Dorothy Vogel was a reporter, publicist, and technical writer in New York and New Jersey before she retired to the Northwest to take up mystery writing and nature. Timber Mill Action, Vogel's first book, focuses on an east coast bishop's son who is wanted in Oregon for the bombing of a timber mill in an environmental action gone wrong. A man is dead, another is in a coma, the mill went up in flames and the suspects are on the lam. The bishop sends Samantha Baxter, new priest and former detective, out to search for his boy. With the help of a tiny church and a bunch of disaffected hippies, she races against time and the law to discover where justice lies.
Her second book, Not for Sissies, is a collection of humorous essays and poems about late retirement. Topics touch on medical help, friendships, family, cultural trends, fear, and forgetfulness. Some titles: My Big Toe, Physical Terrorists, Organ Recital, The Love Hormone, The Value of Cheap.
Family Business, her most recent book published in 2022, focuses on Lila Van Dam, publisher of The New York Standard, a family-owned daily newspaper, who needs to choose which of her three sons is best suited to succeed her. Her time in the top job is running out and for the first time in its history of more than a hundred years, the future of the paper is in doubt. Technology is fast becoming the dominant news provider and the next publisher will determine the newspaper's survival and her family's as well. How the Van Dams survive this decision is the stuff of common existence, captured here in a riveting drama.