Joy Michelle Austin’s Half Agony, Half Hope follows Rick Wentworth after his engagement to Anne Elliot ends and a message apparently from Anne draws him back to the Elliot estate. The woman waiting is Louisa, Anne’s identical twin, who drugs Rick before imprisoning him in...

In Painting Over Cracks by Lee Bukowski, Beth and Danny were in an accident. They were hit on Danny’s side of the car; he was thrown out and died at the scene. Beth survived with a few injuries but now faces life without Danny. To...

Mark Seader’s Proof of Theory follows Dr. Quinten Trent, a physicist at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, after a one-fifth-second anomaly suggests an object has lost twenty percent of its weight. Quinten believes the reading may point to a way of interrupting gravity itself, so he...

In Larry Good and Meredith Good’s The Tree of Ticket Leaves, Meri misses a voyage to England when sudden illness keeps her behind in Virginia. The next morning, she sees a battered tackling dummy stand up and walk away from the football field where he...

In Razing Craze by Meredith Good, Allie Trask is having the worst week of her life: she loses her job at the bank and is about to start from zero, her good-on-paper boyfriend dumps her, and she is having panic attacks. She impulsively decides to...

Annie Dike crafts a story about what remains when the ground gives way in this big-hearted saga of trauma and grit. Clovis tells the story of Calliope “Callie” Potts, which begins with a prologue in which her brother Jude’s little sandcastle washes away in the...

Julie Cruse’s The Burn List tells the story of abuse and a life shaped through enduring violence and survival, from a childhood characterized by domestic poverty and abuse to a distressing journey through higher education that replicates the very harm she sought to escape. College...

Sinner’s Prayer by Dwain Lee is the second book in the Dan Randolph/Greg Zhu mysteries. Plumbers discover a skeleton in a concrete trench beneath the youth room floor of the Parkvale Presbyterian Church in Louisville. It is the remains of a former youth leader and...

Deborah J. Brasket’s This Sea Within follows Lena, a young journalist who goes to San Balanque to connect with her heritage and to follow a story. What begins as a chance to learn more about the country soon brings her inside the world of the...

Nothing Left to Lose by Len Joy is a moving, multi-generational tale of love, loss, reconnection, and family. When Clover Lane was just a young teenager, she ran away and headed to the bright lights of San Francisco, to Haight-Ashbury, where the anti-war, summer-of-love, hippie...

S.R. Woodward’s Centurion follows Mark Royce, an office worker recovering from the removal of a brain tumor, after anonymous tickets take him and his boss to a live paranormal television show at Gosbecks Manor. Mark has spent months insisting that his earlier visions were symptoms...

Seeing Sunny Again is a collection of Americana short stories by Paul Clayton that explores many issues. Among them are memory, loss, family, friendship, love, and resilience across different eras of American life. The stories range from coming-of-age experiences in mid-century Philadelphia to wartime Vietnam,...

Most non-profits fail within the first five years due to financial decline, operational collapse, lack of leadership, legal troubles, etc. According to Ryan Dewey Smith, you have to be a pragmatic optimist to run a non-profit organization. Smith is the founding chairman and CEO of...

Laura Briel Sullivan has written an adult tale for those who are grieving in Sailing With Angels. The story is both gracefully poetic and extraordinarily visually beautiful. Princess Briel takes her sailboat out on the open water. Along the way, she meets many characters who...

Tony Burnett's Mirage is a gritty crime thriller with lead characters Carrie James and DJ (Kevin) Cash, who don't trust each other and have opposite purposes. But they agree to work together to bring down a drug cartel on the Mexican-US border. Carrie has demons...

Unshakable Dreams by Elizabeth Ann Thompson takes us right into 1988 with Miranda Graaf, a young rural veterinarian whose life implodes when her husband Hank is locked up in Wyoming over an old probation slip-up. To make matters more complicated, Miranda gives birth a month...

In Day of Wrath by Otho Eskin, DC Metropolitan Police detective Marko Zorn and his partner, Saoirse Richmond, must solve the murder of Father Vincent Holmes, Cardinal Archbishop of Washington. The victim is found on the cathedral floor, as if he fell from the stone...

Keith A. Hartzler’s Whispers on the Swing is a Christian collection of short prayers and questions written as a private conversation with God. Hartzler begins by telling readers these lines came to him during time with his Creator, then lets each page hold one thought....

The Inheritance by Paul Peters is a moving look at how a person can rebuild their life after hitting absolute rock bottom. The story follows Jacob Steele, a young man who comes home from military service as a very broken person. But instead of finding...

The Attenuating Puritan by Robert McGuiness is a work of satire that makes the reader wince, or at times laugh somewhat uncomfortably at the state of mental illness, industrial contaminants, and other factors affecting modern day America. A man who has likely suffered from bipolar...