When Arjuna leaves for the United States for his master's degree, the plan is clear: school for two years, get a good job, return to India and marry a family-approved wife, start a family in America, etc. But this plan succeeds only to the point...

Lost Pigeons is a slice-of-life drama by George Arau. Michael Foster and his brother Chris had been close since childhood. Always the more driven of the two, Chris was a star athlete in high school who joined the US Army after graduation. After a stint...

Jane Meyer is the heroine of Beach of the Dead: Book Two of the Heartland Trilogy, but we only meet Jane briefly before she changes her name to Ana Jiménez. The novel opens with a carefully crafted hook: “My first purchase in my new life...

From the hook of the first two pages to the rollercoaster ride of emotions throughout, readers will be drawn into JJ Elliott’s There Are No Rules For This. The fact that this is JJ Elliott’s debut novel makes one greedy for the next. A tight...

Following the ousting of President Travvis E Donnelly from power, the US was run by a military junta. The People’s Second Amendment Militia (2 AM), an outlaw group dedicated to fighting far-right extremists, received intel about a planned operation by Donnelly’s loyalists called Allegiance America,...

The Music Within Your Heart by Isaac Samuel Miller is the story of Sophia as she walks down memory lane. The first big shock of Sophia’s life came when her brother’s mutilated body was found in a lake, and she could do nothing. Sad and...

Beatrice Knight’s Alverstone: A Regency Family Saga of Love and War concerns Marquess Jasper Alverstone, who doesn’t want to marry Angelica Thorne, despite encouragement from his mother. He finds the woman has no compassion for others. Meanwhile, Charlotte Winford is trying to discourage Squire Henry...

I know from personal experience how difficult it is, even in a short story, to create a fictional character based on real-life events and make readers fully relate to that protagonist’s emotions and decisions in a twisty murder mystery. But that is what D.F. Kennedy,...

Melanie to the Rescue and Other Unlikely Tales by Carol June Stover is every short story lover’s delight. Each of the fifteen works in this anthology is heavily character-driven. The titular Melanie to the Rescue focuses on a romance author, Lorraine Woodruff, who becomes more...

Cold Blows the Wind by Catherine Meyrick is a poignant and thought-provoking tale set in bustling Hobart Town, Australia, in 1878. The story follows protagonist Ellen Thompson, a spirited young woman with a baby, torn between her attachment to her family and her desire to...