Q: What do the Las Piernas Express and the Long Beach Press-Telegram have in common?
A: Jan Burke, the award-winning mystery author and former Press-Telegram columnist who will be the featured speaker for this sure to be memorable evening.
Photo Credit: Sheri McKinley Photography (2010)
On February 10, 2012, the HSLB and the Long Beach Press-Telegram are dedicating to the community 1,400 bound volumes containing most of the city’s newspapers from 1902 through 1989. The dedication will mark the first time this collection has been seen by the public.
We are honored to announce award winning and bestselling author Jan Burke will help us commemorate the event as one of our featured speakers.
Jan is well-known to mystery aficionados — she is the author of 14 novels and more than 20 short stories. Jan often speaks about how publishing a book had always been one of her lifelong ambitions and although she might now be the author of multiple novels, the excitement of release day has never gone away. Among her best-known works is the mystery series featuring Irene Kelly. Irene is a reporter for the local paper, the Las Piernas Express, who is married to a homicide investigator named Frank. Las Piernas is a fictional town that is a compilation of coastal locales in which Jan has lived, including Long Beach. In fact, Jan was once a Sunday columnist for the Press-Telegram.
Jan has received multiple awards and recognition for her work including an Edgar for her 1999 book Bones and an Agatha Award in 2000 for her short story “The Man in the Civil Suit”. She has received outstanding reviews in newspapers across the United States and her books have been translated into more than 15 languages.
This event promises to be a night of great celebration, history, and notable guest speakers. The evening will kick-off with a reception featuring outstanding appetizers catered by Primal Alchemy and a great wine selection donated by the HSLB Board of Directors. In addition, there will be a silent auction featuring a long list of options ranging from fine dining at some of the city’s best restaurants to a Naples cruise courtesy of Gondola Getaways.
Please join us for this once in a lifetime event as we celebrate the city’s history, its hometown newspapers, and pay homage to the reporters and columnists whose work lives on in the newest permanent addition to the Historical Society, the Long Beach Historical Newspaper Collection.
For more on Jan Burke and her latest mystery-thriller Disturbance, make sure to visit her web site www.janburke.com.