For Vera Leinvebers, a concert pianist and music teacher now living in Canada, childhood memories of war, loss and dislocation are so painful and traumatic she is forced to create a fictional self Lara to retell […]

Some women get pregnant with little effort. Others, however, struggle with infertility issues and need an outlet for both their educational needs and to bond with others in a similar situation. Author Krissi Marie […]

This well-crafted British war novel set during the London Blitz of 1940-1941 resurrects elements that have enlivened the genre for seven decades. Alan J. Summers gives us derring-do aloft: his hero is a dashing, […]

The title of this unremittingly dark espionage thriller is fitting; although the storyline is impressively labyrinthine and adeptly narrated, it’s the incredibly complex – and utterly heartrending – character of […]

Author Martine Racine is a Jungian psychoanalyst and ordained minister. In The God Within, she describes how the divine lives in all of us.

Racine posits that our center of power, creativity, and morality […]

A man, a woman, and a talking Martian plant walk into a bar… OK, that doesn’t exactly happen in Falling into History —among other things, the plant doesn’t walk; it glides. However, Peter Fleming’s time-traveling tale is about a sentient, super-powered plant transporting itself and two human companions through time and space, and an…[Read more]

The plot, if that is the word, of Peter Menting’s Elvis Cream is quickly told: Ali Hasheeshee, a wealthy fundamentalist sheik in the Emirate of Quais, wants to go to the United States to convert its population to Islam, but unfortunately he is a dead-ringer for America’s most hated terrorist enemy, Osama Al Osama. Meanwhile, a nearly [...]

In this short but elegant novella, an aging matador from Mexico meets his greatest adversary in an infamous bull from the American heartland. Inspired by traditional folk tales, the author sets his story in an indeterminate time period, spinning a legend all his own with the compassion and verve of a born storyteller. The novella begins [...]

Ralph White’s debut novel, Power and Control , a political thriller that takes place in the near future, begins shortly after a cataclysmic Christmas Day that saw entire towns and villages in 19 countries totally wiped out by chemical or biological attacks. The “Earth Cleansers,” who have taken responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of…[Read more]

Nel Rand’s debut novel is a picaresque tale that takes the reader down the Mississippi River and through the haunted past of its main character, Ellie. Ellie is recovering from divorce when her estranged father, Tiny Moon, a 300-pound gambler and eating contest champion, re-enters her life. Despite her efforts to remember her deep-seated anger for [...]

Powered by an intriguingly complex antihero, richly described realm-building, relentless pacing, and a darkly lyrical and deeply philosophical narrative, the first installment of J.R. Bailey’s fantasy series is gloriously comparable to classic adventure fantasy sagas like Moorcock’s History of the Runestaff, Howard’s Conan, and Leiber’s Fafhrd…[Read more]

Barnato’s adventure tale, which travels between Scotland and South Africa, begins dramatically in 1999 when Johannes, a young South African, sets fire to his neighbor’s house after catching him having sex with his wife. The next chapter rapidly shifts to a Scottish castle and is written through the eyes of Boysie, the new resident Jack Russell [...]

When retired Hollywood scriptwriter Glenn P. Wolfe succumbed to lung cancer in 2007, at age 81, he left unfinished this wildly inventive story about the tricks of memory and the emotional tug of baseball; about comic folly in a disorderly family, the neuroses of showbiz folk, and the glories of language itself. There’s so much energy [...]

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Marshall Harrison presents this book as one Marine’s memoir of his experiences in Vietnam, but readers will quickly realize that these recollections are no more factual than those of George MacDonald Fraser’s popular character Harry Flashman. Leaving Brogado is actually a funny, honest, thoroughly engaging novel, published (posthumously) by a…[Read more]

Every mystery has its dark secrets, but the best ones reveal them with a kind of perverse, teasing finesse. And author Melissa M. Garcia does so deftly in Stranger, her second mystery. Ex-con Alex Delgado and her brother Ric have fled Los Angeles for a new start in the small, gritty town of Lake City, Nevada, safely [...]

The author of several well-received regional mysteries, Sternberg ( No Laughing Matter , 2007, etc.) hits his literary sweet spot with this imaginative throwback set on the high seas circa 1855. As the novel opens in Boston, a highborn lady named Elizabeth Godwin argues vehemently against returning with her family to her native England, begging…[Read more]