The Pacific Northwest Writers Association has chosen South Jersey native and heart surgeon-turned-novelist Daniel J. Waters to receive its highest honors.

Publishing as Bandageman Press, Waters has set three of his four self-published novels in the Jersey Shore/Mickey Cleary series “down the shore” on Long Beach Island. The name of his publishing company is “a play on the Little Golden Book Dr. Dan the Bandage Man, first published in the late 1950s and read to me often as a child,” he explained.

The action begins during the tumultuous Summer of Love in 1967 in Surf City Confidential and continues in the socially…