Lead stories from SPR’s ever-growing independent book portal
Review: Birth of an Assassin by Rik Stone ★★★★★
The first book of the Birth of an Assassin series is set on the backdrop of post-war, Soviet Russia. In Moscow, 1947, young Jez Kornfeld, a Jewish citizen, enlists in a military recruitment drive to fulfill his starry-eyed ideals of what it is to be a soldier.
What Jez doesn’t predict is that he has enlisted in something far more sinister than the regular corps. When a sinister KGB operative takes special notice of young Jez he makes a decision that pulls the youth into a hideous world of murder and intrigue that he never dreamed of. It soon becomes […]
Drachen by Brendan Le Grange is a classic treasure hunting story, with all the thrills and adventure such a labeling entails. Sorry, Indie fans. There’s no Ark of the Covenant at the end of this ancient bread crumb trail, no treasure of the Free Mason’s buried beneath national monuments, and not a single person stumbling through modern day Mexico in search of El Dorado. In Le Grange’s novel, Brett Rivera seeks the fabled treasure of the lost Hanseatic warship Drachen.
Hattie’s Place by Katherine Stillerman is a touching historical fiction novel set in the early 1900s in South Carolina.
This memoir of a childhood and young-adult life spent advancing inexorably toward disaster was written from federal prison. Jamila Davis is currently serving a 151-month sentence for bank fraud. This memoir serves as both cautionary tale (for young people as well as their parents) and sociological profile. The cautionary tale is powerful, the sociological profile perplexing.
In the beginning, there was a tribe of nomads that took only what they needed and lived as one with the world. As time grew, the tribe became the tribes, and the tribes’ three wisest argued the nature of things: one argued light was the true creator, one argued dark, and one argued both were unreasonable and would only believe in what could be proved. They split the tribes into factions and distanced each other to far corners, leaving the undecided to rot in the fields.