A Christmas Eve Rescue:

Craig Johnson’s

“Spirit of Steamboat”

It’s Christmas Eve 1988, and the new sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming, Walt Longmire, gets a call that a wreck on I-90 has killed three adults. The only survivor is a 10-year-old girl, badly burned with inhalation injuries. Unless Walt can get her to Denver, she will die ... but a winter storm is rolling in, regional airports have closed, and the Life Flight heli-pilots who brought her in refuse to go up again.

“Story Time for Grownups” offers a different kind of holiday tale: the desperate flight of a leaky 45-year-old World War II bomber through a blizzard to get a badly injured little girl to proper medical care. The pilot is crusty, profane, and one- legged Lucian Connolly, retired sheriff and veteran of Doolittle’s Raiders when they bombed Tokyo. Dr. Isaac Bloomfield, a Holocaust survivor, monitors the patient. There’s a young female copilot, and the injured girl’s grandmother to accompany the patient. Walt has to monitor the hydraulics on the bomb bay doors, which keep dropping and have to keep being pumped back up to reduce wind drag.

Warm yourself with a hot cup of coffee or tea — or a microbrew, glass of wine, or cocktail — at Rose City Book Pub and listen to dramatic excerpts from the novella Spirit of Steamboat, part of the bestselling series by Craig Johnson, which inspired the hit A&E and Netflix series “Longmire.” No cover. David Loftus has read to listeners in libraries, coffee shops, Powell’s Books, Borders, and three branches of Umpqua Bank. In February/March 2020, he will appear in the Oregon Children’s Theatre production of “The Journal of Ben Uchida,” a young boy’s account of the evacuation and imprisonment of 110,000 Japanese-American citizens and their immigrant parents (which happened to David’s mother and her Hood River family) during World War II.