Threats. Murder. Revenge. Todd Borg’s eighth novel — “Tahoe Heat” featuring his long-standing protagonist private detective Owen McKenna — involves a fatal fall at Lake Tahoe’s Cave Rock, encoded piano strings, and a wild mustang named Heat.

Borg’s series of mystery thrillers set exclusively around Lake Tahoe will be the featured topic of the next Fireside Chat, hosted by Andy Whyman, Nove. 18 at 7pm in Sierra Nevada College’s Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences, rooms 139/141.

Stunned by the beauty of the second highest big lake in the world, Borg and his wife moved from Minnesota to Lake Tahoe in 1990. While he had written short stories, reviews, articles, and three novels before moving to the region, the dramatic Tahoe landscape gave Borg the idea for a series of novels with a detective protagonist who lived at Lake Tahoe. The result was Owen McKenna, an ex-cop with a tragic background, who moved from San Francisco to the mountains to study art and earn a slightly more genteel living as a private detective. McKenna works out of a rented office space on Kingsbury Grade on the South Shore, and lives with Spot, his Harlequin Great Dane, in a tiny log cabin (500 square feet) that sits 1,000 feet above the East Shore. All eight of the Owen McKenna Mystery Thrillers are available for check-out at SNC’s Prim Library and the Incline Village Library.

Borg’s work has won numerous awards including the Ben Franklin Award for Best Mystery of the Year and the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association’s Best Thriller of the Year. A prolific lecturer and speaker, Borg also teaches at Lake Tahoe Community College. His three-day writing workshop The Hook, the Twist, and the Cliffhanger is open to any aspiring fiction writer and focuses on the craft of writing entertaining fiction, including character development, the rising plot curve, and critical aspects of writing effective prose such as scene construction, point-of-view, and dialogue.

For more information on the event, contact Shelia Leijon, IVGID Seniors Program Coordinator, at (775) 832.1310, shelia_leijon@ivgid.org, or Debi Noonan, SNC director of Special Events, at (775) 831.1314, ext. 7420, dnoonan@sierranevada.edu.