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Tri-Valley authors continue to produce creative, engaging and inspiring work – at an amazing rate that’s admittedly tough for us to keep up with.
With apologies for our delay, I wanted to highlight three writers who reached out in recent weeks (and months) to let us know about their new books in 2026: “Murders in the Marquee” by San Ramon’s Dana Mentink, “The Evolution of My Smile” by Dublin’s Monique Rardin Richardson and “Iran, the Little Kitten Who Became a Lion” by Dublin’s Farzaneh Yassini.
One a return to mystery roots, one a personal poetry collection and one a children’s book with a powerful message – each making an impact in their genre niche, and beyond.
Mentink is a seasoned author – with 60-odd published books to her credit – known more for suspense and lighthearted contemporary works but itched for an opportunity to find her way back to mystery.
Thus she checked into the fictional Grand Mallard Marquee, which she set in San Francisco to deliver “murder, merriment … and mallards” for her readers.
“The protagonist, a hapless down on his luck bellhop, gets assigned the job of tending the Marquee’s resident flock of ducks, but when he sees a woman plummet from the fifth floor balcony, he teams up with an elevator man and a well heeled guest to solve the crime,” Mentink’s press release describes the plot.
“Mystery has always been my first love,” she said ahead of “Murders in the Marquee” being released by Harlequin Publishers last month.
A San Ramon native, Mentink’s literary journey has been heavily influenced by growing up in the Valley, going through local schools and remaining in the area with her family. “Books are a connection point between people,” she said. “The teachers in this district fostered that creative ability to reach others using words as a conduit.”
Richardson, a respected poet in the region also known for her publicity support for the California Writer’s Club Tri-Valley Branch, explores emotional healing in “The Evolution of My Smile” – her latest poetry collection, published by Kelsay Books in August.
“I wanted to explore the relationship between shadow and light … the idea that healing isn’t a linear checklist to complete, but a continuous circle to embrace,” Richardson told me by email. “This collection came from recognizing that one’s true emotional growth isn’t about leaving sadness behind, but about learning how all our feelings can live together.”
She described the process of preparing the book, a compilation of personal poems from over the years, as “an exercise in vulnerability”.
“In learning from heartbreaks and in casting out the idealizations we want to believe, we reach a point of healing, and our job is done. There will never be a time in life when things won’t get to us. We are human, created to feel,” she said.
“It was an introspective process of learning to sit with the darker moments until the light caught up,” Richardson continued. “The great thing about feelings is how they can pass in moments if we ride out the difficult sensations. The sun will always shine again. Or as a good friend said to me once, ‘It can’t always rain.'”
“I’m proud of how this collection came together,” she told me. “I hope it reaches anyone who has ever felt broken and serves as a gentle reminder of our shared humanity and capacity for resilience.”
Similar messages of resilience and hope are central to Yassini’s debut work, “Iran, the Little Kitten Who Became a Lion”, a bilingual children’s book published in English and Farsi.
She said feelings of helplessness and heartbreak while watching footage from Iran at the beginning of the year compelled her words to flow.
“I wrote this book out of pain, but also out of hope,” Yassini told me. “I was terrified that after so many lives were lost, the world would move on and forget them. I couldn’t stop what was happening from thousands of miles away, but I could write. I could preserve a piece of their story.”
“The little kitten becoming a lion represents what I saw happening among young Iranians – a generation that was expected to remain quiet finding its courage, its voice and its strength,” she added.
The medium served as a way to speak to Iranian children growing up outside of the country to understand more about what their ancestral homeland was experiencing, and the bilingual approach allowed a bridge between generations as well as other audiences, according to Yassini.
“For me, this became more than a children’s book,” she told me. “It became a form of remembrance — a way of honoring those who paid an unimaginable price for asking for freedom, and a way of telling the next generation that their story matters.”
Yassini is getting ready to release a follow-up bilingual children’s book, “Iran in Search of Truth”, on Oct. 29.
Editor’s note: Jeremy Walsh is the associate publisher and editorial director for the Embarcadero Media Foundation’s East Bay Division. His “What A Week” column is a recurring feature in the Pleasanton Weekly, Livermore Vine and DanvilleSanRamon.com.
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