Last Best Books for Summer 2026: Grit to Grind, The Confession Artist, and Others
Grit to Grind: Shaping Montana Communities One Skatepark at a Time
By Andy Kemmis and Chris Bacon
Foreword by Jeff Ament
Chronicle Prism, 2025
In the 1990s, if you were a kid in Montana with a skateboard, you drove a long way to use it. Grit to Grind tells the story of how that changed. Chris Bacon, longtime owner of Board of Missoula and president of the Montana Skatepark Association, and photographer-writer Andy Kemmis chronicle the building of MOBASH skatepark in Missoula and, from there, nearly fifty more across the state, including parks on reservations and in towns most guidebooks skip. Pearl Jam's Jeff Ament wrote the foreword and, through his Montana Pool Service, helped fund the work. Kemmis's hundred-plus color photographs carry the book.
Montana Off the Beaten Path (11th Edition)
By Michael Dalton McCoy
Revised by Ednor Therriault
Globe Pequot, May 2026
The Off the Beaten Path series has been steering travelers toward the good stuff for decades, and the Montana volume is now in its eleventh edition, freshly revised by Missoula writer and DM contributor Ednor Therriault. Readers of this magazine know Therriault as a connoisseur of the strange corner and the unmarked turnoff; his own books, from Montana Curiosities to Haunted Montana, established him as one of the state's most reliable guides to the parts of Montana that don't make the postcards. A good glovebox companion for any summer drive.
The Confession Artist
By Christine Carbo
Thomas & Mercer, June 2026
Whitefish writer Christine Carbo, best known for her Glacier Mystery series, steps away from those novels for a standalone thriller out June 1. A killer who calls himself the Confession Artist posts sketches of intended victims on social media with a six-day ultimatum: confess publicly, or die. When a Flathead Valley ex-cop turned first-year PI named Crosbie Mitchell sees a sketch that looks unmistakably like her, the FBI agrees she is next, and Crosbie has more than one secret she could confess to. Carbo, a Pinckley Prize winner, sets the book in the northwest Montana landscape she has made her literary home.
Wonderlandscape: Yellowstone National Park and the Evolution of an American Cultural Icon
By John Clayton
Pegasus Books, Paperback Reissue June 2026
Bozeman writer John Clayton's Wonderlandscape first appeared in 2017 and was honored at the Montana Book Award; this June, Pegasus reissues it in paperback with a new afterword on the cultural footprint of the Yellowstone television series. The book is not a park history in any conventional sense. Clayton tells the story of Yellowstone through ten figures who reshaped what Americans wanted the place to mean, from Thomas Moran and Ansel Adams to the Craighead brothers and Yogi Bear. The argument is that Yellowstone has always been a mirror as much as a landscape, and the new afterword extends that argument into the streaming era.
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