Talisman by Tom Catalano is not your usual time travel story. Archaeology student John Shaw is on a dig in Antigua with a team from the University of Chicago, led by the brilliant Professor Henri Rutherford. On the last day of the disappointing trip, they...

In The Chimera Snare by S Black and E Black, Benson rules the realm of Celestine through a system where power determines succession; his concern for an heir leads him to pursue a hidden alternative beyond his marriage to Athelisa. In secret, he arranges...

The Halls of the Shadow King by W. Tod Newman follows Amal, who takes command of a far-reaching network after the death of his mentor Bazir. With his sister Neffie maintaining operations, Amal investigates reports from Britannia describing open gatherings where fear once ruled and...

The Shattered Weave: The Song and Forge Chronicles Book 1, by A.M. Lavender, is epic high fantasy with dark fantasy and mythic elements. Readers are brought into a world sustained by the mysterious Weave. But their reality is beginning to fracture. This leads scholar Elara...

The Brewster Protocol by Moran Tomer is an exhilarating technothriller that introduces us to Josh Brewster, a retired Mossad spy who now runs his cybersecurity consulting firm in Singapore and looks after his golden retriever. But his cushy, boring life as the Chief Information Security...

In Anne M. Kennedy’s The Baku Inheritance, book one in The City of Winds series, in 1890, Anton Nikolayevich Sabroski arrives in Baku with tanker plans that could open a new route through the Suez Canal. He learns that his father has died, and the...

In Peter Van Oossanen’s The Extraterrestrial, when an infant is left in a basket on the porch of a remote California farm, John and Mary Stanton raise him as their own son, naming him Sam and giving him an ordinary life in the Salinas Valley....

In The Orphans of Nilad by Erich and Daniella Sanchack, driven by a sealed letter, EoC leads Kaida, the blue-eyed barbarian Dinger, and the half-elf Kekron ashore to Nilad, a mountain town shrinking under fear after miners vanish, and strange messages begin appearing in the...

In Judith Kendall’s The Tangled Web, railway payroll officer James McConnolly leaves Adelaide in December 1912 carrying the Christmas wages for the South Australian Railways, but never reaches his first delivery stop. His disappearance leaves his wife, Lizbeth, to rebuild her life in New Zealand...

Entertaining and well-researched, A. Piper Burgi’s The Exploress and the Pillars of Eternity is a fine example of historical fiction. Set in the early nineteenth century, at a time when Egypt was just beginning to allow Europeans access to their country and its archaeological treasures,...