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Free Books Set in Michigan – Mystery Novels Upper Peninsula

Free Books Set in Michigan - Mystery Novels Upper Peninsula

Free books set in Michigan. Mystery novels set in the Upper Peninsula. Fiction books set in Detroit. Michigan authors. Many modern and vintage pdf novels.

Century Past has a wide variety of fiction books, which you can find at Fiction in the top-of-page menu.


Book Collections of Fiction Set in Michigan

Michigan Fiction Book Collection

Modern works of Michigan fiction, including mystery books set in Michigan, that you can read online or download for free. There are many well-known authors represented, including Michigan authors. Included are horror stories from the Michigan Chillers series, including “Mackinac City Mummies”. Genres include mysteries, crime, romance, adventure, history fiction, juvenile, humor, teen and more. You’ll find short stories too.
Some authors are: Joyce Carol Oates, Christopher Paul Curtis, Cassie Edwards, Michelle Dalton, Michelle Celmer, Steve Hamilton, Patricia Polacco, Gayle Gaymer Martin, Mitch Alborn, Mary Davis, Pearl Cleage, Bridgett M. Davis, Maxine Trottier, Robert Charles Wilson, Joseph Finder, Lacey Alexander, Don Pendleton, Bette Ford, Patrick Jones, Jim Harrison, Colleen Coble, Susan Holtzer, Lucia Raatma, Jody Hedlund, Doulas Allyn, Joseph Heywood.

Books set in Michigan Upper Peninsula – Collection – Mystery Novels Upper Peninsula

About 60 books that take place in the Michigan Upper Peninsula, free online. Read online or download. Some Upper Peninsula authors.

Detroit Fiction Collection – Free Books Set in Michigan

Here are about 250 books set in Detroit Michigan. They aren’t self-published; they’re scanned modern books by major authors, including many Michigan writers, free online. They include murder mysteries, detectives, novels about relationships, historical fiction, books about the auto industry, African American novels, and other genres.
Some authors are: Jeffrey Eugenides, Donald Goines, Mike Lupica, Elmore Leonard, Don Pendleton, Bette Ford, Loren Estleman, William J. Couglin, Douglas Allyn, Peter Leonard, Wahida Clark, Gary Hardwick, William X. Kienzle, Cheryl Robinson, Tim Farrington, Olivia Rupprecht, Kelley Armstrong, Rainelle Burton, Alan Lawrence Sitomer, Porter Shreve. Books set in Detroit, includes some black Detroit authors.


Novels Set in Michigan

A Little Learning is a Murderous Thing – Mystery Novels Upper Peninsula

Allin, Lou
Five Star 2005

“Life at Copper University in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula has been good for Professor of Victorian literature Maddie Temple, but the school year is about to get off to a deadly start. Maddie’s first day of school is marred by the death of a student who fell from the library’s upper floors. Soon after, the Chairman of the school is found blind and paralyzed in his bed and dies soon after. Flo Andrews, the ambitious English Coordinator is the likely suspect. Maddie turns amateur detective to figure out who is behind the strange happenings at Copper University, and uncover a killer — before she learns just how murderous a little learning can be.” -Publisher. “Copper University” (Michigan Technological University) is in “Stoddard” (Houghton MI), in Michigan Upper Peninsula.

Author notes: Lou Allin (1945-2014) grew up in Chicago and received a PhD in English Renaissance literature in 1977. She then was a professor of English at Cambrian College in Ontario, Canada. She published poetry and novels, including the Belle Palmer mystery series and the Holly Martin series.

See the Menu at the top of every page for Directories of Free Online Fiction and NonFiction Books, Magazines, and more, on 400 pages like this at Century Past

The Burning of Rachel Hayes – Mystery Novels Upper Peninsula

Allyn, Doug
Five Star 2004

Troubled veterinarian David Westbrook has moved to a small town in northern Michigan to start a new life, but his past soon catches up with him. Despite his attempts to lie low, Westbrook rescues a young boy from a well and immediately finds himself in the spotlight, not to mention haunted by the bones he saw while saving the boy. Were the bones from a poacher who disappeared in the 1950s or from Rachel Hayes, a farm woman who vanished in 1871? Allyn deftly weaves greed, ambition, action, romance and tragedy in dueling mysteries set 133 years apart. Michigan mysteries, Michigan author, Mystery books set in Michigan.

Author notes: Doug Allyn, born 1942, is a Michigan mystery author and a professional musician who travels around the Midwest with his rock band. He has published at least 10 novels and a number of short stories. He lives in Montrose, MI.

Wolves Against the Moon – Free Books Set in Michigan

Altrocchi, Julia Cooley
NY: Macmillan 1945

“The dramatic story of a French Canadian who, from 1794 to 1834, operated a fur-trading business on a large scale, and whose orbit extended from Quebec through the Great Lakes country and south to New Orleans. It is replete with melodrama, filled with details of relations of white men and Indians, touching the history of Mackinac MI, Detroit, and Chicago, and the massacre at Fort Dearborn, the original site of Chicago. All through Joseph Bailly’s prosperous career as trader and friend of Indians, runs the thread of his unwilling infatuation for the French woman who was the wife of his most determined enemy.” -Bkl. Old Northwest. Historical fiction that takes place in Michigan, Books set in Michigan.

Author notes: Julia Cooley Altrocchi (1893-1972) was an author and poet who wrote many works for children and adults. She was raised in Chicago, and graduated from Vassar College in 1914. In 1928 she moved with her husband to Berkeley, California, where he spent his career as a college professor. The couple maintained a summer home near Warren Dunes State Park in Michigan.

The Lake, the River & the Other Lake

Amick, Steve
Pantheon 2005

The resort town of Weneshkeen, nestled along Michigan’s Gold Coast, has become a complex melting pot: townies and old timers mix with ritzy summer folk, migrant cherry pickers, wily river guides, and a few Ojibwe Indians. As the summer blooms, these lives mingle in surprising ways–a lifelong resident and Vietnam Vet pursues the take-no-guff deputy sheriff, while plotting revenge against the jet-skiers polluting his beloved lake; a summer kid from downstate stumbles into a romance with the sexiest rich girl in town; the town’s retired reverend discovers the Internet and a new friend in his computer tutor. A resonant social comedy with richly-drawn characters and quirky charm.

Author Notes: Steve Amick’s short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, The New England Review, Playboy, Story, the anthology The Sound of Writing, and on National Public Radio. He has an MFA from George Mason University and has been a college instructor, playwright, copywriter, songwriter, and musician. He’s a current Michigan author, dividing his time between his hometown, Ann Arbor, MI, and a family cottage on a famously clear lake along the northern edge of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.

Free collections of Historical novels for various places, time periods and peoples

Cookie Cutter

Anthony, Sterling
Ballantine 1999

A police lieutenant has her hands full trying to solve a series of murders that have targeted conservative African Americans and ultimately are connected with an upcoming mayoral election. The novel is set in Detroit.
“A work of stunning psychological suspense featuring one of the most complex villains in recent literature, Cookie Cutter is more than a compelling thriller. It is also a gritty, passionate tale of family and lovers, crime and politics, and the black experience in America–on both sides of the law.” -Publisher.

The Case of the Weird Sisters

Armstrong, Charlotte
Gifford 1943

Alice Brennan is going to marry a millionaire. She has caught the eye of her boss, Innes Whitlock, but before they can tie the knot she must meet his sisters: three women who are so awful that no amount of money is worth enduring their company. One is blind, one is deaf, one is missing an arm, and they all want their brother dead. The accidents begin as soon as Alice and Innes arrive at the sisters’ creaky old Michigan country house, set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Author notes: Edgar Award–winning Charlotte Armstrong (1905–1969) was one of the finest American authors of classic mystery and suspense. The daughter of an inventor, Armstrong was born in Vulcan Michigan, and attended Barnard College, in New York City. For a decade she wrote plays and poetry, with work produced on Broadway and published in the New Yorker. In the early 1940s, she began writing suspense. Over the next two decades, she wrote more than two dozen novels, winning critical acclaim and a dedicated fan base.

The Dollmaker – Free Books Set in Michigan

Arnow, Harriette
Avon 1972

“Gertie Nevels, a courageous and unselfish Kentucky countrywoman who has a talent amounting to a passion for whittling small objects out of wood, is forced by the war to leave the happy, although poverty-stricken, community where she has spent her life and go to Detroit, where her husband has found work in a factory. The meanness, squalor, and lack of privacy of her new surroundings, and the debasing effect of the city on her husband and on some of their children, oppress her, but she maintains her integrity and her faith in her fellow human beings.” New Yorker
“It is hard to believe that anyone who opens its pages will soon forget (Gertie) and her sufferings as traced in Harriette Arnow’s long, heavily packed masterwork.” NY Times Book Rev. Books set in Detroit, Michigan fiction, Books set in Michigan.

Author notes: Harriette Louisa Simpson Arnow (1908-1986) was raised and educated in Kentucky, teaching school in a remote area of Appalachia for two years before moving to Cincinnati. She published her first novel in 1936. She later married and, in 1944, the couple settled in a public housing complex in Detroit. ‘The Dollmaker’ was published in 1954, after they had resettled in Ann Arbor. It met with considerable critical acclaim, and was also a best seller. This Michigan author died on her Washtenaw County Michigan farm in 1986. -Wikipedia.

The Weedkiller’s Daughter – Books Based in Detroit Michigan

Arnow, Harriette Simpson
Knopf 1970

As compelling as it is turbulent, The Weedkiller’s Daughter captures a family at the center of the rapidly changing society of midcentury Detroit. Fifteen-year-old Susie greets this new era with a sense of curiosity, while her father rages against it, approaching anything and everything foreign, unconventional, or unfortunate as he does the weeds he perpetually removes from his garden. As Susie seeks escape from her parents’ increasingly restrictive world of order and monotony, she ventures deeper and deeper into a dangerously new territory. The Weedkiller’s Daughter is a gripping psychological exploration of a generation on the brink of indelible—and irreversible—transformation.

We have hundreds of Free Novels set in different countries around the world

A Woman’s Place

Austin, Lynn N.
Bethany House 2006

They watched their sons, their brothers, and their husbands enlist to fight a growing menace across the seas. And when their nation asked, they answered the call as well. Virginia longs to find a purpose beyond others’ expectations. Helen is driven by a loneliness money can’t fulfill. Rosa is desperate to flee her in-laws’ rules. Jean hopes to prove herself in a man’s world. Under the storm clouds of destruction that threaten America during the early 1940s, this unlikely gathering of women will experience life in sometimes startling new ways as their beliefs are challenged and they struggle toward a new understanding of what love and sacrifice truly mean.

Private Heat: An Art Hardin Mystery

Bailey, Robert E.
M. Evans 2007

“Private detective and retired counterintelligence officer Art Hardin stays away from the flashy kind of PI work, preferring to pay his bills by checking up on false disability claims, routine surveillance, and the like. So when the senior partner of one of the premier legal firms in Grand Rapids approaches Hardin about a job protecting his niece from her soon-to-be ex-husband for a couple of days, Hardin isn’t exactly eager to take on the job. However, Hardin finds that the fee offered to too great to pass up. After a hatchet attack, a house burnt down, and a few violent encounters with some crooked cops, Hardin can hardly wait for the case to be over. But when the husband is found murdered, the niece attempts suicide, and Hardin is brought in on a trumped-up warrant for the crime, it is no longer a case that he is willing to walk away from — even if he could.” -Publisher. This mystery is set in Grand Rapids Michigan.

Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon

Bakopoulos, Dean
Harcourt 2005

“During the summer of 1991, when times were tough, the men of blue-collar Maple Rock outside Detroit disappeared one by one, with one of them leaving a note saying he was going to the moon. The women rage and weep, then start new lives—finding jobs, remarrying, moving to nicer suburbs. But the fatherless sons, among them 16-year-old Mikey Smolij, flounder for years. After an initial period of freedom and licentiousness, during which they take over the local tavern and serve as studs for older women, these teenage boys live with doubt about whether whatever caused their fathers’ disappearances might get them too.” Booklist
“By deftly welding magic realism with social satire, Bakopoulos captures the dark side of the working-class dream.” N Y Times Book Rev.

A Lesson Plan for Murder: a Louis Searing and Margaret McMillan Mystery

Baldwin, Richard L.
Buttonwood 1998

No one sheds any tears when overbearing English teacher Marcia Deaver is found dead in her classroom. Some staff members speculate it was a heart attack, or perhaps a suicide, but Liz Hopewell knows that no self-respecting member of the Valerian Hills English Department would kill herself without leaving behind a perfectly penned suicide note, complete with detailed footnotes and obscure literary references.
After the police begin investigating the death as a murder, Liz finds Marcia’s mysteriously coded lesson plans. Convinced that they hold the key to identifying the murderer, normally risk-averse Liz finds herself obsessed with solving the crime. Set in Newberry, Grand Haven, Charlevoix, and other Michigan locales.

She’ll Learn

Barkley-Staples, Sybil
Sadorian 2002

She’ll Learn untangles the web of life’s trials and tribulations. It’s lesson is being taught each day you live it. Maxine, Sydney, and Indira learn that nothing else matters, but true friendship. They figure that although they lead separate lives their lives all affect each other. Together they always make it through.

A Superior Death – Mystery Novels Upper Peninsula

Barr, Nevada
Berkley 1994

Nevada Barr sends Ranger Pigeon to a new post amid the cold, deserted, and isolated beauty of Isle Royale National Park, a remote island off the coast of Michigan known for fantastic deep-water dives of wrecked sailing vessels. When a routine application for a diving permit reveals a grisly underwater murder, Anna finds herself 260 feet below the forbidding surface of the lake, searching for the connection between a drowned man and an age-old cargo ship. Mystery set in Northern Michigan, fiction books set in Michigan.

“Author Notes: Nevada Barr was born on March 1, 1952. She is the author of a series of mysteries involving national parks. She draws on her own experience as a National Park Service ranger to thrill readers with the majesty of nature. Anna Pigeon, the heroine of such novels as A Superior Death and Endangered Species, is a rough-and-tough ranger who left the wilds of New York for the great outdoors, and is modeled after Barr. Barr began writing in 1978, garnering national attention with the publication in 1993 of ‘Track of the Cat’, which won both the Agatha and Anthony awards for Best First Mystery Novel. Her novels are known for breathtaking descriptions of nature, diverse settings, and a no-nonsense heroine. She also provides frequently unflattering portrayals of the National Park Service.” -Bowker author biographies.

The Feast of Love

Baxter, Charles
Pantheon 2000

From “one of our most gifted writers” (Chicago Tribune), here is a superb new novel that delicately unearths the myriad manifestations of extraordinary love between ordinary people.
The Feast of Love is just that — a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us. In a re-imagined Midsummer Night’s Dream, men and women speak of and desire their ideal mates; parents seek out their lost children; adult children try to come to terms with their own parents and, in some cases, find new ones. Michigan authors. Fiction that takes place in Michigan, fiction books set in Michigan.

Author notes: Charles Baxter is a current Michigan writer who lives in Ann Arbor Michigan and has taught writing at the University of Michigan there. He is the author of several novels and is the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature. -Publisher.

Who Fought and Bled

Beebe, Ralph
NY: Coward-McCann 1941

“Historical novel of the War of 1812 as it was fought out in the west. Young Roderick Hale of Boston learns from his lawyer that he has fallen her to a vast estate on the Miami river near Dayton, Ohio. Resolving to go west to claim his inheritance, he falls in with Capt. Abijah Stark, western scout and ranger, and the two form an odd partnership. Their joint adventures are described with considerable humor and there is some promise in the early chapters of a plot. This evaporates, and the book should be read as straight narrative giving a clear idea of the times.” -Wisconsin Bulletin. War of 1812, historical fiction.

The Road to Wellville – Free Books Set in Michigan

Boyle, T. Coraghessan
Viking 1993

This social satire provides a portrait of 1907 Battle Creek Michigan “from three perspectives. The first and most central is that of Dr. Kellogg himself, high priest of a sanitarium where the rich and powerful go to be cured of physical and spiritual ‘autointoxication’ brought about by meat eating and sexual activity. Possessed of a Napoleon complex and an abiding hatred of Post, he is saluted around the clinic as ‘the Chief.’ The second is that of Will Lightbody, a patient at the clinic who has trouble getting the Kellogg religion. The third viewpoint is that of Charlie Ossining, a shady businessman who tries to get a piece of the breakfast-cereal action a little too late.” Booklist
The author “evokes the world of the senses with remarkable skill. As always, his prose is a marvel, enjoyable from beginning to end, alive with astute observations, sharp intelligence and subtle musicality. Possibly as an effect of his highly developed style, Mr. Boyle’s vision has been one of the most distinctive and original of his generation.” -N Y Times Book Rev. Books that take place in Michigan, fiction books set in Michigan. Battle Creek (Mich.)

Author notes: T. C. Boyle was born Thomas John Boyle in Peekskill, New York in 1948. He received a B.A. in English and history from SUNY Potsdam in 1968, a MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1974, and a Ph.D. degree in nineteenth century British literature from the University of Iowa in 1977. He has been a member of the English department at the University of Southern California since 1978. He has written over 20 books and received numerous awards.

Touched

Campbell, Scott
Bantam 1997

Robbie Young is an ordinary twelve-year-old boy about to drop a bombshell that will devastate his small town family. One day he rides his bike home after school, finds his mother in the kitchen making dinner, and speaks aloud the secret he’s been keeping for a year, “Jerry Houseman’s been touching me.” Robbie has been molested and the Young family will never be the same. From that moment on, the novel unfolds with inexorable power. The story is narrated in four parts: first by Robbie’s mother, then by Jerry Houseman himself, then by Houseman’s wife Linda, and concluded by Robbie himself fifteen years later, when he has returned to town for a high school reunion. Each voice is remarkably persuasive and utterly convincing. Child sexual abuse fiction, Books set in Michigan.

Author notes: This Michigan writer was raised in Jackson, Michigan and received his B.A. at Miami Univ. in Ohio. He has also done graduate studies, and taught writing at MIT and Emerson College. Author of two novels and short fiction.

We have thousands of free books of short stories, and hundreds in audio

I Wish I Had a Red Dress

Cleage, Pearl
Morrow 2001

“Joyce Mitchell is the social-worker founder of the Sewing Circus and Community Truth Center, dedicated to guiding young women from teenage pregnancies and violent relationships with the ‘babydaddies’ to free and independent adulthood. Joyce herself, five years a widow, longs for enough safety and assurance to wear a red dress, an ultimate symbol of freedom and abandon. When she meets former Detroit cop Nate Anderson, the new counselor at the high school, long-repressed feelings are awakened.” Booklist
“With humor and sparkling dialog, Cleage balances the dark, abusive relationships of Joyce’s clients with the delightfully healthy love between Joyce and Nate and the strength of women’s friendships.” Libr J. Novel set in Detroit; Pearl Cleage is an African American Detroit author. African American women Fiction.

Author notes: Pearl Cleage (1948-) is an African American author of fiction and non-fiction. Her novel ‘What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day’ was a 1998 Oprah Book Club selection. She is known for her feminist views, particularly regarding her identity as an African American. Cleage was born in Springfield, MA, daughter of a teacher and minister. The family moved to Detroit when she was a child, where her father became a Civil Rights activist. She graduated from Spelman College in Atlanta in 1971 and was then on Spelman’s faulty as a writer and creative director. Many of her novels are set in Atlanta neighborhoods.

The Resurrectionists – Mystery Novels Upper Peninsula

Collins, Michael
Scribner 2002

The Booker and IMPAC Prize-nominated author of The Keepers of Truth delivers a haunting novel of psychological suspense about a wayward family’s search for salvation in an America that has left them behind. The solitude of the Upper Peninsula in Michigan is Michael Collins’s heart of darkness in this compelling story of the unquiet dead. Almost thirty years ago, when Frank Cassidy was five, his parents burned to death in a remote Michigan town. Now Frank’s uncle is dead too, shot by a mysterious stranger who lies in a coma in the local hospital. Frank, working menial jobs to support his unfaithful wife and two children, takes his family north in a series of stolen cars to dispute his cousin’s claim on the family farm. Once there, however, Frank also wants answers to questions about his own past: Who really set the fire that burned the family home and killed his parents? Will the stranger, who hangs between life and death, be able to shed light on long-buried secrets? Brilliant and unsettling, The Resurrectionists is an ironic yet chilling indictment of American culture in the seventies and a compassionate novel about a man struggling to overcome the crimes and burdens of his past. Fiction / Literary, Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense.

Author notes: Michael Collins is an Irish novelist and international ultra-distance runner. His novel The Keepers of Truth was shortlisted for the 2000 Booker Prize. He has also won the Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Lucien Barriere Literary Prize at the Deauville American Film Festival. -Wikipedia.

Blackrobe – Mystery Novels Upper Peninsula

Corcoran, Charles
Milwaukee: Bruce. 1937

The fictionalized life and explorations of the Jesuit missionary, Jacques Marquette (1637-1675). Partially set at St. Ignace and Sault Ste. Marie in Northern Michigan.* Indians — Fiction — 17th century — Mississippi River.

Author Charles Corcoran, was, like Father Marquette, a Catholic Jesuit priest.

See also: Thwaites, Reuben Gold, Father Marquette in Century Past Biographies: M, N & O

Hard Christmas: a Cat Marsala Mystery

D’Amato, Barbara
Berkley 1996

Journalist-turned-sleuth Cat Marsala knows there’s no such thing as easy money. But a feature story on Christmas tree farming does sound relaxing. And once she arrives at the DeGraaf farm, Cat finds a friendly, colorful family whose hard work spans generations. Then Cat learns about the mysterious death of Henry DeGraaf, Sr., the previous spring, and a palpable tension replaces the cheery air. Could the DeGraaf family closet be rife with skeletons? When a fresh corpse turns up, she’s sure of it. Set in the Holland area.

“Author Notes: Barbara D’Amato is a playwright, novelist, and crime researcher. She was born in Michigan. D’Amato held jobs as a carpenter on magic shows, assistant surgical orderly, assistant to a wild animal act, stage manager, and legal researcher. She is a past president of Sisters in Crime International and serves on the board of the Mystery Writers of America. D’Amato wrote a children’s musical, The Magic of Young Houdini, and two musical comedies for adults. She was nominated for the Anthony award for her novel On My Honor and was the runner-up for the Nero Wolfe Award for the novel Hard Women. The Doctor, The Murder, The Mystery won the Anthony and Agatha Awards for Best True Crime and was used as the basis for a segment on the TV show, Unsolved Mysteries. -Bowker Author Biography.

See our free women’s fiction books

Shifting Through Neutral

Davis, Bridgett M.
Amistad 2004

“For Rae Dodson, the early seventies are as hopeful and promising as the peace signs popping up everywhere. The signature sounds of Motown are filling Detroit’s airwaves, and automobile factories are supporting a burgeoning black middle class, which works by day and plays bid whist by night. Rae’s hip older sister, Kimmie, has moved home from New Orleans; her mother’s nerves have calmed enough for her to stop taking her “vitamins”; her father has discovered new painkillers that ease his chronic migraines; and now, despite her parents’ sleeping in separate rooms, the peace between them seems to be holding. All that shifts, however, when Rae’s mother suddenly takes off with her lover down a stretch of highway.” – Publisher.

Author Notes: Bridgett M. Davis is Professor of Journalism and the Writing Professions at Baruch College, CUNY, where she teaches creative, film and narrative writing and is Director of the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program. She was born in Detroit.

Slouching Towards Kalamazoo

De Vries, Peter
Penguin 1984

“It is 1963 in an unnamed town in North Dakota, and Anthony Thrasher is languishing for a second year in eighth grade. Prematurely sophisticated, young Anthony spends too much time reading Joyce, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas but not enough time studying the War of 1812 or obtuse triangles. A tutor is hired, and this “modern Hester Prynne” offers Anthony lessons that ultimately free him from eighth grade and situate her on the cusp of the American sexual revolution. Anthony’s restless adolescent voice is perfectly suited to De Vries’s blend of erudite wit and silliness-not to mention his fascination with both language and female anatomy-and it propels ‘Slouching Towards Kalamazoo’ through theological debates and quandaries both dermatological and ethical, while soaring on the De Vriesian hallmark of scrambling conventional wisdom for comic effect.” -Publisher. Partly set in Kalamazoo.

Author Notes: Peter de Vries (1910-1993) was born in Chicago and graduated from Calvin College in Grand Rapids Michigan in 1931. His first novel, But Who Wakes the Bugler?, was published in 1940 and illustrated by the cartoonist Charles Addams. His other works include No But I Saw the Movie, Comfort Me with Apples, The Tents of Wickedness, The Blood of the Lamb, and Madder Music.

See our Century Past page on Michigan Society to read about immigrants, crime, ethnic groups, women, African Americans, pioneer life, and social issues.

Home for Christmas – Free Books Set in Michigan

Douglas, Lloyd C.
Houghton 1937

Novelette about five prosperous brothers and sisters who return to the old homestead to celebrate Christmas. Books set in Michigan, Fiction set in Michigan.
Lloyd Cassel Douglas was an American minister and author. Douglas was one of the most popular American authors of his time, although he did not write his first novel until he was 50. -Wikipedia.

A Spy in Old Detroit

Emery, Anne
Chicago: Rand McNally 1963

Despite his conflicting feelings of loyalty, a fifteen-year-old French boy becomes a spy for the British during Pontiac’s siege of Detroit in 1763. Historical fiction books set in Michigan.* Pontiac’s Conspiracy, 1763-1765 — Fiction,

Author: Anne Emery is a lawyer and the author of the Collins-Burke mystery series, set in Halifax, Cape Breton, Ireland, London, and New York. She has won two Arthur Ellis Awards, an Independent Publisher Book Awards silver medal, and the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction.

Edsel; A Novel of Detroit

Estleman, Loren D.
Mysterious 1995

“Has-been Detroit journalist Connie Minor is hand-picked by Henry Ford II to create the promotional campaign for his top-secret brainchild; the Edsel. He’s scarcely settled in when he gets caught between Walter Reuther and a Communist-hunting local politician who blackmails him into tapping his old underworld contacts for leads on a plot to kill Reuther. Bouncing from the mob to the union to the boardroom, Minor not only uncovers the murder plan but a stealthy scheme to sabotage the Edsel as well. A swiftly entertaining story of Detroit in the 1950s with all the panache of a Raymond Chandler and a keen eye for historical detail.” Libr J.

Author Notes: “Loren D. Estleman was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1952. He received a B.A. in English from Eastern Michigan University in 1974 and spent several years as a reporter on the police beat before leaving to write full time in 1980. His first novel was published in 1976 and since then he has published more than 70 books including the Amos Walker series, Writing the Popular Novel, Roy and Lillie: A Love Story, The Confessions of Al Capone, and a The Branch and the Scaffold. He received four Shamus Awards from the Private Eye Writers of America, five Golden Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America, the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement from Western Writers of America, and the Michigan Author’s Award in 1997. He lives in Whitmore Lake, Michigan.” -Publisher.

Jitterbug; A Novel of Detroit

Estleman, Loren D.
Forge 1998

“A Tom Doherty Associates book”. In World War II Detroit “the heat is on Racket Squad leader Lieutenant Maximilian Zagreb and his three detectives when someone starts killing people for hoarding ration coupons. Using some artful manipulation and some very unsubtle pressure, Zagreb leans on a couple of unlikely sources for help. Frankie ‘The Conductor’ Orr, a local mob boss, and Dwight Littlejohn, a black riveter in an airplane factory, are unwilling participants in Zagreb’s efforts to smoke out the killer dubbed Kilroy by the newspapers.” Publ Wkly
“This is historical crime drama at its highest level done by a consummate craftsman.” Booklist.

Motown

Estleman, Loren D.
Bantam 1991nbsp;

Second volume in the author’s Detroit trilogy. “Choreographing the movements leading to the August 1966 Detroit riots, Estleman focuses on three main characters: Rick Amery, an ex-cop hired to spy on a Ralph Nader-like consumer advocate; inspector Lew Canada, trying to prevent a war between the Mafia and black gangs, and a likely race riot; and Quincy Springfield, numbers racketeer and ‘blind pig’ (after-hours club) operator.” Publ Wkly
“Estleman seems more intent here on paying homage to the Motor City than on writing a mystery. Place is more important for Estleman than action, though this time several workable plots merge forcefully toward the novel’s conclusion.” Booklist.

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