By Frank E. Baker (alaskaverse.com, $20)
The blurb: Baker says the reason he wrote these "ruminations for tent-bound days and nights," which include photos of his Alaska wilderness destinations and maps showing where the poem is set, "is that I deeply love the land and am relentlessly haunted by it. When I refer to a high mountain top or deep valley, I have, in most instances, physically been there."
Excerpt: "In Eagle River
cars wait at traffic lights.
Carrs' clerks bag groceries.
Rich aromas from Jitters cofffee shop
waft across
the mud-puddled parking lot
into the thick spring air.
Deep in the mountains,
at the end of the valley,
crystallized silence
sparkels in the sun.
The Art of Making Money
By Jason Kersten (Gotham Books, $26)
The blurb: By his early 20s, Art Williams was running off hundred-dollar bills at a secret printing press... arriving at a bill so perfect that even law enforcement had difficulty distinguishing it from the real thing. Spending his fake money as quickly as he could print it but still unsatisfied, he dropped everything to track down his long-lost father in the wilds of Alaska, setting in motion a chain of betrayals that would be his undoing.
Excerpt: "A few days later, Senior and Anice visited Vicki and Jim Shanigan, their friends from Wasilla, the latter of whom was also senior's partner in the pot and OxyContin operation. ... Since Wasilla was as comparatively populated as Chickaloon, and closer to Anchorage, Jim covered the distribution end of their drug business, dealing much of their product to local Native American tribes. .... Shanigan was a licensed bush pilot who owned a float plane, meaning that he could fly them to far-flung destinations in Alaska, Canada, and theoretically, even to eastern Russia, where they could pass or sell counterfeit at a safe distance from their home."
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