Fall from Grace, by Richard North Patterson, Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, NY, March 2012, 278 pages (hardcover, $26.00).
Chilmark is home base in Richard North Patterson’s newest novel, Fall from Grace. “I’ve long wanted to write a novel set on Martha’s Vineyard, my summer home for almost two decades now,” Mr. North Patterson writes in the book’s afterword.
Lighthouse Santa
Sara Hoadland Hunter and Julia Miner, the writer and illustrator team behind The Lighthouse Santa will give a reading at the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore in Vineyard Haven on Thursday, Dec. 15, at 5 p.m.
Cynthia Riggs, daughter of Dionis Coffin Riggs, has immortalized her mother as the 92-year-old sleuth Victoria Trumbull of a popular Island mystery series. Riggs, the younger, has penned ten of these novels so far, the title of each one inspired by the name of a poisonous, or at least sinister, flower, such as Deadly Nightshade and The Paperwhite Narcissus.
Before probing the outer reaches of our galaxy, alien hunters would be well-advised to turn their telescopes around, training them on Earth’s own cephalopods instead. The group of animals includes squid, octopus, cuttlefish and nautiluses and were seemingly jury-rigged by evolution, armed with suction cups, beaks, ink, jet propulsion, camouflage and an intelligence entirely unlike our own.
Author Chip Bishop’s great-great-uncle, Joseph Bucklin Bishop, was a newspaper editor during the time of Theodore Roosevelt. One of the stories he covered was the construction of the Panama Canal, the transoceanic canal that today seems a foregone conclusion but at the time was considered by many to be a fool’s errand.
Islanders will have a say in selecting the first Martha’s Vineyard Poet Laureate.
Year-round poets must submit five poems of any genre, style or form. A jury of judges will read all submissions, and nominate five finalists. The winning five poets must be willing to participate in a public reading that will be videotaped and distributed on the Martha’s Vineyard Poetry Society’s Facebook page; MVTV; YouTube and through other Island media and agencies.