A Painted Lily by Angela Hoke tells the story of a young man plagued by the mysteries of his past and his true heritage, who sets out on a quest to discover his roots. Tony is accompanied by his long-term best friend and confidante, Becca....

Genna's Fight: Will She Be Able to Discover Her True Self & Get Her Son Back In Time? by Sheldon D. Newton begins in a way so that the reader can’t help but keep reading. The hook is very powerful: “I am divorcing you Genna....

Southern Patchwork Quilt is a combined work of prose, poetry, fact and fiction, written by Phyllis F. McManus. With an autobiographical beginning, Phyllis tells of how money was hard to come by in the 1950s. A child’s new dress meant blistered fingers, as the parents...

“Listen,” Gabriel Da Silva told his two children, Sarah and Jacob, “listen well because I am preparing you for life.” These arresting words open That Woman: Beating the Odds in Colonial New York by Wayne Clark, a historical novel that deals with kidnapping and...

What the River Wants by Arthur Byrd is a gripping Southern fiction novel that features family, love, loyalty, solitude, and the subtle ways the past has its grip on us. The past is not always gone; it lives in our memory and, at times, it...

Never Summer by Tim Blaine is an adventure mixed with elements of self-discovery, the search for meaning, and the hidden importance of mortality. Vlad D’Agostino has lived the best days of his life in Japan. Now diagnosed with tuberculosis in its terminal phase and barely...

Honor in the Blood, by S.H. Montgomery, is the second installment featuring the Savio and Callahan families of Chicago. The two families, united through the marriage of Francesca and Fin, further continue their petty squabbles based on generations of pent-up fear and hatred for the...

“The first thing they teach you in the army is how to make a bed—a lot of good that is doing me now. You can’t make a bed if someone else is in it.” These are the first words that stuck in my mind when...

The Hook by Kathleen Doler is aptly subtitled: Surfing to Survive a Shattered Family, Drugs, Gangs and the FBI. Set in an idyllic surfing town, this book explores the depth of kinship, crime, and justice, while looking at how far a woman can go to...

Destiny's Design by Rosemary Gard is a novel that beautifully captures the soul and spirit of immigrants. Although I haven’t read any work by this author, and even though this is part of a series, I was able to connect with the story and the...