In How to Invest in Commercial Real Estate, authors Dowell and Stachenfeld have created the ultimate guide for anyone interested in getting smarter quickly on the complicated world of commercial real estate.

In an easy-to-read format, the authors dissect nearly every aspect of commercial real estate investment, from the basic to the more complex, including asset segmentation, market analysis, deal structuring, promote mechanics, capital stack construction, commercial underwriting best-practices, risk assessment and mitigation, joint venture dynamics, and best-in-class investment processes just to name a few.

But this book isn’t just for beginning investors. Even seasoned professionals will benefit from reading it, especially from the authors’ insights into the more intricate elements of the market.

The authors, a commercial real estate investor and a commercial real estate attorney, have over seventy years combined of invaluable industry experience. Their love for their subject is palpable, and they pass along their passion and enthusiasm to the reader.

So, whether you are taking those first steps into commercial real estate investment or want to upgrade your existing expertise, How to Invest in Commercial Real Estate will prove to be a much needed and frequently referenced resource.

The United States is barreling toward a second Civil War. Washington, DC is under an orchestrated attack by militias intent on changing everything. The president is assassinated, cities are on fire, and the country is descending into chaos.

In Seattle, Daniel Goldman packs up his brother’s old Karmann Ghia with camping gear, books, and supplies, and retreats from the city. Reeling from a shattered legal career, a bad marriage, and occasional PTSD, he drives to a cabin near a quirky community called Duck Springs. His plan is to escape into the wilderness, where he can read, hike, contemplate his future, and ruminate on the absurdity of it all. Unexpectedly, he also finds love.

But the country’s troubles are not restricted to cities, and soon tiny Duck Springs is surrounded by rogue troops who have a specific reason for attacking this small town . . .

The Duck Springs Defiance is a tale of community, resistance, and redemption. 

John Edward Rossi isn’t the man you’d expect from his name. Adopted at age four, he is Hawaiian in looks, but New Jersey-raised, where he has spent thirty-one years struggling to blend in. He runs the family business, and is engaged to Angela Mancini. Marriage is his chance to finally assimilate into local society. 

His best friend has taken a job with a gambling company in Hawaii. When Jimmie is found murdered on Maui, John is compelled to return to his birthplace to bring his friend’s body home and to reassure Jimmie’s mother that justice will be served. The moment he steps off the plane, Maui feels alive to him—refreshing, intoxicating, and strangely familiar. He soon realizes that Jimmie’s murderer is not the man they have in jail. Plus he is spellbound by Lani, the accused suspect’s beautiful and mesmerizing Hawaiian attorney. 

Determined to find Jimmie’s killer, he is led into a perilous confrontation with Charles N. Brewster, a wealthy and powerful casino owner. Meanwhile, Angela’s father dispatches goons to Maui to drag John back for marriage to his daughter. And a mysterious gang of Tongans is pursuing him around the island. 

But John Rossi is undeterred—Hawaii has become home.

Paul Konwiser’s intimate knowledge of Hawaiian culture and lore imbues his novel with credibility and compassion. Island of Shadow and Light sweeps readers into a vivid story of identity, danger, and discovery, where the brilliance of Hawaii’s beauty collides with shadows of greed and violence.

“How can you describe a force?” Margaret Fuller’s friend Sam Ward asked after the pioneering feminist died in 1850 at age forty. Called by Henry James a “ghost” haunting American transcendentalism, Fuller comes to life in this historical novel—not as a pale specter but a passionate firebrand. 

Sparks Fly Up: The Lost Story of Margaret Fuller is a character- and plot-driven story of a brilliant woman who manages to infuriate and inspire peers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville.

Fuller wrote the first American book on women’s rights and was the first female newspaper columnist and war correspondent. She shocked New England conservatives with her revolutionary zeal, affair with a young Italian soldier, and “illegitimate” child. On the cusp of returning to the States from Italy, she died in a shipwreck. Lost with Fuller was her manuscript on the Italian struggle for freedom (the Risorgimento).

Uniting in Concord, Massachusetts, her friends squabble over how to memorialize her life. In this transformative, meticulously researched—and sure to be much discussed—view, some are proud of her ambition and others scandalized.

Strong female allies fight to preserve Fuller’s legacy. A charming cad is not a fan. Thoreau must choose sides. Whitman is an aspiring poet disguised as a hack reporter, and Melville finds Fuller’s story rousing. All are galvanized in a tour-de-force, cinematically thrilling, final scene. “If you have knowledge,” Fuller wrote, “let others light their candles in it.” Sparks Fly Up: The Lost Story of Margaret Fuller shows how her light emboldens and radiates—then and now. As the characters wrestle with the question of “me” versus “we,” their ethical dilemmas are evergreen.

Daughters of Fire is a gripping adventure of romance, intrigue, myth, and murder set amid the cultural tensions of today’s Hawaiʻi.

Winner of the Independent Book Publishers Association Benjamin Franklin Silver Finalist Award for Popular Fiction

A visiting astronomer falls in love with a Hawaiian anthropologist who guides him into a Polynesian world of volcanoes, gods, and revered ancestors. The lovers get caught up in murder and intrigue as developers and politicians try to conceal that a long-dormant volcano is rumbling back to life above the hotel-laden Kona coast. The anthropologist joins forces with an aging seer and a young activist, and these three Hawaiian women summon their deepest traditions to confront the latest, most extravagant resort as the eruption and the murder expose deep rifts in paradise.

Tom Peek’s mystical and provocative novel picks up Hawaiʻi’s story where James Michener left off. Daughters of Fire illuminates how the islands’ post-statehood transformation into a tourist mecca and developers gold mine sparked a Native Hawaiian movement to reclaim their culture, protect sacred land, and step into the future with wisdom and aloha.

Includes an illustrated map and 9 original pen-and-ink drawings created for the novel by John D. Dawson. Also includes a Reading Group Guide. 

Originally published in 2012, Daughters of Fire has become a classic of modern Hawaiian fiction. This edition includes a new introduction by the author.

Since we imagine something intentional about a community both in its formation and its function as a new entity, there is something both baffling and attractive about the idea of a “plant community.” Do plants know what they’re doing? Some claim our attention: good to eat, good to smell, get stuck to your clothes. For a majority, plants or plant communities arouse a restricted admiration: lawn. A lawn can be a plant community, an atrocious one to be sure. But I’m thinking of plant communities in the eyes of God, where the plants foregather in ancient times and set out toward infinity. These deserve the word community, and the individuals who make them up are original in the extreme, as they must be: they live in a tough town.

It is our luck that the eternal aspects of these daredevils have fallen to the eye of artist Lindy Smith who has used the sun in ways known best to her to reveal the souls of plants as lives, as archetypes, as semaphore. Their shapes seem to belong to dreams while for all their unexpectedness they are no more accidental than dreams. What we see emerges from the lives they’ve lived in deep time; their importance hangs over them as an aura. 

We long to say their names: milkweed, mullein, bulrush, fescue, rush, yarrow. Or, on the other hand, sumpweed, pigweed, spurge. They belong to the things we see for the first time while recognizing we’ve known them always, hence the longing to absorb their eternal forms. Creation—we have it by our fingertips, just. Smith’s images Smith has discovered the souls of so many plants I thought I knew and left their essential signatures on my mind that I will never see them in the same way again, or more to the point, forget them again. I wish I knew enough about the process to understand what help the sun has been in finding these plants out. But here they are, seen by an artist, and what help it is.—from the Preface by Tom McGuane