In Eilidh MacTavish's Any Way Out, an unnamed child lives with Pop, a father who destroys her youth with physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Mother, who is also a victim, still lashes out at the child and blames her for much of the abuse. As...

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...

Life had been going well for young James Fields until his father died in 1984, when James was thirteen. Bills began to pile up, and since his mother’s meager salary could only cover so much, life became a tough struggle. They moved to Oakland in...

A call for help unravels a plot to return native land to its rightful owners in R.L. Keck’s Absence of Mercy. The story features two explosive crises. In Wyoming, a radical “Professor” is said to be falsifying soil contamination reports, and E.J. Lonetree is dispatched...

Chris Wind’s This Is What Happens is a rare gem. A fifty-five-year-old woman feels stuck, wasted, and wounded. All she wants is to return to a cabin on a lakeside one final September to go through journals written for thirty-five years and unravel the mystery...

Dorothy Van Soest’s Until It’s Over is an enthralling thriller told through two distinct timelines that rise and ebb like the tides of a turbulent sea. Sylvia Jensen is an octogenarian activist who suffers a heart attack at a rally at the state Capitol when...

In When They Came Home by Terri Lewis, we follow Milton, a standard American farm boy whose life is split in two after he gets shipped off to the battlefields of Europe in 1918. He survives the fighting, but the terrifying sights and sounds follow...

In Mitchell Hadley’s The Book of Revelations, at age eight, Nan Jaffe loses her parents after one frightening night in Indianapolis. She is taken to Illinois by her grandparents, who rename her Robin and sever her past. Years later, she lives in San Francisco as...

In Nick Iuppa’s Evolution’s Angels, when four children survive separate disasters, their hospital scans reveal a brain structure that scientists at Leland University have never seen before. Dr. Kathleen Kelly studies Melissa Washington, a Rochester shooting survivor; Ángel Rivera, a Tucson ranch boy; Lillie Allonzo,...

Lynn Hesse’s Part of the Stars begins in 1878, Arkansas, when midwife Myra Logan vanishes after visiting the McCurdy family and wakes inside a mountain cave ruled by pale beings. Her husband Zepeda searches across the winter frontier while Myra’s aunt, Nellie Gatewood, presses officials...