The Gertrude Threshold by Christopher Brooks
The Gertrude Threshold by Christopher Brooks is a moving and harrowing work of apocalyptic fiction that asks the question: what would you do if it was the last day on Earth? The Gertrude Threshold refers to a mathematical calculation that precisely determines the last day humans can survive after Global Warming. A family spanning several generations waits out the last day in a series of tubes underground, and the narrative switches between characters, giving this short novella an epic breadth and scope.
Like the best of apocalyptic fiction, The Gertrude Threshold deals with many serious themes within a highly readable […]
Lemat is living every writer’s nightmare: the starving artist, unknown and unheralded. He hits such rock bottom that he attempts suicide, splits up with a girlfriend and gets fired from his job. He then meets Guy, a talent agent who urges him to write something lurid and incendiary, which is more like doing a deal with the devil. Selling out his artistic soul works: he becomes famous and controversial, lands a 6-figure publishing contract, but comes to realize that compromising one’s integrity also comes at a great price.
Workman’s Complication by Rich Leder is the uproariously funny and engaging debut novel in the McCall & Company series. Off-Broadway actress, Kate McCall, reluctantly inherits her father’s private investigator business. Her first case is investigating a construction accident, which may or may not be a scam. Meanwhile, she’s also investigating her father’s murder with a strange assortment of eccentrics in her apartment building, all the while keeping up rehearsals in a vampire musical.
By far, the weakest part of many self-published books is the synopsis found on Amazon and elsewhere. Worse than the cover, worse than the writing in the book itself, there are a lot of blurbs on Amazon that are pretty near atrocious. I include my own books in this category. Writing a decent blurb is an artform totally separate from writing a book.
The Kingdom of Assassins by Erik Mackenzie is the exciting and impressively detailed story of an NYPD detective, Mike Maclaymore, who teams up with a Saudi princess to stop a terrorist attack in New York City. It traverses the globe between New York, the Middle East, and Europe, covering every angle of the operation. Throughout the book, there are many twists and surprises, as it is unclear who exactly is responsible for the threat. In this way, Kingdom of Assassins moves like a whodunnit murder mystery as much as a rolling political thriller, as the clues unravel fast and furiously, […]
The Button Chronicles by Juniko Moody is the highly inventive dystopian novel about the very nature of human evolution. Replete with its own inventive language, The Button Chronicles is about a dark 22nd century where mysterious buttons appear from out of nowhere. When pressed, a person disappears, and soon there are buttons for every person on earth, with millions of people disappearing. No one knows where they came from or how the devices work. A suspenseful and thought-provoking read, The Button Chronicles asks serious questions about the nature of reality and how mankind can survive on its current dystopian path.[…]