlib.org/divisions/mdauthor/winners.asp.

Romance fans know that Nora Roberts sets many of her books in her native Maryland, including her Chesapeake Bay series (Sea Swept, Rising Tides, Inner Harbor, and Chesapeake Blue). Poised on the marshy edges of the bay, the novels follow the intertwined fates of the Quinn brothers and the women they love. Start with Sea Swept (the first book in The Quinn Brothers. Berkley. 2006. ISBN 978-0-425-20814-4. pap. $14), featuring bad boy Cameron Quinn who is forced to give up his playboy lifestyle and move back to the bay when his father dies unexpectedly.

Anne Tyler, known for her brilliant evocation of place, locates Back When We Were Grownups (Ballantine. 2004. ISBN 978-0-345-47724-8. pap. $7.50) in her familiar Baltimore cityscape—one she knows well and uses to full effect. Rebecca Davitch married into a family that ran a catering service in an aging, rambling house. When Rebecca's husband died young, she inherited the business as well as his three children from an earlier marriage and dedicated her life to making everyone around her happy. Now, watching the youngest child plan her wedding, Rebecca is beginning to wonder if this is the life she was meant to have. An encounter with her old college beau offers a chance to consider what might have been.

At the turn of the 20th century, Baltimore was known for steel manufacturing. Sparrows Point was the “company town” established by the Bethlehem Steel Company to house the thousands of steelworkers it employed. In Wives of Steel: Voices of Women from the sparrows point steelmaking communities (Penn State Univ. 2005. ISBN 978-0-271-02685-5. pap. $50), Karen Olson (anthropology and history, Community Coll. of Baltimore Cty.) relates the history of Sparrows Point from the perspectives of the wives whose lives changed dramatically with the fortunes of the steel industry. Olson's tales of mothers raising large families without electricity or plumbing are particularly affecting, and her book recaptures a particular, and now lost, part of the state.

Fans of nature writing will enjoy Barbara Hurd's Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination (Univ. of Georgia. 2008. ISBN 978-0-8203-3152-2. pap. $16.95). A naturalist and teacher of creative writing at Frostburg University in the mountains of western Maryland, Hurd writes poetically of time spent in the Cranesville Sub-Arctic Swamp in western Maryland and the Cypress Swamp in southern Maryland, bringing their landscapes vividly to life. Her essays speak of her love of small things, such as the swamp cabbage and the frogs plunking into the water. Readers will delight in the metaphors of eternal verities and visions told through tales of swamp gas and mud.

This column was contributed by Ada Woods, Marcella Fultz, and Denise Barker. Woods and Fultz are Librarians at Cook Library, Towson University, MD. Barker is retired from Cook Library