RIVERWALK BOOKS

The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett

I’d never heard of Annie Hartnett until last year. The Road to Tender Hearts came out with an endorsement from one of my favorite writers, John Irving, and it looked like the kind of book I’d enjoy: comical, offbeat, a road trip novel filled with quirky characters and wild incidents.

I didn’t get around to reading it though until this summer while I was on my own road trip with my daughters and my mom. We rollicked our way down the Oregon coast to the redwoods of California and back, and along the way I dove into Tender Hearts.

What a ride.

Hartnett focuses her story on PJ Halliday who at sixty-three suddenly becomes the legal guardian of his estranged brother’s grandchildren. Halliday’s life is a stunning contradiction. Years before he won the lottery and became a millionaire, but instead of making his life better it did little more than hollow him out. Along the way, his daughter died on her graduation night and his wife left him. Now here are these kids on his doorstep. He’s never met them and he feels overwhelmed at this new responsibility, but he also detects some faint whiff of redemption or hope or something.

And there’s more hopeful news. The girl he was in love with in high school is now single. Her husband died and the funeral is coming up and if Halliday can make it across the country to Arizona he can arrive in time for the funeral and propose to his high school sweetheart. Sure, it’s a bit morbid and more than a little presumptuous, but time waits for no one.

And so Halliday sets off with the kids and his adult daughter and a cat that can predict when people are going to die (yes, really).

The Road to Tender Hearts reminds me of certain quirky, offbeat movies: Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, or Sideways. Stories that weren’t afraid to embrace the weirdness of their characters. Stories that weren’t afraid to dig into characters with broken lives. Stories that didn’t offer pat answers for how to make your way out of the darkness and into the light.

I read Tender Hearts in hotel rooms. I read it by the ocean. I read it in the passenger seat of the car zipping down Highway 101. And time and again it made me laugh and made me pause for a moment to appreciate how excellent a writer Hartnett truly is.

This last year we’ve sold a whole lot of copies of uplifting novels like Theo of Golden and The Correspondent. But while people have focused on those books, they’ve often missed this one. I highly recommend you track down a copy. It is uplifting and moving in its own way and tremendously funny to boot.

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Thanks for reading, folks. Until next time.

Ciao,

Tyler Miller
Owner, Riverwalk Books

Good Books Lately: Daredevils by Shawn Vestal

Riverwalk Books — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:44:09 GMT

The city of Spokane, Washington and its surrounding regions have been home to more great writers than you realize. Butting right up against the long arm of Idaho, Spokane has been the backyard of Jess Walter (So Far Gone), Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian), John Keeble (Yellowknife), Terry Davis (Vision Quest), and many others.

Even I used to live there, but who’s keeping track, right?

If you’re a modern lit fan, you’ve probably come across Walter and Alexie. If you’re old enough, you may remember Keeble. And cultish movie fans likely recall the 80s flick Vision Quest, which was shot in Spokane and happened to be Madonna’s film debut.

But many of Spokane’s best writers have been either forgotten or overlooked. Including Shawn Vestal, columnist for the Spokesman Review and current professor at Eastern Washington University. In 2013, Vestal released one of the finest short story collections to come out of the PNW (Godforsaken, Idaho) and a few years later gave us the stunning first novel Daredevils.

My personal hot take on Vestal is that if he were a New Englander writing about rural Catholics he’d be a minor literary rock star. But he’s living on the wrong side of Washington State and writes about rural Mormons. Since the literary world revolves around New York City, this doesn’t win him any points in the Proper Circles.

Daredevils interweaves the lives of two Mormon teenagers circa 1975: Jason and Loretta. If, like me, your understanding of Mormonism is pretty sketchy, it’ll serve to simply understand that Jason is what you might think of as a Standard Everyday Mormon, while Loretta belongs to the Out There on the Fringe Mormons (apologies to any Mormon readers offended by the very broad brush I’m painting with here).

So what exactly does it mean to be Out There on the Fringe?

You Mormons. Loretta doesn’t think of herself — of her family, of Short Creek — as Mormon, exactly, although everyone here thinks of themselves as the only true Mormons. In her mind, Mormons were what they were before they came here seven years ago, Mormons were what they were when they lived in Cedar City, went to church on Main Street, the tan-brick wardhouse on a street with ordinary homes and a grocery store and a gas station. Mormons, she thinks, live in the real world, or at least closer to it. They had a television back then, and a radio in the kitchen. Her mother listened to country music. They dressed like real people, like worldly people — though, she knows, they were farmier and more country than Salt Lake City Mormons, the rich, blond Mormons, the ones you can barely tell are even Mormons at all. Mormons, she thinks, marry one person at a time.

It’s that last line that will be a stickler for fifteen-year-old Loretta, who after being caught sneaking out at night is married off to a man old enough to be her father, a man who already has a wife and seven children. Loretta’s family and the other believers of their faith view Celestial Marriage as part of God’s ultimate plan, a sacred obligation for both men and women.

Loretta, however, is skeptical.

Dean had blushed, his enormous ears luminous with blood, and though Loretta hardly knew him, and though she was just fifteen, she could see in his rabbity eyes that it wasn’t the celestial kingdom he had on his mind.

The wedding is blessed, though Dean promises to wait until Loretta turns sixteen before consummating their union.

Like Loretta, Jason feels constrained by his faith and family. He lives in Twin Falls, Idaho. His father is Dean’s brother. Years ago the family split when Dean moved to Arizona to follow a more extreme version of their faith. Jason isn’t nearly as unhappy with his existence as Loretta, but as he has gotten older he has begun to question the path his parents have laid out for him. What he really wants — like most teenagers — is just to get out, to be free, to live a life without the weight of the expectations of his mother and father and God.

For Jason, this yearning for freedom is summed up by his hero, Evel Knieval. While his parents tolerate his obsession, at the start of the novel they forbid him from going to see Knieval’s latest jump, this one over the Snake River. Despite their wishes, Jason’s grandfather sneaks him out to go watch the stunt, lying to Jason’s parents about where they are going.

Jason, like Loretta, is slowly discovering that the rules he thought were set in stone are more malleable than he believed. Or, rather, that they are bent to suit many of the very people who so fervently claim to believe in them.

Circumstances bring Jason and Loretta together. Dean moves his family to Idaho after his father dies, and the collision of these two strains of religious believers is about as happy as you’d imagine. In short order, Jason realizes he is infatuated with Loretta, and a clear plan of escape begins to coalesce in Loretta’s mind.

When the two finally ditch out, it’s no surprise (well, not to the reader anyway…Jason and Loretta’s respective parents are certainly caught off-guard).

Throughout the novel Vestal intersperses short chapters told from the point of view of Evel Knieval. They are compact speeches really, expounding upon the stuntman’s ideas about life and his career. Knieval himself will appear late in the novel, intersecting with Jason and Loretta after they hit the road.

In Knieval Vestal brings together two threads thrumming beneath the surface: the desire for freedom and the danger that desire poses. For Jason and Loretta, Knieval is the embodiment of their fantasies. Here is who you can be when you decide to do whatever you want whenever you want, consequences be damned.

But having embraced uninhibited freedom, Knieval has also become the flip side of the coin from Dean: a man spiraling in a whirlwind of hubris and self-worship. That Loretta is forced to sacrifice her virginity to Dean but willingly gives herself to Knieval hardly seems to make much difference. In either case, she is preyed upon by men whose twisted moralities have become justifications for taking their pleasures when and where they like.

As Knieval puts it at one point: It’s a fucked up world, America. Even the love is all wrong.

Vestal has crafted a compelling coming of age tale, one that weaves universal themes into a landscape not often written about by a major American writer. In the end, he asks us what we are to do with all this freedom we so badly want. After all, Jason and Loretta’s ancestors came West in search of greater freedom, and generations later their descendants feel utterly trapped.

If freedom isn’t the answer, then what is?

Years ago Bruce Springsteen said that when he wrote the song “Born to Run” he had put all these people in all these cars and set them off down the road. At the time he’d believed that was enough, but over the years he realized that freedom disconnected from any sort of community was a soulless existence. And so he decided that it wasn’t the endless open road his characters had really been searching for.

“What they were looking for,” Springsteen said, “was connection.”

Vestal’s characters can relate.

Shop Talk

“I’m opening a horror book store.”

I took a step back. The gentleman was about my height, maybe five years younger, thick through the chest with a burly looking beard and a bar band T-shirt. Not creepy, not even a little.

“Yeah, where at?” I asked him.

“Olympia.”

The state capitol. If anyplace needed a horror bookstore, that was it.

When you own a bookstore, you meet a lot of people in the industry. Writers, mostly, but also agents, editors, publicists and of course other bookstore owners. Booksellers are, on the whole, a pretty friendly bunch, willing to give of their time and expertise, willing to help make introductions and pass along contact information. There’s not that many of us, to be honest, so the whole thing has the vibe of some kind of exclusive underground club. The dodo probably felt the same way near the end.

“You’ve got a good selection of horror stuff here. More than I’d have guessed for a store this size.”

I tell him it’s been a love of mine since middle school and how at first we weren’t sure it’d be much of a seller when we took over the store but I was determined to have certain titles on the shelves even if they didn’t go anywhere. Stuff I loved. Stuff I’d have been excited about running into when I was younger.

“You’ve got Richard Laymon down here,” the guy said. “I don’t see much of his work in stores anymore.”

“Traveling Vampire Show is a fav,” I said. “Definitely tamer stuff for him though. Nobody gets torn apart until the very end.”

There is an older man and woman with Mr. Horror Store. They both nod. “It’s not nearly as gruesome as most of his work.”

I realize I’ve got three people in the store who’ve all read Richard Laymon. Not quite as rare as getting struck by lightning while being attacked by a shark, but in the same ballpark. Laymon is a wickedly talented and wholly unique writer, but he never seemed to catch on here in the States. I hear he’s better known in the UK. I’ll probably never have three Laymon fans in the building at the same time again.

“Got anything you’d recommend?” Mr. Horror Store asks.

Indeed I do.

I hand him a copy of Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying. “He’s better known for Rosemary’s Baby, but this is his first novel, and his best novel, and you can hold me to that. Not horror exactly, but a very dark thriller.”

We talk about the merits of James Herbert, another Brit who did alright stateside but was literally a legend on his home turf across the pond. I hand him a copy of David Hartwell’s anthology The Dark Descent.

“Best collection of horror stories I’ve ever seen. Hartwell has great taste. You get all the big names — King, Poe, Jackson, Lovecraft — but all kinds of gems you’ve never heard of. Honestly, this baby came out in the 90s. I can’t believe it’s still in print, but nobody carries it. I haven’t seen it in a bookstore in twenty years.”

He asks about how we order books, and I tell him he’d be better off setting up accounts directly with publishers. Discounts are better, as is the customer service. I mention Valancourt Press because they have great titles, a real find for horror nerds, as well as Design Studio Press, which puts out the most stunning editions of Lovecraft I’ve ever seen.

“Do you do only new books?”

“Basically. I’ve got a table here of used paperbacks, mostly stuff that appeals to older guys who dig those old Tom Clancy’s and Clive Cussler’s. If you can source them cheap enough, used books can pay off.”

I hand him a beat up copy of Joe Lansdale’s The Nightrunners. The old Tor edition. He gives it a glance and hands it back. Probably he should have bought it, as it’s going for $85 on the secondary market in good condition and I’ve got it priced at $4.99.

We talk a bit longer about boring industry stuff. I wish him well and give him our business card and tell him to shoot me any questions he has.

Selling books is a good business. By which I mean there are a lot of good people in it, a lot of passion and enthusiasm, a lot of care and attention and hope and joy. We’re an optimistic lot. We believe in books and reading and education and the free flow of information. We believe in the future (why else would you write anything down and pass it along).

In my book, the more of us the better.

Good Books Lately: How to Read Water by Tristan Gooley

Riverwalk Books — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:55:53 GMT

Now here’s a book that should be boring as hell. How to read water? If anything was going to be a snooze fest, this should be it. But instead of composing a literary anesthetic, Tristan Gooley has authored a manifesto to mankind’s curiosity and a treatise on the benefits of paying close attention to what’s happening around you. In an age where there’s an app for everything — and thus no need to deeply contemplate anything at all — Gooley shows us just how much we can learn if we turn our attention away from our screens and focus our gaze on the natural world.

While I have no problem with marking up a book, I am not a particularly dedicated underliner. I own a highlighter but can never find it unless I have no need for it. I don’t use colored tabs when I read. Margin notes? Please. I can’t write that small and even if I could I’m too damn wordy to make intelligible notations inside half an inch of white space.

All that said, from time to time I do find myself underlining passages. Usually sentences so striking I want to come back to them later and copy them down. Or random factoids so fascinating I want to be able to trot them back out later for my wife so I can give her further cause to question why she married me in the first place.

On rare occasions — when I’m reading someone like Loren Eiseley or Matthew Crawford — I actually end up reading with a pen in hand, because with some writers there’s just that much good shit to underline on every page.

That, my friends, is how I worked my way through How to Read Water: Clues & Patterns from Puddles to the Sea. I didn’t go into it expecting to do so, but there were too many interesting revelations to pass up.

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You’d think a book titled How to Read Water would mostly be about navigation. Not a seaman? Pass it by. But no. How to Read Water tackles navigation, but that is only part of Gooley’s vision. What the book is really about is what we can learn by close observation of water in all its incarnations.

That may indeed be out at sea, where reading water is essential to finding your way. But Gooley dives into much more than that. Here’s an incomplete list of chapter headings just to give you an idea:

How to See the Pacific in a Pond
Land Ripples
The Not So Humble Puddle
Rivers and Streams
Light and Water
The Sound of Water
Currents and Tides
Water at Night

Here’s a few things I underlined:

Rivers do not run straight for more than ten times their own width, which means that if you find one that does you are looking at evidence of human tinkering.

Ponder that a moment. Someone worked that bit of observation out mathematically and then had to apply it to river after river to confirm it. Ask yourself how long you’d need to study a river to even notice such a thing, and how many rivers you’d need to visit to be sure it was a universal truth and not just a oddity of, say, rivers in England.

In places where lots of gravel is deposited, a natural barrier is created that then deflects the river or stream. The interesting thing is that this happens according to certain definite rhythms. There will be an alternating combination of quick water and much slower water, and this always happens in a certain way. The quick patches are known, perhaps onomatopoetically, as ‘riffles’, and the slower areas are known as pools.

Again: imagine strolling along river after river, watching, noticing, measuring, guessing. When was the last time you paid such close attention to a body of water?

The distance that water can travel upward is influenced by a number of factors, including its purity — clean water rises higher than polluted water — but the main one is the size of the gaps between the particles. Water rises much higher in soils with fine round particles, like silts, than in coarse soils, like sandy ones. At extremes, water can rise very high in clay, but will hardly rise at all in gravel.

Perhaps that doesn’t sound like a very important nugget of information. But imagine you live along a river. As the rain falls, you may want to know whether or not the river is in danger of flooding, and understanding how water is absorbed by the soil surrounding the river is a critical factor in that calculation.

Suddenly, we’re drawing a straight line between observation and understanding and wisdom.

Ultimately, it is that line Gooley is tracing. How to Read Water isn’t an amusing collection of random facts. It is an exploration of how close observation can reveal aspects of the natural world and how we can use that knowledge to gain wisdom.

Working my way through How to Read Water, I was constantly reminded of how curious we are as a species, how hungry we are to understand reality, and how carefully we have studied space and time for thousands of years. Gooley brings together bodies of knowledge acquired over many, many generations from all around the world, all of it hard-earned by people with no access to modern technology.

Intense curiosity, careful observation, deep reflection. If wisdom were a tree, these are the roots feeding it, and all three seem in danger of withering in a world that now trusts their phone more than it trusts its own eyes.

Today we are more likely to snap a photo of nature and ask AI to tell us what the hell we’re seeing and what it means. We have outsourced critical thinking to algorithms and machines. Instead of being proud of our intellectual inheritance, we doubt ourselves at every turn, certain that Google knows better than we do.

Which is why How to Read Water — as well as Gooley’s other works like The Natural Navigator, How to Read a Tree, and The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs — feel so refreshing. They are a reminder of the incredible power of observation and reflection.

They are also a reminder of what we stand to lose when we focus our attention on our devices and ignore the natural world. Knowledge, after all, is not eternal. It can be lost. No one alive today knows for certain how the Great Pyramids were constructed. Theories abound, but the reality of their construction remains shrouded in doubt.

Here is Gooley on this very point in regards to the navigational wisdom of Pacific Islanders:

The Islanders had not fully appreciated the rarity of the knowledge they had in their possession and were allowing it to die out with the last generations who still practiced these skills. The old ways must have seemed futile in the face of the West’s technological prowess, even before GPS. The great irony was that this surge of Western interest rekindled an awareness within the Islanders that they had something not just special, but unique. Nowhere else on Earth was there such a rich repository of ancient nautical navigation techniques still alive and in use. The Islanders had fallen into the same trap as the West, of believing that because something has lost its value in terms of necessity, it has lost its value altogether. A renaissance was sparked, one culminating in organizations like the Pacific Voyaging Society, who continue to treasure and pass on the local skills and heritage.

And that, in the end, may be the most important point. It may no longer be necessary to know all kinds of things, but that does not mean the knowledge in and of itself — and the means of acquiring it — are simply without value. It is not necessary for me to know how to take pictures with actual film and develop them myself, but I am forever grateful to my high school photography teacher for teaching me those techniques.

I encourage everyone to start an Analogue Bookshelf in their home, a section of titles dedicated to the arcane world that existed before computers. Books about typewriters and stitching your own clothes. Guides on card games and collections of old maps. Volumes that remind us of where we’ve been and what we’ve learned and how we’ve applied that knowledge.

Books like How to Read Water.

Shop Talk

What the girl really wanted was a cannibal clown, and when she found him she squealed. Our store is pretty small, so you can basically hear any conversation going on anywhere in the building. Squeals of joy are hard to miss.

“It’s here! They have a copy!”

Few statements bring more immediate joy to a bookseller’s heart.

I was chatting with the girl’s mother at the counter, but now Mom cocked her head. Her daughter was on the far side of our shelves, in the fiction section. I assumed she’d landed on a copy of Jenny Han or Sarah Dessen, but you know, thirteen-year-old girls can surprise you.

“They’ve got a whole shelf of Stephen King back here!”

Indeed we do.

Now I’ll tell you something about Stephen King. He’s the only writer who draws readers across the entire spectrum: old, young, male, female, and everything in between. All socioeconomic classes. All backgrounds. He cuts across all of it. And in our store, the only time I see middle schoolers pawing through the adult fiction section is when they’re looking for Uncle Stevie.

That goes one of two ways. Either Mom is a true believer in letting kids follow their heart’s desire. Or she’s not.

The young girl came around the corner. She was wearing a hip-length dress the color of a robin’s egg and a smile. In her hands she held a small stack of books: IT, Salem’s Lot, Night Shift, We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Aside from the dress, she reminded me of myself at that age. She held up the pile like an offering and smiled even wider.

Her brother came trailing behind her. “Do you think I should read one? I’ve got to pick one for my book club.”

They looked roughly the same age, but the boy was probably older. In middle school, the girls shoot up a lot faster, while the boys tend to lag behind. Given their roughly equal height, he was probably a year or two ahead of her.

“That’s the one you want?” Mom asked, eyeing IT, which is thicker than a brick but much nicer to hold in your hands.

“I already saw the movies,” the girl said. “I know the book’s going to be even better.”

Mom didn’t blink. Didn’t argue. Didn’t drop a single hint about nightmares or “age appropriate material”. The world needs more mothers like this. Too often what I see in the store are parents who, through the best of intentions, try to steer their children away from what the kid really wants to read. The end result, obviously, is a series of tiny punctures in a child’s love of reading. That hissing sound you hear is passion escaping into the ether.

“You can get three,” Mom said. “Make sure you find the ones you want.”

Another squeal, and the girl whipped back around the corner. Her brother followed. A few minutes later they made their way back to the counter. The brother held in his hands a copy of Misery.

“I’m in a book club,” he explained. “Me and my friends. We pick a book and read it and then we get together and discuss it and watch the movie.”

I talk to a dozen book clubbers a day, but on the whole they’re women in their fifties and sixties. I tried to recall if I’d ever met a teenage boy who claimed to be in a book club. This was a first.

“You’re in for a treat,” I told him. “Stephen King said Misery was one of the five best books he’d ever written, and the movie’s not too shabby either.”

His sister had settled on IT, the Shirley Jackson and The Dead Zone. I was the same age when I first read King, and I can still recall the sensation of a whole wide world opening up, new vistas I hadn’t imagined before. You weren’t reading Goosebumps anymore, that was for sure. King, like all great writers, has a way of changing your perspective, burrowing inside you and enlarging your dreams.

And like every great writer, he can set you on the path to discovering a whole host of other amazing authors. It is through King that I came to John D. MacDonald, Don Robertson, HP Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, William Sloane, and so many others.

I rang them up and off they went, back out into the world, where I imagine things would never be quite the same again.

Good Books Lately: Lost Man's Lane by Scott Carson

Riverwalk Books — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:40:19 GMT

Here’s a pop quiz question for you: what do Lee Child, Stephen King, Stewart O’Nan, Robert Dugoni, William Kent Kruger, Dean Koontz, Joe Hill, Lisa Unger, Harlan Coben, Kevin Powers, Ron Carlson, Ridley Pearson, Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly, Dan Simmons, and George Pelecanos all have in common?

They’re all fans of Scott Carson.

Except Scott Carson isn’t a real person. It’s the pen name of Michael Koryta. Under his own name he publishes thriller novels, and under his pseudonym he writes supernatural tales that hedge into Stephen King territory but without the same go-for-broke gore of King’s more disturbing works.

Now I’ve been reading Koryta for over fifteen years or so, and in all that time I’ve stood by my assessment that his finest novel was The Prophet, a wicked 2012 mystery novel set in a small town not all that different from Chelan where I grew up. Every new Koryta book that came out I’d snatch up and devour, and they were always excellent. But still The Prophet stayed at the top of my list.

Until now.

I can say unreservedly that Lost Man’s Lane is Koryta’s best book. Not just that. It’s the best novel I’ve read so far this year, and at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I’ll further add that it’s one of the finest novels I’ve read. Ever.

As Jerry O’Connell’s character says in Stand By Me: sincerely.

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At the heart of Lost Man’s Lane is sixteen year old Marshall Miller, our narrator looking back from middle age. As the novel opens, Marshall is getting his driver’s license, an achievement that turns sour when he is pulled over five minutes into his very first solo drive.

Hey, we’ve all been there.

Marshall’s encounter with the police will color his life forever. The officer who pulls him over identifies himself as Corporal Maddox. At first the interaction is merely fraught with the usual tension, but it quickly turns unsettling. When Maddox implies that he may not file the ticket he has written Marshall — thus letting the kid off with a kind of heavy-handed warning — Marshall thanks the officer.

“Did I say you have a second chance? I said sometimes I forget to file the paperwork with the court. I made no fucking promise of it…you make assumptions,” he said. “That’s a dangerous way to live, Mr. Miller. It is a better way to die.”

Maddox’s attitude and language are disturbing enough, but what troubles Marshall even more is the teenage girl he can see clearly in the back of Maddox’s patrol car. The girl is crying and appears more than a little frightened.

Later, Marshall will see the girl again. On a MISSING poster.

Her name Meredith Sullivan. She is nineteen. Five foot six, one-hundred-twenty-five pounds. And she has disappeared.

Bad enough. But when Marshall reports what he saw to the authorities, things only get worse. Neither the local police nor any of the county or state authorities have an Officer Maddox in their employment. Whoever pulled Marshall over was only impersonating a cop, and there is utterly no trace of evidence to his real identity.

The vanishing of Meredith Sullivan will alter the direction of Marshall’s life. It will lead him into the employ of Noah Storm, a private investigator searching for the missing teen. It will make Marshall a local celebrity for a time — his sighting of Meredith is the only lead in the case — and eventually turn him into a local pariah when his further encounters with the mysterious Maddox are dismissed as publicity-seeking stunts.

To get at the truth, Marshall will need to dig deep into the past, not only of his hometown but also of his own family. The two histories, and what really happened to Meredith Sullivan, are of course intertwined (this is a novel, after all).

Now my idea of a great suspense novel isn’t complicated, but it does set a high bar. I want genuinely captivating characters who behave in realistic ways. I want twists and turns that aren’t telegraphed a mile away. I want writing that is clear and doesn’t insult my intelligence or waste my time. I want suspense that feels earned rather than manufactured by the author.

Too many suspense writers today set out to zip their story from Point A to Point B, then zag it hurriedly along to Point C, all the while hustling the reader with a tired bag of tricks: cliffhanger chapter endings, scenes that start in the middle of the action, horrifying sequences that turn out to be dreams, etc. It’s not the tricks themselves that are the problem. It’s that too many writers confuse the tricks for genuine suspense, opting for the lazy path instead of crafting credible characters who behave like real human beings and then putting them in harm’s way.

Koryta has always been good at creating characters, but in Lost Man’s Lane he goes an extra mile. In the past he has written many taut, compact thrillers. Here he gives the narrative plenty of runway, trusting in his ability to blend scenes of menacing suspense with engaging sequences of everyday life.

And while the suspense is legit, in the end it is the everyday hurdles Marshall faces that make the novel so memorable. Coming of age stories work when the author reminds us of the universal nature of growing up: making friends, falling in love, coming to grips with new responsibilities, recognizing our own mortality and the mortality of those we love. Koryta pulls this off beautifully.

In addition, he captures the era of his story — it’s set in 1999 — vividly. He mixes in music and movies from the time period well, but that’s just low-hanging fruit. Where Koryta really goes the distance is in nailing the mood of the end of the millennium, one tinged with fear (remember the Y2K hysteria…ugh) but also, in retrospect, oddly innocent.

Take his handling of the Columbine shooting, which Marshall and his friends watch on TV and react to.

Her father turned off the television and then looked back at us. His face had that same stricken angst we’d seen from Mr. Doig. Jerry Flanders was desperate to make it better. We were kids; we shouldn’t have to see this tragedy. Out in Littleton, Colorado, they were kids; they shouldn’t have to live through this tragedy.

Or die in it.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Jerry said in a voice that sought the ring of authority but couldn’t find it, “it’ll never happen again. Not in a school. Not after this one. We will not let this shit happen again.”

He was grim and sincere and we believed him. The bodies of children lay in their cooling blood inside a high school library, and police in an armored truck tended to a boy who had a bullet lodged in his brain, and it was the United States of America in the year 1999, and, yes, we absolutely believed that people with power would make it stop.

Those were different times. You couldn’t fool today’s kids the same way.

Stephen King once said his aim was to write novels that readers would refuse to put down. Kids hollering at you that you haven’t made dinner? Too bad. Wife’s out for hours with the hot young tennis pro? Who cares? House is literally on fire? Hey, just a few more pages till the end of the chapter.

Lost Man’s Lane is that kind of novel. It is suspenseful and captivating, and at its center is a story about love and growing up, friendship and loyalty, and coming to grips with who you are and who you want to become. It’s the kind of novel you don’t want to put down, and the kind of novel that forces you to put it down every now and then because you’re simply in awe of what the author is pulling off.

My hat’s off to Mr. Koryta, who has never been in finer form.

In a better world, there’d be no school shootings, and Michael Koryta would be selling millions of books a year.

As always, we greatly appreciate if you support local independent bookstores when purchasing your books. You can click the links on this page and they will take you to our partners: Bookshop.org and Libro.fm. Any purchase you make through those links will support our store, Riverwalk Books.

Thank you and happy reading.

Shop Talk

A group of Mormon boys came into the store the other day. I say boys. They’re all young men. Early twenties. Six of them from down Brewster and Bridgeport way.

“They put us all out here because we can all speak Spanish,” one of them tells me, thin and shorter than the rest of his missionary brothers. “I’m from Michigan originally.”

They’re a literate bunch, hovering around the classics table trading notes on Dante’s Inferno and the merits of The Count of Monte Cristo. For a while I talk with the tallest of them, a serious looking blond kid who paws through our Philosophy section. We take a broad approach to the word philosophy in our store, so this section plays home to everything from Marcus Aurelius to The Book of Common Prayer. Personally, I like to think of a school that employs both the Buddha and Seneca and nobody has a problem with it.

“What would you recommend?” the blond kid asks me.

I point him towards Thomas Merton, that old Trappist monk with a mind as sharp as Hattori Hanzo steel.

“Try Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” I tell him. “You really can’t go wrong with Merton, but that’s the best place to start, where you can see his mind whirring along. A local pastor turned me onto that one.”

“I’m not Catholic,” the blond skeptically.

“Neither am I. I sell that one to Protestants and atheists as often as I sell it to Catholics.”

He still seems skeptical, but he gives it a look. Meanwhile I venture back over to talk to Michigan.

“You read Cormac McCarthy?” he asks me.

“I’m partial to his early novels. Outer Dark is brilliant. But, you know…dark.”

He mentions he read The Road in school. I give him a second look. He can’t possibly mean college. He’s barely old enough to stroll legally into a bar (assuming a Mormon missionary had such an inclination).

“In high school?”

“Yeah. My teacher loved the book but hated the movie.”

I try to wrap my mind around a high school curriculum that includes The Road.

“Where’d you say you went to school?”

“Michigan.”

For a moment I flash back to that scene in Field of Dreams, Ray Liotta asking Kevin Costner if this is heaven. “No,” Costner replies. “It’s Iowa.”

We live in an era where people are banning everything from Where the Sidewalk Ends to The Wizard of Oz, and yet somewhere in the outlands of Michigan there’s a English teacher who, as the kids say these days, understands the assignment. The Road being read by juniors in high school. Lord in heaven.

Our conversation wraps around a few more classics, and Michigan mentions he’d like to try One Hundred Years of Solitude in the original Spanish. I tell him I sold a Spanish edition a few months back to a true blue eighty-year-old Mexican cowboy working out in Brewster.

Eventually the missionaries pack it up and head out. They don’t buy anything, but it was good conversation all the same. Left me with a story to tell and thoughts to ponder about how in spite of what we’re always reading in the headlines, things aren’t as dark as we’re led to believe.

Independent Bookstore Day

Riverwalk Books — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:18:40 GMT

Saturday April 25th, 2026 is Independent Bookstore Day.

Here at Riverwalk Books, we will be having a Grab Bag Sale to celebrate. There will be a bag with various discounts inside. If you swing by the store, you’ll get a chance to snag one of the discounts out of the bag: 10%, 15%, 20%, who knows? Then you can apply that discount to your entire purchase of anything and everything in the store.

Or maybe you have your heart set on a book that we don’t have in stock? No problem. Come in and pick out a discount, and we’ll order your book and you can apply your discount right then when you order.

Here are some titles we’re recommending right now on our Staff Picks Shelf:

Lost Man’s Lane is the best novel I’ve read so far this year…by a mile. Carson is the pen name of Michael Koryta, one of the best writers working in the country today. For years I’ve been saying his thriller The Prophet is his best book, but Lost Man’s Lane has knocked it off the pedestal. I don’t think I’ll read a better book all year.

Self-help and wellness isn’t usually my cup of tea, but Ikigai is succinct, to the point and doesn’t get lost in the weeds. I often feel like this is what all self-help and wellness books should aim for, since most could honestly be reduced to a pamphlet but have been blown up to 300 pages to justify the cover price. Ikigai bucks the trend and is stronger for it.

Love apocalyptic dystopia? Already done 1984 and Fahrenheit 451? Then check out this baby. Pat Frank wrote one of the finest post apocalypse novels on record, the tale of a community dealing with the fallout of all-out nuclear war. Alas, Babylon had a significant influence on Stephen King’s writing of The Stand, another masterpiece about the end of the world. This one shouldn’t be missed.

People often say the last time they remember this country all being on the same page was after 9/11. I disagree. Even in those dark days people were ideologically opposed about what to do in the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers. For my money, the last time Americans really came together was the homerun race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa (after which baseball basically came undone due to steroid scandals). The Ball breaks down that chase but focuses primarily on how actual baseballs are made, how those homerun balls became worth small fortunes, and how catching those balls changed the lives of the people who took them home. This is a short, swift read, but you’ll learn an incredible amount of wonderfully fascinating details about America’s favorite pastime.

I’ve been a Bourdain fan for a long time, and this may be the best way to get introduced to his writing. This collection brings together work from the entire span of his career, showing off a multitude of talents. Bourdain wrote about food, of course, but he also wrote crime novels, graphic novels, travel essays, and a range of pieces about life in America’s restaurant kitchens. Bourdain wasn’t a cook who happened to write. He was a true American writer who happened to work as a chef.

Hope to see you Saturday!

Ciao,

Tyler Miller
Owner, Riverwalk Books

Good Books Lately: Uncool Ghosts

Riverwalk Books — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:32:37 GMT

Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta

The first novel by Tom Perrotta I ever read was Little Children. This would have been 2011, years after it came out. I was visiting my in-laws for the first time, and I’d brought it along with Stewart O’Nan’s Songs for the Missing. Neither is a cheery read.

But both authors have remained on the short shelf of my favorite writers ever since.

As it happens, I wrote Perrotta an email after finishing the book. I told him I’d enjoyed it immensely and given it to my girlfriend, who also read it and loved it. He was gracious enough to write back.

Fast forward fifteen years. Stef and I are now married. We’ve got two kids, and Perrotta has a new book out at the end of this month: Ghost Town.

The novel focuses on Jimmy Perrini and his coming of age in the 1970s in New Jersey. Perrotta bounces between timelines, offering the occasional chapter from the point of view of Jimmy as an adult, but the vast majority of the novel revolves around him as a thirteen-year-old kid coming to terms with his mother’s untimely death.

It’s fairly common for coming of age novels to span a single summer. Michael Chabon did it with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Fitzgerald did it with The Great Gatsby. Ditto Philip Roth with Goodbye, Columbus. Perrotta tackles that same timeline, squeezing a heavy dose of emotional maturation into the months between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Perrotta is he’s deceptively easy to read for a literary novelist. He doesn’t burden his prose with complex syntactical structures or a pretentious lack of quotation marks. He doesn’t beat you with arcane language that would baffle even a literature professor. No, Perrotta keeps his writing uncluttered by linguistic pyrotechnics, favoring instead clarity and concision.

Like this here:

That might not have been so remarkable if they’d been living in northern Idaho or the cornfields of Nebraska, but Creamwood was just a half hour from Manhattan and only fifteen minutes from Newark, still smoldering from the riots of 1967. Jimmy’s dad was a union welder in a sheet metal yard; his neighbors were mail carriers and assembly-line workers and auto mechanics and secretaries. There were probably lots of Black people who did those same kinds of jobs who would have been happy to live in Creamwood, but they weren’t welcome. They could work in the gypsum factor or the supermarket or the freeze-drying plant, but they couldn’t buy a home or rent an apartment in town. They couldn’t even stroll through the quiet streets after dark without being treated to a friendly chat with a police officer.

While race isn’t the central focus of the novel, it thrums in the background like an off-key tenor in a crowded choir whose voice cuts in and out and grates against your ear. But Perrotta keeps his eye primarily upon how Jimmy confronts his mother’s death and the way his family begins to unravel once she’s out of the picture.

Perrotta offers a complicated picture of the picturesque Creamwood, a happy little suburb of middle class families. Like most places, the surface is shiny but there are cracks just underneath: Eddie, a teenage dropout who takes Jimmy under his wing, aimlessly cruising the backstreets in his powder blue Chevy Vega; Leonard, who for a price will sell you a dime bag of weed along with your crispy McDonald’s fries; Mr. Kaz, one of Creamwood Middle School’s favorite teachers who never recovered from his brother’s death in Vietnam.

And what’s a coming of age story without a burgeoning romance? Olivia is two years older than Jimmy, widely considered to be the smartest girl in Creamwood’s history, and seems intent on broadening Jimmy’s carnal knowledge.

But in an interesting twist, it’s a different bit of knowledge Olivia introduces to Jimmy that plays a bigger role than sex: how to use a Ouija board.

Ghost Town isn’t a spooky book, and the ghosts that linger in Creamwood are fairly banal, at least if you’re expecting something out of Stephen King. Instead of trotting them out for scares, Perrotta sprinkles a bit of ghostly seasoning the way a chef might sprinkle an overpowering spice. Just a touch here and there, enough to flavor the narrative with questions about how we go on living when those we love have passed on, and how we learn to internalize their love and expectations once they are no longer with us.

In interviews Perrotta said he started writing Ghost Town after returning to his hometown to live with his mother while she was ill. She died during the course of the composition. I don’t truck with the idea that fiction is always autobiographical, that we should always be looking for parallels between the work and the writer. In my view, that shows little more than a serious lack of imagination on the part of the reader.

That said, it’s hard not to feel that Perrotta channeled his own mother’s absence into the writing of Ghost Town, which swirls around the gap created by Jimmy’s mother’s death.

This is a fine novel by one of America’s best writers. I wouldn’t miss it.

If you want to get the book, check out the links below to our partners. If you select Riverwalk Books when you checkout, we will receive the profits.

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The Uncool by Cameron Crowe

If I’d been born in 1957 instead of 1983, I’d have wanted Cameron Crowe’s life.

You can keep the later filmmaker era. It’s Crowe’s teen years I want, the period where he bummed around the country watching some of the greatest rock n roll bands in history, interviewing everyone from Gregg Allman to Ronnie Wood, and became the youngest ever contributor to Rolling Stone magazine.

At fifteen.

Yeah, you read that right. Fifteen years old. By sixteen, he had his name on the cover. Sincerely.

Could this even be accomplished today? I doubt it. Any parent letting their high schooler ditch class to hang out with rock stars would almost certainly be reported to CPS today. And what band in our social media soaked world would ever let a fanboy journalist pal around with them on the road?

The Uncool, Crowe’s memoir of his youth, vividly captures a rock n roll industry in transition. The rebellious roots of the Sixties were in the rearview. Onward was the era of rock n roll as vehicle for getting filthy stinking rich.

As Crowe quotes the great rock critic Lester Bangs:

“Don’t make friends with the rocks stars. They’ll ruin you. The publicists will ruin you. You gotta remember. They’re all trying to use us to play up the glory of rock stars, and it will kill rock and everything we love about it. I’m telling ya, it’s going to get ugly. They’re gonna buy you drinks. You’re gonna meet girls. They’re gonna fly you places for free, offer drugs. It’ll seem like fun, but these people are not your friends. These are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of rock stars. And they will ruin rock and roll and strangle everything we love about it, right?”

I’ll let you decide if Bangs was ultimately right about where rock music was heading, but he certainly was right about Crowe’s life. Everything he predicted happened, although Crowe managed to come through mostly unscathed, probably because he kept saying no to all the cocaine and was simply too fumbling and naive (by his own admission) to hook up with all the ladies on the road.

Where he did excel though was in getting people to open up to him. The list of his interviews is like a guest list at a Rock N Roll Hall of Fame banquet: Allman, David Bowie, Todd Rundgren, Ronnie Van Zandt, Pete Townshend, Jim Croce, Van Morrison, Jerry Garcia, Graham Parsons, Kris Kristofferson, Joni Mitchell…the list goes on and on.

What’s more, so many of his interviewees were notorious for never speaking to the press, and yet they opened up to this baby-faced kid from California. And it wasn’t just that he got them to share intimate secrets. He was also a top shelf writer, a journalist who churned out work at an early age for Creem, Rolling Stone and an array of newspapers around the country.

If you love rock n roll in general and seventies rock in particular, you’re going to enjoy this book. Crowe focuses most of his recollection on his youth and how rock music shaped his life. If you’re looking for a penetrating examination of his life as a filmmaker, that honestly gets little attention in this book.

Some memoirs leave you broken by the difficult life the author has overcome: Townie by Andre Dubus III or A Bookshop in Berlin by Francoise Fenkel. Others are infectious because of the wonderful life the author has led: Life Itself by Roger Ebert or West With the Night by Beryl Markham.

The Uncool falls into the latter category. Wonderfully written, infectious, and filled with one dazzling life story.

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