The Gift follows Butch Blackwell, a boy raised by his mother, Pansy, inside the strict world of the Jehovah’s Witnesses after his father, Ace Sharkey, disappears before his birth. Butch grows up in rural California under rules that shape his life, while rancher Steve Bultemeyer...

Matthew West-James’s Burning Salt begins with the Jaka, an ancient civilization that has learned to cross between universes through the Nexus after earlier expansion nearly destroyed them. When a rupture starts sending three-dimensional matter into a planar universe, every crossing tears through the two-dimensional environment...

Robb Erwin’s A Refuge of Last Resort follows twenty-two-year-old Lorelei Rücker, a former wildlife student trapped in debt bondage at Saino-Blatt, a Florida consulting company built around corporate scams. Lorelei has hyperosmia, which lets her detect odors other people miss, but no warning prepares her...

Held in the Vanishing by Ti Mougne is a memoir about a dutiful daughter who becomes her parents' caregiver. In this book, Mougne talks about the wonderful, unpleasant, draining, and heart-wrenching moments she, her husband, and her son experienced while living with her parents. Mougne...

Guardians of Destiny, the first book of Louise Briony Hallam’s Stone of Souls trilogy, presents the celestial world of Asteria, a realm now threatened by Chaos. The universal forces of creation (Light of Being) and Chaos once fought, and Chaos was defeated. But now the...

Mickey Jenks, a private investigator, receives an anonymous tip about Claudia Danvers, a missing woman in a cold case. The tipster says he witnessed her murder two decades ago but fears the killer will come after him if he speaks to the police. He asks...

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...

“At what point does the desire to succeed become indistinguishable from the willingness to harm?” For Tanner Barrett, the protagonist of Aaron Ryan's short novel The Darkness Within, that question is answered in a horrific manner. Tanner is an indie author caught in a slump...

The Kikiloa Chronicles: Book One by Erik D. Larson is a sweeping, time-bending adventure that opens at the end of time and then doubles back to San Francisco, two hundred thousand years ago, and everywhere in between. At its center are two characters: Kiki, an...

The plan was simple: six-year-old Patrice Johnson was supposed to meet an untimely end, and Crossing, an aptly named crossing guard, was the one selected to chaperone Patrice to the afterlife. Crossing gets his assignment mixed up, and things go awry. Since Crossing needs to...