Books Set in Washington
Our journey through the 50 states continues with a stop in Washington!
Book Club Pick – Washington
Later On We’ll Conspire by Kortney Keisel
What is Later On We’ll Conspire about?
Everyone loves a Christmas surprise––just not when it’s a spy in disguise.
Lacee: I’ll be home for Christmas…alone was the plan, but everything changes when I bump into a handsome stranger who always seems to be in the right place at the right time. So there’s a new plan, a plan that involves a casual holiday fling. Merry Christmas to me.
But spending the holidays with Park Bradshaw in my charming hometown turns into Mission Impossible when I find out his knife skills go way beyond carving the Christmas ham.
Now I’m on the run, living out my own Christmas version of Die Hard, where making it home in time for Christmas is the least of my worries. I just want to make it home alive ––and hopefully not lose my heart to the one man I’m not sure I can trust.
Because as the countdown to Christmas ticks on like a bomb, I’m left wondering which side he’s on.
Kortney Keisel on Literary Escapes Podcast
Want to know more about Kortney and her books? Listen to this conversation on the Literary Escapes Podcast!
coming 12/5
More Sweet Reads Set in Washington
Enjoy this additional selection of books set in Washington, featuring cozy mystery, contemporary and women’s fiction, and Christian romance. Perfect for easy reading, these delightful tales promise happy, hopeful endings.
Which one will you choose for a literary escape to Washington?
Secrets of Sunbeams by Valerie Comer
Genre: Christian Romance
She’s lost her parents and sisters, and no one is going to threaten what she has left: her goat. He’s ready to save the world; if only his neighbor and her goat wouldn’t intrude on his time and space. Can urban farming and romance shine on the same city block?
Eden Andrusek knows she should have fixed her fence last week. It’s too bad her runaway goat makes a less-than-ideal first impression on her new neighbor, who turns out to be cute, brilliant… and a little uptight.
Solar architect Jacob Riehl is furious when he returns outside to find a goat eating his presentation. As someone who likes everything in its place, he has little sympathy for a farm animal in the city or its tattooed owner, but there’s something about the lovely Eden that captures his attention.
What will it take to win over a man whose only pet was a goldfish? And how long can Jacob and Eden go without addressing the goat in the room?
Under the Christmas Lights by Ivory Fields
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
She turned the family hotel into their town’s star attraction. Now somebody’s trying to destroy it.
When Birgit Strauss and her two sisters inherit a beautiful authentic German hotel in the mountains of Washington State, the enterprising trio leave the family vineyard and switch grapes for guests – and they quickly transform the hotel into an unrivaled tourist hotspot.
But things quickly take a sour turn. Haunted by a strange series of mysterious happenings and missing deliveries, Birgit begins to suspect that someone is out to sabotage them. Determined to unmask the culprit and protect the reputation they worked so hard to build, she recruits the help of Christopher O’Patrick – a real-life mountain man and new arrival to town.
On the cusp of a historic festival and with the holiday season fast approaching, the pair begin to unravel the unusual occurrences that are hounding her hotel. But love is in the air, and Birgit begins to wonder whether she’ll find Christopher under the mistletoe…
Can Birgit and her sisters save their hotel from a would-be saboteur? And how will Birgit deal with the budding romance that has swept into town like a winter storm?
Recipe for a Charmed Life by Rachel Linden
Genre: Women’s Fiction
American chef Georgia May Jackson has one goal—to run her own restaurant in Paris. After a grueling decade working in Parisian kitchens, she is on the cusp of success. But in one disastrous night, Georgia loses her sous-chef position, her French boyfriend, and her sense of taste! Renowned for her refined palate and daring use of bold flavors to create remarkable dishes, Georgia is devastated to discover her culinary gift has simply…vanished.
When she receives a surprising invitation from her estranged mother, Georgia flees to a small island near Seattle hoping the visit will help her regain her spark in the kitchen. As she tentatively reconnects with her mom, a free-spirited hippie eager to make up for her past mistakes, Georgia realizes there is something about the enigmatic island she just cannot piece together. Good luck charms start appearing in the oddest places. Her neighbor is a puzzlingly antagonistic (and annoyingly handsome) oyster farmer. And her mom keeps hinting at a mysterious family legacy.
With the clock ticking and time running out to win her dream job in Paris, Georgia begins to unravel some astonishing secrets that make her wonder if the true recipe for a charmed life might look—and taste—very different than she ever imagined.
Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple
Genre: Women’s Fiction
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect; and to 15-year-old Bee, she is her best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette vanishes. It all began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette’s intensifying allergy to Seattle — and people in general — has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.
To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, and secret correspondence — creating a compulsively readable and surprisingly touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.
Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah
Genre: Women’s Fiction
In the turbulent summer of 1974, Kate Mularkey has accepted her place at the bottom of the eighth-grade social food chain. Then, to her amazement, the “coolest girl in the world” moves in across the street and wants to be her friend. Tully Hart seems to have it all―beauty, brains, ambition. On the surface they are as opposite as two people can be: Kate, doomed to be forever uncool, with a loving family who mortifies her at every turn. Tully, steeped in glamour and mystery, but with a secret that is destroying her. They make a pact to be best friends forever; by summer’s end they’ve become TullyandKate. Inseparable.
So begins Kristin Hannah’s magnificent new novel. Spanning more than three decades and playing out across the ever-changing face of the Pacific Northwest, Firefly Lane is the poignant, powerful story of two women and the friendship that becomes the bulkhead of their lives.
From the beginning, Tully is desperate to prove her worth to the world. Abandoned by her mother at an early age, she longs to be loved unconditionally. In the glittering, big-hair era of the eighties, she looks to men to fill the void in her soul. But in the buttoned-down nineties, it is television news that captivates her. She will follow her own blind ambition to New York and around the globe, finding fame and success . . . and loneliness.
Kate knows early on that her life will be nothing special. Throughout college, she pretends to be driven by a need for success, but all she really wants is to fall in love and have children and live an ordinary life. In her own quiet way, Kate is as driven as Tully. What she doesn’t know is how being a wife and mother will change her . . . how she’ll lose sight of who she once was, and what she once wanted. And how much she’ll envy her famous best friend. . . .
For thirty years, Tully and Kate buoy each other through life, weathering the storms of friendship―jealousy, anger, hurt, resentment. They think they’ve survived it all until a single act of betrayal tears them apart . . . and puts their courage and friendship to the ultimate test.
Buried In a Good Book by Tamara Berry
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Bestselling thriller writer Tess Harrow is almost at the end of her rope when she arrives with her teenage daughter at her grandfather’s rustic cabin in the woods. She hopes this will be a time for them to heal and bond after Tess’s recent divorce, but they’ve barely made it through the door when an explosion shakes the cabin. Suddenly it’s raining fish guts and…is that a human arm?
Tess was hardly convincing Gertie that a summer without Wi-Fi and running water would be an adventure. Now she’s thrust into a murder investigation, neighbors are saying they’ve spotted Bigfoot in the woods near her cabin, and the local sheriff is the spitting image of her character Detective Gabriel Gonzales—something he’s less than thrilled about. With so much more than her daughter’s summer plans at stake, it’s up to Tess to solve this case before anyone else gets hurt.
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