Good winter reads from local authors

For book lovers, winter time is reading time, when gray skies and rain allow you to cozy up in an armchair without any guilt about staying indoors.

Books also make an easy and relatively inexpensive holiday gift.

This year, there are several new books of local interest to consider:

“The Alcatraz Rose” by Anthony Eglin ($15.99, Larkspur House.) Sonoma author Eglin plunges his detective series hero, botanist Lawrence Kingston, into a long-unsolved missing-person case and intrigue surrounding the discovery of an English rose, thought extinct for half a century, growing on Alcatraz island.

“Frank Lloyd Wright on the West Coast” by Mark Anthony Wilson, with photography by Joel Puliatti ($50, Gibbs Smith.) Wilson, who has taught at Santa Rosa Junior College, Sonoma State University and other institutions of higher learning, examines the famed architect’s influence from the Marin County Civic Center to Hollyhock House in Los Angeles.

Mary Street Alinder of Sea Ranch, former assistant to legendary photographer Ansel Adams and later his biographer, broadens her focus on his work to include Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange and other Adams contemporaries in the Bay Area circle that helped reshape modern photography in a new book, “Group f.64” ($35, Bloomsbury.)

“Heritage Salvage: Reclaimed Stories,” by Michael “Bug” Deakin ($24.95, Cameron & Company.) The founder of Heritage Salvage in Petaluma takes readers on a tour of the bars, restaurants and furniture that he and his crew have crafted from reclaimed wood materials.

“The Spook Lights Affair” by Marcia Mueller and Bill Pronzini ($24.99, Forge.) The Petaluma husband-and-wife team, each of them a top solo mystery writer, pen the newest in their Carpenter and Quincannon series, set in 19th-century San Francisco.

“A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American Literature” ($15.95, Regent Press.) Jonah Raskin, known both as an author and a longtime literature teacher at Sonoma State University, surveys wilderness as reflected in the work of Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.