Seattle-area authors provide appealing choices in summer fiction

If you're an avid reader, you already knew the Pacific Northwest was chockablock with successful writers. But a recent wave of new summer fiction is a reminder of the quality — and the variety — of the authors in our own backyard. The settings vary from Regency England to folksy Midwestern farms, an international high school in Mexico and a murder-trial courtroom, offering something for just about everyone. So now that summer has finally arrived, here is your companion for that relaxing afternoon in the hammock:

"The Actress" by Elizabeth Sims (St.Martin'sMinotaur,$24.95,400pages): We first meet aspiring actress Rita Farmer in an audition for a horror flick, where she is screaming her lungs out — but not quite successfully enough to land the part.

In debt and desperate, Rita fears that her abusive bully of an ex-husband is going to use her poverty to get custody of 5-year-old Petey. It looks like a godsend when Rita is hired by a high-profile defense attorney to coach his star client, the wealthy Eileen Tenaway, who is charged with the murder of her own little daughter. But as Rita works with Eileen to create a more empathetic, likable persona for the jury, she is drawn further into the murky and dangerous realities of the case: If Eileen didn't kill her little girl, who did? Sims, a Port Angeles-based author who has written the Lillian Byrd series of mysteries, has a well-plotted and engaging winner here in what looks like the start of a new series. Let's hope so.

"Mexican High" by Liza Monroy (Spiegel & Grau, $21.95, 334 pages): Seattle-born Liza Monroy, who now lives in New York, attended high school in Mexico City and is the daughter of a State Department Foreign Service officer — just like the protagonist of this coming-of-age novel about a high-school senior whose mother's job makes the two of them relocate south of the border.

Initially despondent about leaving her U.S. high school and learning a whole new world, protagonist Mila sets out to negotiate a thicket of cultural differences, a new language, easy drugs and alcohol, and a class system in which children of privilege are escorted by drivers and bodyguards while the parents swan off to the next spa appointment. By turns tough and vulnerable, Mila also is searching for her Mexican father, whom her mother has never identified (he's a socially prominent married man with whom Mom had a brief fling).

Monroy renders Mexico City in all its contradictory aspects — poverty, beauty, danger, pollution, opportunity — and makes Mila's struggle to find herself very real. The title, which suggests south-of-the-border hallucinogens, doesn't really suggest the complexity and honesty of this excellent debut novel.

"The Lost Duke of Wyndham" by Julia Quinn (Avon, $7.99, 371 pages):

When the elderly and cranky Duchess of Wyndham (and her pretty young companion Grace Eversleigh) are accosted on the road one night by a handsome highwayman, the duchess unerringly recognizes him as her previously-unknown and unheard-of grandson and heir — despite the fact that it's dark, and the roguish robber is wearing a mask. Where is that duchess when we really need her? She could find Osama bin Laden in a trice.

The long arm of coincidence is stretched pretty far in this Regency romance by Seattle author Julia Quinn, who is simultaneously writing a second novel about the other contender for the same dukedom ("Mr. Cavendish, I Presume" will be out in October, also from Avon). At least the highwayman and presumptive ducal heir is a Robin Hood robber, devoting his earnings to impoverished war veterans, and thus a man of principle as well as a dashing romantic to partner the strong-willed heroine. Snappy dialogue and a couple of entertaining plot twists make this Regency a charmer.

"The Widows of Eden" by George Shaffner (Algonquin Books, $21.95, 307 pages): It's a long, dry summer in the appropriately named Nebraska town of Ebb, where the small-town farmers are in so much financial trouble from crop failure that one couple have gathered up their possessions and abandoned their farm to seek their fortune elsewhere.

Sammamish author George Shaffner makes rural Nebraska sound so unappealing that the novel might well be banned by local chambers of commerce, but he summons up a charming milieu of highly colorful characters in this third book in a series about Ebb (it was preceded by "In the Land of Second Chances" and "One Part Angel"). This time the townspeople are praying for rain when traveling salesman and miracle worker Vernon Moore shows up, along with three of his friends; the town's richest resident, Clement Tucker, hopes that Moore will instead devote his miracle-working energies to curing Tucker's cancer.

With his dual messages ("Uncertainty is the spice of life" and "Have faith"), the mysterious Moore sets the town aflutter and leads the reader to a more cheerful denouement. On the plus side: the folksy descriptions (one character has "a belly the size of Arkansas") and the spunky narrator (B&B owner Wilma Porter). On the minus: frequent allusions to the previous books and their long history (prefaced by such phrases as "In case you haven't heard") makes this novel best suited to fans of the preceding two in the series.