It’s official—summer is here! Kids are finishing the school year, our days grow longer, and thoughts of getting outside capture our imaginations. Wouldn’t it be nice to take a mini-vacation every day?

You can, and here’s how.

Grab your favorite lemonade or summertime drink and head out to your deck. This is the best time to enjoy an investment that has added real value both to your home and to your lifestyle. If you have a roof cover over your deck, you can relish hours outdoors without worry of being over exposed to the sun’s UV rays. And while you’re on deck, why not spend some time with a great book?

At DeckTec we investigated the opportunities to read recently released books from local authors as you enjoy your Staycation. What we found gives great fun for the whole family…

For Her

There are an abundance of writers focusing on women’s literature in this geography. Slip off your high heels and take a look:

• In Jeanne Quigley’s All Things Murder, unemployed soap actress Veronica Walsh plays amateur sleuth after finding her neighbor’s bludgeoned body. Will Veronica solve the case, or will the killer be as elusive as an acting job? And will she play the heroine or the damsel in distress?
• RITA award-winning, Robin Owens has launched a great new read that will keep you turning pages right through to the end. In Ghost Seer, when her eccentric aunt passes away, up-tight accountant Clare Cermak inherits a fortune. Unfortunately, she also inherits the ability to communicate with ghosts…and those ghosts are Old West legends.
• Theresa Rizzo’s latest work was published March 31, and would make great summer time reading with a 4.6 /5 star rating from 49 reviews. Just Destiny asks, what would you do if your whole world fell apart?Jenny Harrison made some poor choices in the past, but marrying Gabe was the best thing she’d ever done. They had the perfect marriage, until a tragic accident leaves Gabe brain-dead and her world in ruins. Devastated by grief, she decides to preserve the best of their love by conceiving his child, but Gabe’s family is adamantly opposed, even willing to chance exposing long-held family secrets to stop her.
• New York Times and USA Today bestseller, Cindy Myers offers A Change of Altitude coming out from Kensington Books, June 24. Set in the picturesque Rocky Mountains, Colorado Book Award-winning author Cindy Myers combines small-town charm with a poignant storyline perfect for fans of warmhearted fiction.
• Julie Kazimer thrills with The Assassin’s Heart – When CIA assassin Hannah Winslow mistakenly kills the wrong man, she vows never to take another life. Unfortunately Hannah’s superiors believe the killing was intentional. Now Hannah is the target. Hannah always knew it might come to this. Surprising her colleagues, she manages to disappear completely into a new, screamingly dull life, assuming a fake identity, shacking up with an overweight cat, and starting a new career as an ad executive.

For Him

The Wild West may have gone by the wayside, but western writers sure haven’t. Try out these authors today:

• Shannon Baker thrills with her newest mystery, Broken Trust, published by Midnight Ink – Hoping for a new beginning, Nora Abbott takes a job at Loving Earth Trust in Boulder, Colorado. But the trust is rife with deceit and corruption and the body count is climbing. With the help of her mother and a Hopi kachina that technically doesn’t exist, Nora races to stop a deadly plot to decimate one of the planet’s greatest natural resources. Book one, Tainted Mountain, is a 2013 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award Finalist.
• Mike Befeler has brought a smile to many with his Geezer Lit mysteries. He has a new addition this summer, with Nursing Homes are Murder – Paul Jacobson, who suffers from short-term memory loss, becomes an undercover resident at a nursing home to help the Honolulu police track down a sexual assault perpetrator. The police give Paul the names of three persons-of-interest and Paul begins investigating. None of the three appear suspicious. Things go downhill when the woman who had been assaulted is found murdered.
• Stone Cold Dead by Catherine Dilts is a debut novel by an author sure to become a household name. Business at the Rock of Ages is as dead as the fossils cluttering the shop’s dusty shelves. Morgan Iverson, recently widowed and jobless, expects managing the family rock shop for two weeks will be more vacation than work. But when she arrives, her brother slaps the keys in her hands and announces he’s never coming back.

For the Kids

Making reading a habit provides your child with wonderful, lifelong benefits, including increased cognitive skills, and less time needing review in the fall. Plus reading stimulates imaginative skills much stronger than television, movies, computer games or any other forms of electronic entertainment.

• Allie Burton is offering young adults a great read with a series called Lost Daughters of Atlantis. Although her fourth book in the series comes out this summer, you may want to start right at the beginning with Atlantis Riptide – Sixteen-year-old Pearl Poseidon ran away from the circus tired of her adoptive parents’ abuse of her special skills. As a runaway, she craves anonymity but when she saves a small boy from drowning she draws attention to herself and her special abilities. Boardwalk employee and aspiring investigative reporter, Chase Thomas, helps her with the rescue and witnesses her amazing dive.Now, he has questions. And so do the police.
• Linda LaBlanc has two books for the young and young at heart. Simon and Schuster published No Summit Out of Sight May 6. It’s a Junior Library Guild selection and has great reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, School Library Journal and Kirkus. The second is a fiction companion to the first, Four Teens Challenge Everest.
• Aaron Michael Ritchey touches the challenges most on teens’ minds with Long Live The Suicide King – Seventeen-year-old Jim JD Dillinger knows exactly how his miserable suburban life is going to play out. At least drugs added a little chaos to his life, but after almost losing his soul, JD knows he has to quit. Now clean, he figures he has another sixty years of plain old boring life followed by a nasty death. JD decides to pre-empt God by killing himself. However, once he decides to die, his life gets better, more interesting, and then downright strange. New friends. Possible romance. And donuts. Lots of donuts. Once the end is in sight, every minute becomes precious.

And reading needn’t be a huge investment. Local libraries often carry special “local author” collections, so be sure to check with your reference librarian today for more good reads from area authors. Books. They’re not just fun, they’re positively fundamental to a great Staycation on deck.

(Photo by Bev Sykes)