Missouri Life June 2023

BOOKS

Mailboxes and Mysteries Take a summer trip inside these pages.

HAS THE MAIL GONE OUT YIT? Patricia Wallace Birkhead, 317 pages, nonfiction, self-published, softcover, (6 by 9 inches), $14.99. This book purportedly presents tales of a rural mail carrier in Missouri, but it’s really a slice of what rural life in Missouri was like from 1882 to 1959. In her

The author explores the history, legends, investigations, and more in six chapters, and the final one reveals what the spook light actually is. Will that revelation delight or dismay aficionados of the legend?

SEE PRESIDENT MCKINLEY OR DIE TRYING, Fedora Amis, 354 pages, fiction, Mardon Moore Books, softcover, (6 by 9 inches), $19.95. The Chesterfield author continues her Jemmy Mc Bustle mystery series with cub reporter Jemmy going un dercover in an insane asylum in a bid to come up with a

first novel, the author, who lives in San Antonio, relies on multiple visits to Steele to interview people who knew her grandfather, hear stories, and soak up both the language and the culture that existed in the first half of the 20th century. She completes a mission her father and grandfather had long talked about by delivering on her grandfa ther’s belief that “There’s a story behind every mailbox.” It’s an en tertaining read, with 24 chapters, but inexplicably, no page numbers. THE OZARKS SPOOK LIGHT: HISTORY, LEGEND, AND SPECU LATION, Larry Wood, 100 pages, nonfiction, Hickory Press, soft cover, (6 by 9 inches), $9.99. A mysterious light appears at night on a lonely road near the Oklahoma-Missouri line five miles south of the Kansas border. In its early days, it was known as the Hornet Spook Light because of the nearby town.

story that will let her keep her job at a St. Louis newspaper. It’s 1898, but a patient wrongly committed by her husband has now truly lost track of reality and time and thinks it’s 1886. She is determined to escape and convince President McKinley, whom she believes to be in St. Louis for a political convention, that she’s not insane. Jemmy must deal with a possible murder, a handsome doctor, a gangly newspaper photographer, her meddling aunt, and a young cousin nicknamed Horrible Heathcliff the Hellion. The author won the Mayhaven Literary Award for fiction for her Victorian whodunit, Jack the Ripper in St. Louis , the first Jemmy McBustle mystery.

THE PUBLISHERS

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