Virginia book notes

With the end of summer comes the promise of cooler, cloudy weather -- the perfect kind for curling up under a throw with some good fiction. Four authors provide some potential reads.

. . .

Josh Weil, a native of the Blue Ridge Mountains who divides his time between New York City and a cabin in rural Southwest Virginia, knows the hills and the border territories of the Old Dominion well.

So well, in fact, that he has chosen the mountains that straddle the border of Virginia and West Virginia for his debut, a collection of three linked novellas: The New Valley (352 pages, Grove Press, $22).

In "Ridge Weather," Osby Caudill tries to hold himself together after his father's suicide. "Stillman Wing" tells the story of an elderly, health-obsessed single father who lives with his spirited, obese daughter. And "Sarverville Remains" offers the tale of Geoffrey Sarver, a mildly mentally disabled, 30-year-old orphan who is locked into an affair with an older, married woman.

Weil is at work on a novel, and if these novellas are any indication, it will be one to anticipate with pleasure.

. . .

When San Francisco homicide detective John J. Lamb and his wife retired to Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, Lamb didn't leave his past life behind.

He began writing teddy-bearthemed mysteries -- the concept is cute, but the stories are proper whodunits -- and has just released his fifth, The Treacherous Teddy (305 pages, Berkley Prime Crime, $7.99), and it's another winner.

Protagonist Brad Lyon is a retired San Francisco homicide cop (art imitates life). He and his wife, Ashleigh, create teddy bears, and Ashleigh works as an auxiliary cop for the sheriff's department in fictional Massanutten County. This time out, local farmer Everett Rawlins is found dead with an arrow in his chest, and the list of suspects includes a neighbor couple with whom he was feuding, a poacher trespassing on his property, a wealthy Atlanta businesswoman and her 20-something boy toy.

Lamb writes with a profound knowledge of murder investigations and a wit that inclines toward puns and that will have you laughing and groaning. And bears abound -- the teddy variety and the real ones that roam Virginia's mountains. A police procedural with an original twist, "The Treacherous Teddy" puts the talented Lamb's skills on display on every page.

. . .

Central Virginia nanny Jennifer Erin Valent won the Christian Writers Guild's 2007 Operation First Novel contest for "Fireflies in December."

Her second novel, Cottonwood Whispers (350 pages, Tyndale House, $12.99), is a sequel to "Fireflies in December." This entry finds Jessilyn Lassiter and best friend Gemma Teague, who have survived prejudice and heartache, in the summer of 1936, when events threaten to tear them apart again.

Valent's historical novels focus on racial tensions in the South in the 1930s, and her books glow with her profound faith.

. . .

Romance and suspense often go together -- think Mary Higgins Clark -- but Kit Wilkinson adds a third factor, spirituality, in her debut novel, Protector's Honor (218 pages, Steeple Hill Books, $5.50).

When Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent Rory Farrell saves Tabitha Beaumont from abduction, he can't get her out of his mind and soon learns that Tabitha needs protection.

But how far can he go and still balance his professional and personal lives?

Wilkinson lives in Midlothian with her husband, their two children and what she calls an "extremely large" Labrador retriever named Ernie.

-- Jay Strafford