Front Burner: New Year’s Eve Entertaining Ideas From Carla Hall

“First Frost,” by Craig Johnson (Viking) “First Frost,” by Craig Johnson (Viking) After 19 mysteries, Sheriff Walt Longmire is getting a little long in the tooth. So in “First Frost,” author Craig Johnson takes a giant step backward to Longmire’s youth, as — get this — a 1960s surfer dude. Yes, I know, he’s now too big for a surfboard, but surfing is what he and his best friend, Henry Standing Bear, are doing that summer between graduating from college and enlisting in the military. The first hint of trouble comes when a boat capsizes, and the two surfers rescue some of the crew.

“Double Exposure,” by Robert Sullivan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) “Double Exposure,” by Robert Sullivan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Timothy O’Sullivan came west after the Civil War to take pictures of the landscape and the indigenous people for the Clarence King and George Wheeler geological surveys.  The photographs he left behind are both documentation and art. Ansel Adams, who discovered O’Sullivan’s work in the late 1930s, called the photographs “surrealistic and disturbing” (although he complained that they were “technically deficient”). Although O’Sullivan’s photographs are well known, the photographer’s life is largely undocumented.

“Exploring Colorado With Kids,” by Jamie Siebrase (a freelance writer for The Denver Post) and Debbie Mock (Falcon Guides) Letting a kid “wander the historical buildings at the Centennial Village Museum or touch a cloud inside the National Center for Atmospheric Research, that’s when a spark is ignited and the best kind of learning happens,” write the authors in their introduction to “Exploring Colorado With Kids.” “Exploring Colorado With Kids,” by Jamie Siebrase and Debbie Mock (Falcon Guides) This guidebook is a list of fun places to go in Colorado that also teach something. For instance, at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, kids take a mile-long journey through a petrified forest.

Editor’s note: The opinions of the smart, well-read women in my Denver book club mean a lot, and often determine what the rest of us choose to pile onto our bedside tables. So we asked them, and all Denver Post readers, to share their mini-reviews with you. Have any to offer?

Editor’s note: The opinions of the smart, well-read women in my Denver book club mean a lot, and often determine what the rest of us choose to pile onto our bedside tables. So we asked them, and all Denver Post readers, to share their mini-reviews with you. Have any to offer?

When Las Vegas Review-Journal investigative reporter Jeff German was murdered in September 2022, he became the ninth U. S. journalist to be murdered in connection with their work in 30 years. German is much more than a statistic, though. In “The Last Story: The Murder of an Investigative Journalist In Las Vegas (WildBlue Press), German’s colleague Arthur Kane delves into the reporter’s professional life, the police investigation into his death, and the evolution of Las Vegas and news media over recent decades. “It was important to me to get the story out there,” said Kane, an award-winning investigative journalist who worked at The Denver Post for seven years.