Isabelle Marsden, "Belle" to everyone, is thirty-four and running from a Chicago life that has hollowed her out. In The Utterly Unacceptable Atrocity of Isabelle Marsden, Nan Sanders Pokerwinski drops her, fresh out of a job, into a Kansas town chosen almost by accident: a...

Eric Bush’s The Meaning of Androsia is an epic odyssey that follows Ilya Erynovich Koskayin, also known throughout his two-thousand-year-old life by thirty different names. He wakes up in a train station with no memory, yet his instinct brings back skills and knowledge that can...

The Adventures of Kimo by Eric A. Javier captures the feeling of being a young child desperate to escape a mundane afternoon. Kimo is stuck at home because a thick fog has blanketed the California coast, ending any chance of his going to the beach....

The Casserole Code is a fabulous debut cozy mystery by Maissie Wren. The whimsical town of Harmony Creek in Tennessee is known for its long-standing traditional Annual Church Potluck. Nora Beth Hensley, the town’s nurse practitioner, bakes her grandmother’s Blueberry Buckle for the event. At...

The Gift follows Butch Blackwell, a boy raised by his mother, Pansy, inside the strict world of the Jehovah’s Witnesses after his father, Ace Sharkey, disappears before his birth. Butch grows up in rural California under rules that shape his life, while rancher Steve Bultemeyer...

“At what point does the desire to succeed become indistinguishable from the willingness to harm?” For Tanner Barrett, the protagonist of Aaron Ryan's short novel The Darkness Within, that question is answered in a horrific manner. Tanner is an indie author caught in a slump...

The Kikiloa Chronicles: Book One by Erik D. Larson is a sweeping, time-bending adventure that opens at the end of time and then doubles back to San Francisco, two hundred thousand years ago, and everywhere in between. At its center are two characters: Kiki, an...

The Art of Being Let Go by Amulya Veldanda Vadali aims to comfort anyone who has ever lost their job. After an hour's drive to the office, a tired, hardworking woman is told she is being let go. She is given a generic layoff speech...

The Steal is Book 1 of Sunset City Secrets by Ella Kane, and a great start to the series. Bella is a Reiki practitioner with dreams of becoming a screenwriter. Jason is the son of Lewis Hall, who embodies the stereotypes of the domineering father...

The Family Speaks by Kirk Ward Robinson is an extensive, multi-generational family saga that focuses on Blaize Speaks, a fiercely stubborn Appalachian matriarch with a terminal illness, and the children she raised in the poor town of Bilbo, Tennessee. The story follows the fractured lives...