Mona “Ripper” Ripple and her crew, Karcass Five, take center stage in Jarrett Brandon Early’s Lovestruck Maggot, plunging readers straight into the rugged, alien world of Kalderra. The planet itself is unforgettable: glowing subarashi trees rise from volcanic calderas, a huge violet moon looms overhead,...

Death and destruction are dished out to the syndicate that decided to eliminate their top assassin in the entertaining novel, Bunny Slippers, by Matt Peterson. MARI is an international organization of hired killers, and Bunny has worked for them for decades. When Bunny chooses to...

In Tilly Hornsby’s Guardian of the Depths, when marine biologist Kaia Jones inherits her grandparents’ secluded cottage in a private Scottish cove, she expects solitude and a place to continue her work on the sea. Instead, repeated visits from a mysterious woman arriving by rowboat...

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,...

In The Ember Stone by Shari Marshall, Kori Ember does not want anything to do with the less-than-normal things that are part of her heritage. Kori travels the world with her lottery winnings, determined to ignore her magical abilities, though she cannot fully escape them....

“Everything’s the same as it’s always been, Kurt. It’s only our perception of the world that’s changed.” In the novel Without A Face by Lonnie Busch, that sentence would be a significant understatement. The curtain rises in Rescue, a small town somewhere in the American...

Nick Chambers is grieving the recent deaths of his older brother, Alex, and mother, when his estranged younger sister, Deidre, asks to meet with him. He shows up at the rendezvous, only to be attacked by a man, whom he later learns is a demon....

In Sophia Kouidou-Giles’s historic Ariadne, when Cretan princess Ariadne is sent to Athens as part of a fragile alliance, she enters a city strained by famine, political unrest, and rising hostility toward her family. Her brother Androgeus arrives to compete in the Panathenaic Games, but...

Twenty-four-year-old Nina Brandt, a paralegal in Salt Lake City, Utah, is dissatisfied with her ordinary life. While her job paid the bills, she didn’t particularly love it. If only she were better at mathematics and didn’t wear glasses, she wouldn’t have abandoned her childhood dream...