This is a true story from an old Yankee magazine that has always haunted me. Although there is no violence in this story, it involves a lost child, so don't read it if that is disturbing to you. Even now, four years later, Ron and Jill Newton will sometimes let their minds drift back and silently relive that Labor Day weekend, hour by hour, trying to snatch it all back and hold it still at 10:00 A.M. Sunday, August 31,1975. It had been a grand weekend, camping with their children, Kimberly, age six, and Kurt, age four, and three other families from their home in Manchester, Maine. Natanis Point Campground was small and remote, its fifty-eight sites cut from a paper-company forest 1,300 feet above sea level in Chain of Ponds, a wilderness township six miles below the Canadian border at Coburn Gore. Campers fished from two ponds that were deep and cold. When a fisherman landed a salmon from the small wooden bridge below the thread of beach, he would yelp with pleasure and a crowd would gather. Mountains loomed over the ponds, and when at night a loon wailed and the forest pressed close on all sides, you knew you were away. That Friday the Newtons arrived first. It was their first trip with the recently acquired secondhand tent trailer, what Jill called "our luxury." They gathered wood along an abandoned logging road nearly a mile from their campsite. "It isn't camping without a bonfire," Kurt said happily. On Saturday their friends arrived, and Kimberly raced her bicycle through mud puddles while Kurt furiously pedaled his big-wheel tricycle after her, trying to keep up. It was the end of a summer, and there were huge meals and laughter and quiet, chilly nights by a roaring fire. To Jill Newton things felt "just right," which was not unusual. "We'd been married eight years," she would say later, "and everything just seemed to work right. We got along so well. We had saved for four years to buy a house, and when we were ready, there was our house across the street from the elementary school. From before we were married we always said we'd have two children and no more. We had a girl and then by a stroke of luck we had a boy, just what we wanted. It became a sort of joke between Ron and me. We'd say, 'How did we get so lucky? " Sunday broke with a heavy mist over the ponds. Ron took the bite off the morning, using the last of the wood to light a fire. Kurt slept until nine, fighting off a cold; when he awoke he shivered. "I'm so glad Daddy built a bonfire," he said. Ron dressed Kurt for the damp, chilly morning: red jersey, navy blue sweatshirt, speckled red and black corduroys. Kurt tugged on dark brown shoes over mismatched white socks and topped off his outfit with a favorite navy blue jacket decorated with baseball emblems. Jill called Kurt "a head-turner," a striking child with an impish sweet face, bright blue eyes, and platinum blond hair. "The loveliest, sweetest towhead kid you ever saw," said a neighbor....

Thank you. This thread has kept me from the gardening and a possible bee sting. I see many old favorites and more exciting, new authors to try. One of my favorites not listed is Robert Van Gulik, Dutch, world reknown expert on China, son of a diplomat I believe and wrote about Judge Dee in the Tang dynasty. Warning, one book has descriptive scene - 'drawn & quartered' for a mean malevolent being. Was Nevada Barr mentioned? Her lonely ranger, Anna Pigeon, works in the natl. parks. Rarely have physical locales' descriptions stayed with me as strongly. I can still go back to the depths of Lake Superior or the Anasazi cliff dwellings. Perhaps a bit on the dark side.

For some reason I never could warm to to Umberto Eco's writing, no mater how much of it is spot on, see his last quote.

Lawrence Sanders has a series of books featuring his gad-fly detective Archie McNally, they are dated now, Sanders died in 1998, but they are funny and easy reading, def fall into the "pre-cell phones" genre. Bonus: many are available at thrift shops and other cheap places to get good reads. J.A. Jance, her series is set in Arizona and pretty good as well (definitely not as funny as Sanders tho). Some are pre-cell, some newer. Ditto on the thrift shop option. Carl Hiaasen, his novels aren't a series per se, but contain some recurring characters, as a bonus, he skewers South Florida and its denizens, capturing it perfectly (I traveled there quite often in the day, and know it well). TBH his earlier book are the funniest, but I read everything he writes, I appreciate his wit and humor. Some pre-cell, some newer. Joseph Wambaugh, a retired cop, who has written some really good, and funny, crime books (yeah, humor is very important to me), all pre-cell, I think. David Simon and Ed Burns, the creative duo who brought us the Earth's best TV show, The Wire, are both authors of true crime books, tho not necessarily whodunits, more like sprawling, sad, true-to-life stories, just like their TV shows.