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,...

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...

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,...

A Camping Conundrum by Stacy Walker is an investigation of robbery and murder on a camping trip. This is a fast-moving story that holds the reader’s attention from the first page to the very last. The main characters are Liz, who is an exemplary Certified...

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....

Pedaling East by E. A. Coe follows FBI agents Marina Butnari and Doug Hill as they face an unexpected suspension after a tense encounter with a corrupt local militia linked to human trafficking. Instead of just waiting around, they plan a long bicycle trip across...

“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...