A delightful blend of crime, coming of age, and psychological thriller, The White Hat Ruffian by James McVan features sophisticated characters and a tightly written plot full of twists. The narrative begins with the protagonist’s backstory with dramatic childhood episodes, a parent arrested, and the...

“The devil took my hand and led me into darkness.” It’s the calm before the storm in The Shadow of the Firefly by Jeff Shannon. Set in the late '60s in a town called Sycamore Valley, ten-year-old Maggie Schoop loves playing baseball and proving her...

Some people would categorize The Victory Perspective by E.J. Kellett as religious; others might call it daring. I call it very creative and ingenious! It might not be one of the most original ideas, but the approach, the story line and the plot are something...

The Good Night Knight by Josh Will is a humorous, beautifully illustrated book written in rhyme. A knight who guards the city at night keeps the townspeople safe and happy. He knows each of them and treats them like friends. They repay him with...

The Jericho Prophecy by Fiona Tarr is biblical fiction based on the fall of Jericho. It has been forty years since the Israelites wandered in the desert, and they arrive in the land of the Canaanites, ready to claim the Promised Land under the leadership...

Shadow Beneath the Waves by Matt Betts is set in the near future, a few years after the awesome fighting machines known as Cudgels helped win what no one wanted to call the Third World War. One of their Cudgels went missing in the dying...

The Sleeping King is a remarkable book about climate change, written by Laurel Colless. Hidden away in Gum Tree Rest Home in Australia since his parents’ murders years earlier, eleven-year-old Peter Blue is woken from his sleep by a tall stranger, Tollen, who has a...

A day trader and seven-year divorcee, Linda has vowed never to be attached — not in the way her mom is attached, anyway — to any man. Marked for death, she finds solace in a small town on the coast of Oregon, making Sea Crest...

The Antiquities Dealer by Ed Protzel is a mixture of religious fanaticism and science fiction. Twenty years ago, Miriam Solomon was David Greenberg’s only love. She repaid him by running away to Israel, taking Solly, his best friend, with her. Solly was one of the...

Siblings Joe and Marie are off on an adventure to see the animals in the second installment of the Secret Club series, The Secret Club Visits the Zoo written by Joseph Cook and with illustrations by Maria Fonseca. They pitch the idea to their parents...

Marie and Joe are part of a Secret Club. Only special people can belong to this club and they must all want to have adventures that teach them something new and exciting. They had already enjoyed a trip to the zoo where they learned about...

In Carolyn Arnold's The Secret of the Lost Pharaoh, Matthew Connor is once again called upon to unearth a legend. A map possibly pointing the way to the mythical Emerald Tablets is discovered by a colleague in Egypt, along with the tomb of an unknown...

It’s not always the magnitude of the crisis that makes a novel great, but how it is handled and Paul Shadinger shows incredible skill in conflict development in this novel. The first book I read from this author was Code Name: Crescent and, seduced by...

Cedar Springs High students Zelda, Sabrina, Andrew, Gabby, and Justin are the ones everyone around them－peers, parents, and teachers－deem as lost causes, which rightly gives this YA mystery thriller its title. Two undercover FBI agents, Ryan Nash and Patricia Nichols, summoned them to a ‘group-therapy...

The Face of Expression by Aaron Woodson is a collection of unusually and poignantly written reflections and poetry, each so short it fills only a page or half of it — snippets of thoughts, an emotion, a glance into reality, a feeling of change, a...

Lauren is drop-dead gorgeous. When she enters a room, she catches every eye…and she knows it. Her looks and sensuality are her weapons of choice when she wants what wealthy men can give her: a lavish lifestyle and money. Lauren is a polyandrist: a woman...

A man who has lost everything — his job, his wife and daughter — gets the one chance to redeem himself, to save a person’s life. In The Chosen Ones by Lisa Luciano, Brody gets fired from his job as a reporter and his wife...

In The Missing Day, author Mario Marchiò spins an interesting tale about a young man who is running from the law and a minister traveling around the world who happen to sit next to each other on a first class trip to New Zealand, where...

Tragedy, revenge, greed and a wealthy young woman struggling to find her place in society sets the stage for The Player: Rockliffe Book Three by Stella Riley. After the tragic death of his fiancée, and shunned by his family, Adrian Sinclair Devereux was forced to...

The Clothes That Make You by L.S. Kilroy is the story of Sally, a young woman in the late 1960s navigating through high school in a rural Massachusetts suburb outside of Boston. This turbulent time in history is compounded by the unexpected loss of her...