Those curious to relive the spill's details should get hold of the excellent, out-of-print book by Art Davidson, In the Wake of the Exxon Valdez (Sierra Club Books).
That sensibility led Topkis to her first winner, a 1995 British detective story called Death in the Garden, by Elizabeth Ironside. (In January Garden briefly beat out The Da Vinci Code as the top mystery seller on Amazon.com.) To publish this out-of-print title, Topkis had to track down the book's rights.