Book Reviews

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 eighteenth-century London pub is one of the stops in the book.

The story is a sequel to Fleming’s Falling to Destiny. The plant, named Hymoliga Eight, travels with Kim Hawthorne, a “space ethicist” from the near future, and narrator Ishmael Starbuck, an oft-befuddled, amnesiac Australian […]

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 bankrupt company in Muleshoe, Texas, run by a family of 1950s-‘60s music aficionados needs an infusion of capital. When a New York advertising executive tries to improve the sheik’s U.S. image by making him resemble Elvis Presley and then introduces him and his […]

Killer Justin Pointer didn’t realize what life was all about till he died.  In his meeting with St. Peter, he found out that God was willing to give him a second chance –putting his earthly skills of professional assassin to work for God himself.  But there is always a catch.

Pointer learns that the eternal battle between good and evil does exist, and his assigned job is to keep Victor Anson alive.  Once Anson had been one of God’s most avid followers, but has fallen away from the faith.  Now he is God’s Anti-Christ.  And Justin was going to be […]

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 thousands, send messages to eight powerful governments with the pronouncement that they believe the population of Earth must be decimated for the survival of the planet. Christmas Day is just a sample of what is to come on the Ides of March. Each country must […]