Upon opening Paul Kaplan's The Thingy That’s Stringy (and Other Ridiculous Poems), young readers enter a playful world of everyday moments and familiar objects that turn into ridiculously silly rhymes. This book is full of short poems that bounce quickly from deli counters selling laughs...

She Who Floats Above the Breeze by Jennifer Conklin is the third book in The Adventure Above series. It is a well-written book that takes young readers on an exciting adventure as two best friends embark on a journey of discovery. Anya and Breck embark...

Advent Blue by Roland Allnach is a riveting psychological technothriller. The story unfolds against the backdrop of the interplanetary conflict between Earth and its Mars colony. Will Fortner is a hardworking recluse who is a navigator at the CHOICE Institute. His dream promotion to a...

“The world didn’t leave us much, but it left enough. Enough to remind us that maybe, just maybe, we still matter.” Perhaps, but the novel Seeker by Glenn S. Robertson would indicate that we are a long way from what we once were. The world...

Nick Drake is a war veteran turned ranger and game warden for the US Fish and Wildlife Service stationed in Harney County, Oregon. He was on Malheur Lake trying to catch a bird poacher when he witnessed a fighter jet pilot fall into the water....

Carrie Kabak’s Shibby Magee unfolds in two timelines, following the identical twins Isabelle “Shibby” and Isadorah “Dorah” Magee, who are like chalk and cheese. The story starts in the 1970s when the kids are abandoned by their Traveler mother, Vera Coffey. They are raised by...

The Quantum Gate by Bill Combs is the first book in The Ascension Chronicles series. The story is a metaphysical thriller that blends quantum theory with history and the supernatural. Ethan Cross, a disgraced physicist cast out of academia for his "wild" theories of quantum...

It is 1891. Richard Carnby, Terrence Alexander “Axel” Hastings, Percival Wallace, Dr. Stanthorpe Whitehall, Emma Westover, and Jane Halifax each receive a letter offering membership in a clandestine organization. To accept, they must appear at a specific address. As they heed the invitation, they meet...

In John Wesley Wilson’s Straight to Hell: Memoir of an Ex-Evangelical Pastor, Wilson grows up in rural Alabama inside a world shaped by Pentecostal religion, family violence, poverty, and fear of divine punishment. After becoming a pastor, husband, and father, he spends years trying to...

A Fine Madness: A Novella in Stories and Other Mad Stories by Jeffrey Feingold is a collection of thought-provoking tales that explore human fragility, masculinity, loss, and identity. You meet characters like B, a bald Jewish guy trying to make sense of life and loneliness...

Scott Fleuter’s Behind the Badge: From Police Chief to Opioid Addict follows Fleuter from a childhood where danger teaches his body to react before thought into a law-enforcement career that makes protection his public role. He starts as a street officer and eventually becomes a...

Under The Apple Tree by Kathleen J. Easley opens with Kate Ecklund, recently divorced, buying an old Victorian mansion in the small town of Salmon Falls, Washington, hoping to turn it into a bed and breakfast. As she and her brother Jared start the renovations,...

In Diane Hester’s The Fortress of Us, after her mother dies suddenly in their Adelaide kitchen, eight-year-old Kelsey Haslett moves with her father, Ryan, to rural Port Lincoln, where a tree house becomes the hiding place for Molly, a silent child she has smuggled from...

In his memoir Last August, Joe Gulla shares the month he believes will be his mother Mary Ann’s final one at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. Alzheimer’s has brought Mary Ann to the hospice, where ordinary conversation has stopped, yet Joe keeps arriving with the...

If puffins could bake, what would they make? Poppy Puffin’s Pastries by Ruth Amanda is about a pastry shop in Scotland owned by a bird named Poppy Puffin. Through playful rhymes and a bunch of puffin characters, the story introduces a delicious-looking assortment of baked...

The Havana Syndrome: The Malecón Fall is a spy thriller novel by Dirk Marks. When the ambassador for the Kingdom of Tabari, Julius Jumaane, dies under mysterious circumstances in Havana, Cuba, Alex Simba, an intelligence officer, is called upon to solve the mystery. Alex is...

Every family has a story of courage somewhere in its past. For the Swarts, theirs begins in 1912 in the Netherlands. Inspired by the experiences of the author's own ancestors, eight-year-old Helena Swart is at the center of it all in Penny S. Ledbetter's De...

The House That Fire Built by Kirk Glaser is a collection of narrative poems that tells a story about family trauma. It follows a man who inherits his father-in-law’s house and moves in with his wife and daughter. His father died of cancer and left...

After completing their first assignment, the six candidates of the Order of the Steel Rose—Mr. Carnby, Dr. Whitehall, Axel, Percy, Emma, and Jane—are accepted into the Order. However, they have many questions about the evil they encountered and the culprits in their custody. They soon...

In All We Keep Buried by Pamela Ungashick, a friendship is tested when Kiera is caught up in the disappearance of her friend Naomi’s ten-year-old nephew, Scottie. Everyone suspects Reggie Parks. Reggie’s brother Evan disappeared years ago, and he was the prime suspect. After all...