SWFL gift guide: Find memorable gifts 'write' here — local authors

You  don't have to live here to appreciate the stories local authors have to tell.  In fact, it's hard to find an area code outside of major metropolitan U.S. that turns out more bestsellers per capita  than 239, with authors like Sue Monk Kidd, Janet Evanovich, Robin Cook and Nathan Hill living here full- or part-time.

Other Southwest Florida writers who have built long, strong audiences — such as Random House/Loveswept author Tina Wainscott, Jeff Lindsay (the "Dexter" series) and Kristy Kiernan ("Catching Genius") — specialize in gripping reads as well. It's money well spent to buy any of their books for gift giving or your own reading.

Yet a new story is born with every day, and new area authors to write them.

A few of the most fascinating stories here were not pieces the writers had planned. Nor are all of them fiction. There are some cautionary tales and some to offer a jolt of inspiration. Here are just a few we have spotted in the last several months. All of them are available at Barnes & Noble at the Waterside Shops or online at Amazon:

"The One Year Book of Amazing Stories": By Robert Petterson (Tyndale Momentum; $22.99)

Thousands of people in Naples know the Rev. Robert Petterson as a Presbyterian minister, the now-retired pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church for 16 years. But thousands more know him only as an author who writes a different kind of page turner  — short stories that begin with epiphanies of  everyperson figures, their identities often unwritten until the denouement. Each story packs a lesson, or an inspiration. 

The subtitle is "Seeing God's Hand in Unlikely Places." There's sometimes a component of biblical wisdom, with a New Testament quote, but often it's a simple observation to "instead of counting your blessings, be the blessing others count on."

"They're not proselyting stories. I'm not attempting to convert the unconverted," Petterson said. "A few of these are heroes of the faith, but most of them are cultural icons." The subjects range from Xerxes to Marilyn Monroe, football hero Jim Thorpe and even serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in its tales. 

Petterson has made his book an absolute gift for those seeking help on a topic for whatever reason: Indexes in the back of "Amazing Stories" include 10 pages of topics from the expected — worry, gratitude and hope — to topics that pique your interest to read the stories behind them: "excellence in small things" and "never too late."

The book offers its stories by dates. Petterson wouldn't mind if you prefer to cherry-pick the relevant ones.

Petterson could have written a whole book on himself. His childhood was as rough as one can be: He was sodomized by his drunken mother's boy friend, forced to eat out of dog dishes in one foster home and dismissed on one report card as a child who "will never amount to anything."

"I have it hanging on the wall beside my doctoral degree," Petterson said, beaming.

Books were a way to escape the miseries of his life until his fortunate adoption by loving parents at age 12, and they served him through his higher education years. It also gave him the idea he could assemble 365 stories from his personal trove of stories he'd read. 

He wrote something of a preview book, "The Book of Amazing Stories," and some of those are incorporated into this one. Although he conceded he told himself "I'll never do that again," Petterson said he's found himself researching stories for another inspirational book.

"My stories are designed to encourage people to overcome — in a polarizing world to unite, in a world where there's a lot of hate talk, to bring hope talk."

"Say Goodnight, Seymour": Roberta Ferguson Trail. (Page Publishing; $17.95)

Trail, an Estero resident, came to Southwest Florida without her poltergeist. But the discomforting apparition lived with the Trail family after they bought a pre-Revolutionary War house that Trail, an interior designer, was planning to restore.

In the dining room, a gentleman who smoked. From somewhere around the house, a woman calling out. But in the barn there was ... a gravestone. That might turn out to be the most ominous marker of the family's 13 years there.

"The first few chapters sound like the money pit," Trail said. "It almost did us in. The house was over 300 years old and the deeds go back to King George."

But then, she said, things happened that made the family realize they were not alone.

"It's about a ghost and it's true," she said. Someone had been buried and there was a gravestone, complete with name, that had broken off and become buried in dirt. Despite its overpowering presence, Trail said she and her husband were not about to exhume it and take it to a cemetery.

"I didn't want to wake up some night at 3 a.m. and have some woman standing at the foot of the bed asking, 'Why did you move me?'" Trail said. Available at Barnes & Noble. 

"My Life Through My Dresses": Marina Berkovich (Archway Publishing; $15.99)

Marina Berkovich is known in Naples for her dedicated work, with her husband, Alex Goldstein of  ABG World and SportMusic, documenting Jewish survivors of the Holocaust era who live in Naples.

But she's written poetry ("One-Way Correspondence," 2001). Now she's distilled her life growing up in the former Soviet Union and bouncing around Europe as a an immigrant with a cleverly appropriate theme: her clothing.

Those who have visited Russia during its Soviet days recall the dismal department stores and their dismal inventory. Berkovich goes beyond that, however, to recall the sights and sounds around what she was wearing, the occasions on which she wore them, the adults around her who could make or break her young ego with the backhanded compliment: "And here walks the best dress of the evening."

Some of it is heartbreaking, but all of the book is engaging. The first nine chapters recall the austerity and stoicism of the Soviet material culture, with sneaked trips to Poland the only way to buy blue jeans; the cruel boys whose rape attempt she foiled only because one of them had a shred of honor; the departure from her home on a train that segregated Jews into one care and allowed no one to help them on.

"Dresses" is above all an autobiography of Berkovich's formative years in Kiev where Jews would always be second-class citizens, she says in her book. It may be written for adults, but "Dresses" also is a good gift for any young adult who has grown up in a land of privilege and plenty. 

"And They Found No Witches": Tom Alessi (Self-published; $14.95).

If the wheels of governmental justice have seemed to turn the wrong way before now, the former Rochester, N.Y.,  police officer's tale won't help you sleep better. A commander for the Special Criminal Investigation Section’s Narcotics Unit — where he served as commander of a street drug enforcement unit — Alessi says he and other members of the unit were maliciously fingered by a fellow officer who had been caught dealing narcotics.

They were unjustly accused — turned into a bargaining chip for the drug dealing policeman, he said. All suffered irreparably through a protracted, highly publicized investigation that was looking for results, rather than the truth, he posits.

Alessi takes the reader through the setup and investigation, the trial and the outcome, described tartly in the FOP representative's summary that serves as the book's title. Alessi works as a firearms instructor in Naples now, and admits writing a book was not initially in his life plans.

But he wanted to tell his story. 

"I'd say I worked on it over 20 years off and on," he said.