Rosa Williams watches her husband leave the house on her phone. The police have asked to see the doorbell footage, so she scrolls back past her own return from an early yoga class to the clip of Daniel at 6.50, pulling the door behind him, patting a pocket for his keys, glancing once up at […]
An emotionally charged yet forensic audit of inherited dysfunction and one man’s fight to preserve his truth “I realized that in my family, an intimate thought was not a confidence; it was a target.” Decades before David V. Gobel began auditing his family’s betrayals, he learned how to become a vault. In his deeply affecting […]
A Confluence of Fates by John Zaiss
A gripping novel of fate, luck and choice set in the Vietnam War and its aftermath John Zaiss’s ambitious novel, A Confeluence of Fates, is a terrifically rewarding historical read, depicting the experiences of a soldier and a Vietnamese orphan with equal sympathy. With the spare efficacy of a literary thriller, A Confluence of Fates […]
Midway through The Red Pony by John Steinbeck, an old man comes up the ranch road one afternoon and announces to a ten-year-old that this is a return: there was a house on this land once, and it is where his life began. The boy has no idea what to do with that and runs […]
Bad Words by Rioghnach Robinson
On Christmas Eve, with deep snow over New York and every flight to San Francisco cancelled, a novelist stranded alone in his Greenpoint apartment receives a five-dollar payment from the critic who destroyed his career. The memo suggests it is for eggnog for one. He sends five dollars back with a joke about skating alone. […]
The woman at the end of the counter has her hood up and has not said a word. Ellie, soaked through after crashing her car on a back road in a thunderstorm, fakes a stumble just to make her turn around, and finds the face she glimpsed in her headlights moments before impact. The bartender […]
Victorious by V.E. Schwab
A young man lies sedated on a psychiatrist’s couch in Merit, and his doctor talks him gently down into sleep. Then something begins to rise out of the patient’s chest, scaled and patterned, and the office fills with a darkness that has no business being there. When Dr Gabriel Gray shakes the young man awake, […]
Mississippi Wizards by Kenneth Penn
This creepy paranormal horror is a wild ride with an absolutely killer twist. When a traumatic incident from childhood results in Cassandra Kulinski seeing the mutilated corpse of a dead woman, she’s diagnosed with schizophrenia and put onto an ever-changing cocktail of medications. But it works. For years, her ghost, Nancy, has been held at […]
Bella and Rami by Isobel de Border
A sweeping international romance and deeply rooted love story told by two world-weary adults who are still kids at heart An epistolary novel that follows two star-crossed lovers across continents and decades, Isobel de Border’s Bella & Rami captures the intensity of first love and the still-hot embers of lifelong passion decades later. When Bella […]
Review: Evangeline by Eric Bush
Synopsis: From the award winning author of The Meaning of Androsia: A love story just slightly ahead of its time. Etienne first met Evangeline when she was sitting on a park bench in the Public Garden, on an otherwise ordinary morning in late summer. He didn’t really meet her on that first encounter. His eyes […]