Summer will soon be upon us and hopefully that means lazy days and nights catching up on some great fiction and non-fiction.
While children often make a summer reading list with help from parents, teachers and librarians, adults can do the same either with a book club, a bookstore or library.
Discovering local landmarks in novels and non-fiction books about Alexandria can make reading even more fun.
Check out The View from Prince Street by Mary Ellen Taylor or Hidden History of Alexandria by Michael Lee Pope. Get a taste with this excerpt from local author John Wasowicz's latest novel, Jones Point set in Alexandria.
These were some of the most popular books checked out by Fairfax County residents in 2019. If you missed any of them, be sure to put them on your summer reading list!
- Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens
- The Reckoning, by John Grisham
- Educated: A Memoir, by Tara Westover
- The Library Book, by Susan Orlean
- Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, by Neil DeGrasse Tyson
- Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng
Be sure to download the Alexandria Library System's app to borrow ebooks!
Excerpt from Jones Point, by John Wasowicz
Book jacket for "Jones Point" to be published this fall.
In the scene below, a firefight erupts on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, initiated by the heroic action of Alexandra policewoman Sherry Stone, one of the story’s main characters.
DRAWBRIDGE AHEAD, PREPARE TO STOP WHEN FLASHING
Lights were flashing. Metal gates began to lower in front of the drawbridge. Traffic on the bridge ground to a halt in front of the gates. Dusk loomed. The sky slowly turned from crimson to dark blue. The first star of night sparkled. Lightning crackled across the city’s skyline.
Alexandria policewoman Sherry Stone stood at the entrance of the pedestrian walkway to the Wilson Bridge. She wore sneakers, black tights, and a baggy sweatshirt that hid her service revolver.
A cool breeze swept over the river and the bridge, rushing down the walkway and brushing against Stone. She finished listening to the song streaming on her phone. It was “Heroes” by David Bowie and Brian Eno. She removed her ear-plugs, turned off the music, and tucked the phone in her sweatshirt’s pouch.
Stone jogged along the walkway as the gates dropped. She passed a stenciled marker on a jersey wall that read WWB MILE 0.7. A short distance ahead, a man held out his arms, his palms facing her. He was shouting something at her. As she jogged a little closer, she could hear him. “You have to turn back,” he hollered.
She sped up. When she reached him, she turned, whipping a leg in the air and catching the man’s chin with her sneaker. Her entire body lunged through the air. He fell backwards, hitting the pavement hard. She struck him twice in the torso, flipped him around, pulled his hands behind his back, and quickly slapped a handcuff on his wrist.
She spun the other handcuff around the metal railing along the jersey wall.
Stone jumped over the jersey wall and onto the empty traffic lanes on the far side of the gates. She looked down and realized she was standing near the metal lip of the drawbridge. That section of the bridge shook and jerked and slowly be-gan to rise. She raced forward and catapulted over the lip of the drawbridge like Evel Knievel clearing a ramp at Caesars Palace on his Triumph Bonneville t120 motorcycle.
The side of the drawbridge that rose shuddered to a stop as it formed a 90 degree angle to the bridge, serving as a metal screen blocking the sightline of motorists stopped on the Virginia side of the bridge.
There was now an empty space in the bridge. A large SUV was parked at the edge of the hole, which looked down to the water below. A string of four flatbed trucks idled in the far lane. The operation to retrieve the crates was underway.
A noise suddenly filled the air, a pulsating sound caused by a blade hitting the wake vortex of the previous blade, a phenomenon known as “blade slapping.” Stone looked up, as did the men on the bridge. To the west, lights cut through the clouds, drawing closer by the second. The whir intensified as helicopters came into view, the silhouette of their rotating blades and dark bodies clear against the last light of day.
One of the men grabbed a sidewinder missile launcher. He hoisted the weapon onto his shoulder and pointed it in the direction of the sound, which he and the others now realized were three rapidly approaching helicopters.
Stone popped up from behind the Jersey wall and fired her service revolver at the man balancing the sidewinder on his shoulder. She hit him in the leg. He stumbled, hobbled into the middle of the road, pointed the weapon upward, and fired.
The bridge trembled as a streak of light blasted into the air, a plume of smoke and fumes behind it. The small missile struck one of the helicopters, spewing its innards across the sky. The helicopter’s twirling blades stopped rotating. It fell straight down like a bird struck by a hunter and crumpled as it hit the pavement of the two HOV lanes, causing a horrific crash that shook the bridge.
The darkening sky suddenly erupted into an array of red, blue, and white emergency lights. An assemblage of police cruisers, vans, fire trucks, ambulances, and SUVs stormed across the three empty lanes of traffic and raced at breakneck speed toward the enemy forces gathered around the crane.
The men began firing their semiautomatic weapons at the approaching army of police vehicles. Billowing clouds of smoke from the helicopter lying in the HOV lanes wafted across the bridge and created a barrier between the men and the onslaught of vehicles headed in their direction.
The battery of law enforcement vehicles burst through the cloud of smoke like Patton’s tanks at Meuse-Argonne. The vehicles stopped and executed 90 degree turns, forming a shield that faced the men standing around the crate. Officers jumped out of the vehicles and began firing. Their arsenal of weapons dwarfed the firepower of their adversaries, who were caught off-guard and unable to retrieve the weapons in the crates to make use of them.
Warring factions exchanged gunfire. Bullets struck the bridge at awkward angles, their sounds echoing across the bridge and over the water, the sound of metal against metal, now a firestorm created as the two sides confronted one another. The men unloading the crates scattered, some seeking shelter from a mounting barrage of bullets by ducking behind the metal container lifted from the barge while others sought refuge inside the crane.
John Wasowicz's novel, "Jones Point," set in Alexandria. It is available at local bookstores or through Amazon.com. Look for a new ebook from him later this year!
