"A man can have skookum. So can a place. It's strength, a sort of mysterious power," Jack Hart writes in his new novel ”Skookum Summer: A Novel of the Pacific Northwest.” The Chinook term also signifies “magic” or “spirit,” and clearly, for Hart, our Puget Sound Region oozes skookum. It has inspired Hart, a former managing editor and writing coach at The Oregonian, to write this exceptionally constructed and brilliantly rendered novel of the Pacific Northwest.