Twists and Turns
Once Upon a Crime follows a veteran homicide detective who needs to find a vigilante serial killer before she kidnaps her daughter. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration for Once Upon A Crime came from my reading about the hunt for the Son of Sam. He’d sent a taunting message to an NYPD detective threatening the detective’s daughter.
Another part of the inspiration came from a criminal case I worked on when I was a police officer about the sexual assault of a young lady.
How did you come up with the idea for the antagonist in this story, and how did it change as you wrote?
In writing Once Upon A Crime, given that most sex crimes have women as victims, I wanted a female character hunting for sexual offenders to be the antagonist. At first, she was a disgruntled police officer whose back story was about her being dispatched to do a preliminary investigation of the brutal sexual assault of a young girl. A news item gave me the idea for a different antagonist: Penny Grimes.
When you first sat down to write this story, did you know where you were going, or did the twists come as you were writing?
When I started writing Once Upon A Crime, I had fairly good idea of where I was going with it. As the story took root, several ideas came to mind for the twists and turns used in it.
Can you tell us more about what’s in store for Detective Madison Chase and the direction of the next book?
At this time, I haven’t decided whether to write a sequel to Once Upon A Crime.
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In a twisted game of cat and mouse, Detective Madison Chase must outwit a serial killer targeting sex offenders—before her own daughter becomes the next victim.
October in Fort Worth takes on a sinister hue for Penny Grimes. She’s not just a vigilante; she’s a poetic executioner, leaving headless pedophiles as her gruesome calling cards. Each murder scene is adorned with a chilling rhyme, taunting the police and, in particular, haunting veteran homicide detective Madison Chase.
But Penny has a darker agenda. She’s set her sights on Chase’s daughter, Emily—a blonde, blue-eyed four-year-old, living image of the child Penny has always yearned for. Unbeknownst to Chase, while she’s hot on the trail of Fort Worth’s most elusive serial killer, Penny is plotting to kidnap Emily.
Unrelenting Optimism
Stolen Lives follows a journalist who uses her intuitive gifts to draw a connection between endangered children during the Spanish Civil War and babies missing in present-day Spain. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
In 2019, I made my second trip to Spain to research settings and story ideas for Stolen Lives, the sequel to Zahara and the Lost Books of Light. I was very fortunate to have an opportunity to meet María Bueno, who at the time was President of SOS Bebés Robados (SOS Stolen Babies). María shared her personal story with me in the same openly emotional way that, in the book, Fabiana Carrasco tells Alienor about the kidnapping of her own baby. I admired María’s honesty and courage and promised her I would bring as much of the story of Spain’s stolen babies to light as I could in my next work of fiction.
Back in Seattle, I started to write while continuing to do background research—and that’s when found what I immediately recognized as an important story thread—the shipping of children by their parents to the USSR for “safe-keeping” during the Spanish Civil War. Hadn’t their lives been stolen too, when Stalin refused to let them return to Spain for more than twenty years? What if one of the Niños de Rusia was recruited by the KGB and had conflicting loyalties? Finally, I had enough “what ifs” to get down to serious storytelling.
What are some things that you find interesting about the human condition that you think make for great fiction?
I’d say that humankind is constantly evolving, moving forward into the unknown no matter how much we pretend to control our lives. Hence our fascination with history, our way of trying to cope with events that were overwhelming at the time they happened. This is one reason that Alienor, the protagonist of the Zahara Series, has the gift of second sight – Vijitas. She sees through the eyes of her female ancestors and this allows the reader to do the same—to feel and touch the past. Although a seasoned journalist, Ally also believes that if we preserve knowledge we just might start to learn from our mistakes. This unrelenting optimism is one of the things I find most interesting about the human condition.
The other human quality that fascinates me is the duality built into the human psyche. As a novelist, I am sworn to endowing each character I create with enough flaws and illusions to balance their occasional heroism or selfless acts. This constant tension from dueling energies serves to soften the clay, allowing me to populate the page with humans who readers can identify with and care about.
What were some of the trials that you felt were important to highlight in main character Alienor?
Alienor is an investigative reporter with lots of heart, which in her case means being willing to take sides when she can make a difference rather than merely observe, write, and email her copy to the Seattle Courier. In Zahara and the Lost Books of Light, she literally swears allegiance to the librarians who are guarding precious books saved from the Inquisition. In Stolen Lives, she is cunningly pulled into a decades-old struggle over ownership of a crate of stolen gold coins. Although she always emerges with words on paper, the stories she ends up writing are much more complex, exciting, and dangerous than expected. Her love affair with Mico also challenges her to learn how to compromise, a skill she’s never successfully practiced.
Can fans of the Zahara series look forward to a third installment? What are you currently working on?
Currently, I am enjoying playing simple classical guitar pieces as I let my subconscious cook up some ideas for Book Three.
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Stolen Lives begins during World War II on the Island of Rhodes and takes the reader on a suspense-filled journey through the decades to present day Spain.
Being a Human is Really Hard
The Requirement of Grief shares your experiences with grief and loss as well as the impact of suicide and the resilience of humans to cope with grief and find hope even in the darkest of times. Why was this an important book for you to write?
Initially, I was writing to help myself process the complicated relationship that I had with my sister Alexis. Each time I wrote about something that happened between us or in our family, I thought of it as its own essay. After Alexis died, I came to an awareness that the things I’d been writing were going to be part of a book, and I began to think about how to put these together in a way that would allow a reader to come along on the journey.
Ultimately when you publish a memoir, it has to be a written with an eye toward the reader and the audience, otherwise it’s more of a journal. I spent a lot of time shaping the chapters and choosing a deliberate structure in order to keep the reader engaged and willing to stay with me for 200 plus pages that deal with very heavy topics.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
I’m always telling my son that being a human is really hard. I tell him this because I want him to develop an awareness of the complicated nature of feelings and the fact that it can be quite overwhelming to experience the full range of emotions. I hope anyone who reads this book will come away with an understanding of each character’s perspective (mine, Alexis’s, my parents), and I hope that this understanding will allow readers to expand their capacity for compassion in their own lives. All the characters in this book, especially me, are deeply flawed, but we are also trying to do the best we can.
I appreciated the candid nature with which you told your story. What was the hardest thing for you to write about?
At a certain point while writing, I decided that I needed to include chapters from my sister’s imagined perspective. Once I made this decision, something clicked. It felt right and necessary. I wanted readers to feel that they knew my sister as well as they knew me. After I had written several of these chapters, I was talking to one of my writing mentors and she asked if I’d written the scene of my sister’s death. I hadn’t, but the moment she asked I knew that I needed to.
This was the hardest chapter to write. I had a fixed number of facts. I knew who Alexis called on her last day. I knew that she sat out on the porch in the sun with a glass of wine. I knew the time that my parents had last spoken to her and what they said, and of course I knew what kind of pills the coroner had found in her stomach and the drug levels in her blood. In order to write the rest, I had to imagine what Alexis might have felt on that day; what she might have thought about as she wrote the note she left for us; how she might have decided which pills to take. This was not something I ever expected to write and it was incredibly difficult, but writing it opened something up inside of me, and I think it was an important piece for the reader to have.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from your story?
Loving a family member through any illness, whether it’s cancer or Multiple Sclerosis or even something small like a pinched nerve, is difficult. Illness and pain can change a loved one’s personality and outlook on life. It could feel like you’ve lost the person even while they are still alive. That’s how it felt with my sister. She was there, but she was not the sister I grew up with.
I had a whole host of emotions that cropped up for me while Alexis was alive, and they were not easy feelings to confront. There was a well of anger, resentment, bitterness, and sadness, which left me feeling a great deal of shame and guilt. My hope is that anyone in a similar situation will feel seen as they read, and perhaps less burdened by shame than I was.
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The Requirement of Grief lays bare the relationship between two sisters and the bond that remains in the wake of a suicide. In startlingly honest prose, Ariano tracks her grief journey chronologically through days, months, and years; all the way through the birth of her first son. But will the unparalleled new joy of motherhood be powerful enough to drive out her grief?
Equal parts shatteringly sad and infinitely hopeful, The Requirement of Grief tells the story of one person learning to bear the unbearable.
How We Value Service
Through Her Lens follows a woman working as a photographer and British Intelligence agent who struggles for personal autonomy during a period of history where women are often overlooked. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I have long loved history, but it doesn’t take much looking to realize that much of what has been kept and written about is men. One evening I was watching an episode of NOVA, a PBS program, called “3D Spies of World War II.” They talked about the V1 and V2 bombs and the pilots who took the images, but they also spoke about the women who worked at RAF Medmenham. Many of them outranked men because the creator of the 3D approach thought women would be better at analysis than men. A woman is credited for finding the V1, Constance Babington Smith. I had a short story with a character named Millie, who was being evacuated from London at the start of the war. My writing group had been encouraging me to explore a longer story for Millie and with this nugget of information about RAF Medmenham, I had my path and one that I wouldn’t have to work to fill in too many gaps. Women did the important analysis work. I only had to learn about them to create a more well-rounded Millie and the world that she would inhabit. It was a chance to tell a true and little-known story about one of the many important things women did to help the Allies’ efforts in defeating the Axis powers.
What were some of the trials that you felt were important to highlight the character’s development?
For a single woman working in the time, the trials were many. It was important to me not to gloss over that fact. For that reason, I made her family rich. Money wasn’t something I wanted her to struggle with. I did want to highlight the limited choices women had. The British government wasn’t going to give her a gun or let her take her camera into the fight for that matter, but they expected her to contribute all the same and with little or no credit. Every day Millie was going to open her beloved newspaper to see honor bestowed on the men of her day. She was going to have to risk everything, remember Britain was regularly being bombed, and get no credit at all. How was an ambitious person to manage something like this? How this would shape Millie interested me. It was also critical that her father not treat her like his sons. He could want things for and from her, but only within what his peers would find acceptable. William may have had progressive ways, due to the influences of his wife—Millie’s mother, Margaret—but they didn’t naturally flow to Millie. They would both need to bend and the conflict between them would need to shape them. Finally, I couldn’t create a world without grave personal loss. No one escaped the war without pain of some sort. Millie couldn’t be an exception.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
The thought I kept coming back to was this: There are things we want to do and things we should do, but unfortunately they are rarely the same things. Every character in Through Her Lens struggled with this fact. I believe most of my readers do as well. In this way I was able to take an old story and pull it into the present.
I also wanted the reader to grapple with how we value service. Why is a surgeon more valuable than a garbage man? Why is a man’s work, in the case of my novel, more noteworthy than a woman’s? Why have there been countless stories told of Winston Churchill, the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy, the men who endured the Battle of the Bulge, but few if any of the intelligence work the women did on Churchill’s behalf, the women who worked alongside him in his bunker in London, or the nurses and other women who followed the men into France, or of those who worked without a gun in the Ardennes? I do not mean to diminish the work and sacrifices of the men, only to ask why not the women too.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
I found writing flirtatious banter quite fun. I have an idea swimming in my imagination of a group of female whiskey trippers, the folks who hauled booze during prohibition, and have written a few short stories to unearth my heroine. As you might imagine women were overlooked at the time and the 1920s were pretty bad for women. So perhaps an alternate reality of the time or maybe a more modern setting like revamped Smokey and the Bandit, populated by women, of course. I’d like to spend my time with a lighter topic and give my sense of humor a bit of a workout. I’ve visited a few spots in Appalachia to start getting a feel for possible characters and see who I can unearth for more inspiration. And I am constructing a cast with short stories and essays which is my second favorite part of the writing process. As to when it will be ready, who can say—soon, I hope! But research is my favorite part of the process, and it can take some time.
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Three years ago, Millie dutifully packed away her cameras and began her career in Secret Intelligence after discovering her surrogate mother’s flat leveled during the Blitz. Her commander has reassigned her to help verify and destroy the Nazis’ long-range vengeance weapons program before D-Day. Amidst the urgent demands of her work, a Royal Air Force pilot named Callum won’t let her forget who she is. He is always there – sneaking her a camera and tempting her with a life spent with him instead of her fiancé, Elliot.
Melissa Bacon masterfully captures Millie’s struggle to choose between her dreams and her duty to family and country. Through Her Lens chronicles a piece of history based on actual events surrounding Operation Crossbow, a top-secret intelligence investigation tasked with stopping the V1 flying bomb and V2 rocket program. This exploration of women’s empowerment is a must-read for those interested in untold stories of the heroes of World War II.
Automobilia
Automobilia, compiled and edited by Jason J. Marchi and Jeffery L. Buford Jr, is an intriguing anthology that interweaves short stories and poems, using automobiles as a central motif to explore a tapestry of human experiences. This collection skillfully spans multiple genres, including thriller, drama, and horror, providing a varied literary landscape.
In this anthology, vehicles are not merely background elements but pivotal to the narrative structure. For instance, “Duel” is a gripping tale where protagonist Mann faces off against a relentless truck driver in a high-stakes road chase to San Francisco. “Passages” delves into the poignant story of Beth, grappling with the loss of her boyfriend Rick and his Mustang in a tragic accident. Meanwhile, “Homeless” introduces us to Max, whose late-night walk leads to an unexpected encounter at an accident site.
The stories in Automobilia are characterized by their exploration of themes such as loss, grief, resilience, redemption, courage, and the bonds of friendship. Each narrative offers a unique perspective on life’s complexities, enhancing the reader’s appreciation of the human condition. A standout feature of these stories is their unpredictability, which injects a sense of excitement and keeps the reader engaged. The use of automobiles as a unifying theme is not only original but demonstrates remarkable creativity. The stories are crafted with skill, demonstrating a keen eye for detail and a flair for capturing the reader’s imagination. While the anthology presents a rich variety of stories, a broader cultural context in some narratives could have offered an even more diverse and enriching experience. The writing throughout is concise and compelling, making each story a satisfying read.
Automobilia contains mature themes and hence, is more suitable for an adult audience. Readers who appreciate an inventive approach to storytelling and the exploration of human emotions and experiences will find this book particularly engaging.
Pages: 299 | ASIN : B0CVPZY4QV
Deadpan
Set in the 1970s, Richard Walter’s novel Deadpan introduces us to Dwight Bridges, a Buick salesman living in West Virginia. His life is unremarkable, marked by a casual antisemitism reflective of his environment. However, Walter swiftly upends Dwight’s world with a surreal twist: Dwight inexplicably finds himself transformed into a famous Jewish comedian. This startling metamorphosis propels the narrative, leaving readers and Dwight alike grappling with a bewildering new reality.
Walter’s storytelling echoes the bizarre identity swaps seen in Being John Malkovich, and shares Kafka’s knack for the absurd, particularly reminiscent of The Metamorphosis. As Dwight navigates his unexpected new life, he confronts his prejudices head-on, offering a candid exploration of bigotry and its personal impacts. The narrative journeys through a tapestry of settings, from Tehran to Las Vegas to Sinai, weaving a complex web where each location contributes to the overarching enigma. Walter masterfully maintains a delicate balance between confusion and coherence, ensuring that the underlying purpose of Dwight’s transformation, as cryptic as it is, gradually comes into focus.
Richard Walter’s Deadpan stands out for its unique exploration of identity and prejudice, couched within an offbeat yet compelling narrative. The novel invites readers to delve into the author’s imaginative and unconventional world, which may not resonate with everyone but is sure to captivate those with a penchant for the peculiar. In its exploration of human tribalism and the personal impact of bigotry, Deadpan offers a distinctive reading experience marked by its audacity and creative vision.
Pages: 246 | ASIN : B0CV2R29S3
Carmel Goes To School
Barbara Vokatis, PhD, presents a charming and educational tale in Carmel Goes to School, which follows a golden doodle named Carmel, trained as a therapy dog, on her visits to local schools. One particularly impactful visit takes place on a Wednesday at Mrs. Jenkins’ classroom, where Carmel not only brightens the day but also imparts important lessons on interpersonal behavior and empathy among students.
During this visit, Carmel observes a troubling interaction between two students, Jakob and Gianna, where Jakob pushes Gianna. Swiftly intervening, Carmel gently educates Jakob on appropriate behavior, leading to a heartfelt apology. This episode highlights the influence and value of therapy animals in educational settings, reinforcing positive behavior among students. What sets this book apart is the author’s creative decision to give Carmel her own narrative voice, adding a unique and engaging perspective to the story. This narrative choice effectively draws readers into Carmel’s world, enhancing the emotional impact of her interactions with the students.
The book is visually enriched by the hand-drawn illustrations by Ms. Kiskis, which are both colorful and expressive, capturing Carmel’s essence as depicted in a photograph at the book’s end. These illustrations beautifully complement the text, making the story accessible and appealing to readers of all ages. Based on a true story, Carmel Goes to School not only offers a delightful read but also serves as a gentle educational tool that showcases the benefits of therapy dogs in school environments—a concept I found particularly enviable, having never experienced such visits in my own schooling.
This is the fourth standalone book in Vokatis’s series about therapy dogs, each illustrating the profound impact these animals can have in educational settings. I eagerly anticipate future additions to this series and highly recommend this book for its heartfelt storytelling and educational value. It’s a wonderful read for both children and adults, providing a window into the world of therapy dogs like Carmel, who make a difference one school visit at a time.
Pages: 31 | ASIN : B0CYSXDG4K
A Beggar’s Bargain
In A Beggar’s Bargain, author Jan Sikes delves into the post-World War II era through the lens of Layken Martin, a recently discharged soldier returning to his family home in Missouri. Layken is confronted with the imminent death of his father and the daunting task of reviving their struggling farm. The narrative takes an intriguing turn when Layken, faced with the bank’s threat of foreclosure, is offered a peculiar solution: marry the banker’s daughter in exchange for an extension on his loan.
Sikes’ work, rooted in historical fiction, showcases meticulous attention to period detail, echoing themes found in classics like The Grapes of Wrath. The novel’s portrayal of poverty and desperation may also remind readers of elements from John Irving’s The Cider House Rules. Layken’s journey is grounded in authenticity as he navigates not only the challenges of saving the farm but also the complexities of an arranged marriage with Sara Beth, a woman he hardly knows. The backdrop of mid-20th century America, with its societal expectations and norms, further compounds the dilemmas faced by the characters. Sikes crafts a nuanced exploration of Layken and Sara Beth’s relationship, which evolves from uneasy acquaintances to potential allies facing shared adversities. The narrative is enriched by a cast of supporting characters like Tab, a young local drawn to the couple, and Uncle Seymour, a wise hired hand offering guidance.
Sikes’ prose is concise and deliberate, a stylistic choice that complements the story’s focus on character development rather than grand historical narratives. A Beggar’s Bargain unfolds as an intimate, moving study of two individuals forced into an unexpected life together. The brevity of the chapters contributes to the narrative’s tight, almost claustrophobic atmosphere, heightening the emotional depth of Layken and Sara Beth’s story.
Pages: 332 | ASIN : B0CVK8442G
LITERARY TITAN 