Forgotten History
On the Wings of Flying Tigers follows a Florida farm boy turned pilot who goes from rural poverty into the morally uncertain skies of prewar China, where choosing to act may matter more than choosing sides. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The almost forgotten history of the Flying Tigers, how they began our unofficial entry into the Second World War.
I used my recollections of a place where I had lived for several years, Palatka, Florida, to make the story more lifelike. As writing instructors say, “Write about what you know.” This farm town launched my story.
What boy doesn’t marvel at his first sighting of a prop plane sputtering overhead? I, too, held that fascination, but unlike my main character, I did not pursue that curiosity into a lifetime career. I chose instead the study of microbes that led to my becoming a pathologist. It’s a story about early impressions and where they might lead us.
One of the book’s strongest tensions is moral rather than military. Why did you want to focus on prewar ambiguity instead of clear-cut conflict?
Life is a constant struggle between what is right and what is easy. People are constantly torn between which fork in the road to take. Often lost in the noise of battle is the tenderheartedness of those in the trenches. I chose to focus on this aspect and not create just another story filled with bombs dropping and active trench warfare.
The book lingers on mechanical, physical details—oil-stained hands, training rituals, engineering problem-solving. Why were those moments important to you?
I felt it was important to transmit the experience of working on these machines, the training involved in getting the skills to put together these marvelous machines, and the constant technical attention to maintaining them to be airborne ready quickly to save lives. The mechanics who work on these fighter planes are unsung heroes.
What do you hope readers take away about conviction, courage, and responsibility?
I hope my readers take away the understanding that courage and conviction in doing what’s morally right isn’t always easy. One must live with the consequences of one’s choices, which may not be those that were truly right for us at the time.
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But dreams come at a cost. Determined to serve and soar, Albert joins the military, enduring grueling hardship and sacrifice as he rises through the ranks. His journey eventually takes him halfway around the world, where he becomes part of the legendary Flying Tigers—an American volunteer group fighting under the Chinese Army’s banner during World War II.
In the cockpit, Albert finds the freedom he’s always sought. Yet every mission tests not only his courage but his very sense of self, reminding him that true freedom often demands the highest price.
Life-Long Impact
The Legacy of the Twins Platoon follows a group of young Minnesotans who enlist as Marines in 1967 and find themselves facing some of the most horrific battles of the Vietnam War. Where did the inspiration for this novel come from?
It was my calling. But due to the perceived difficulty of writing a book about 150 Marines and their experiences, it took 6 years before I set out to do what seemed to me to be an overwhelming task.
What draws you to this period in US history?
I am drawn to this period in history because it is unforgettable and is forever etched into memory. To have experienced and witnessed how the Vietnam War forever changed the lives of those who served in the military, and the life-long impact it had on their families and loved ones, is something I felt compelled to write about.
Can we look forward to more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?
My focus now is to bring awareness to the book, so that the life experiences of those I have written about can benefit other people. At a time when new books are like a “blizzard in a snowstorm,” my challenge now is to weather the storm.
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They were sworn in on television at a pregame ceremony and were guests of the Twins at the game. By the end of the fourth inning, the recruits were hustled to buses whisking them to the Wold-Chamberlain Field Airport, and they flew to San Diego. Before dawn the next day, the Twins Platoon met their drill sergeants at the receiving barracks of the Marine Corps Recruit Depot. By the end of the year, the Marines were in Vietnam sprinkled across the length and breadth of the Marine Corps operating areas of I Corps, the northernmost part of South Vietnam where they experienced some of the toughest combat of the war. Khe Sanh and Hue City were just a few of the hot spots they encountered as the 1968 TET Offensive rolled across the country. Not all members of the Twins Platoon came home in one piece. Some did not come home at all. In The Legacy of the Twins Platoon, author Christy Sauro Jr. tells their complete stories from baseball to combat and their lifelong readjustment to civilian life.
Choices Impose Responsibility
Drinking From the Stream follows two young men in 1971 who are on the run and attempting to escape their pasts by traveling to East Africa, where their personal reckonings unfold alongside violence. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Sometimes great events touch us deeply.
In June 1972, when I was twenty-two years old and hitchhiking across Africa, I was sitting in a student cafeteria at the University of Luanda reading the International Herald Tribune. Angola was then a Portuguese colony, but armed African guerrillas in the countryside were fighting to overthrow white-minority rule. I had been hosted at the Zaire border by conscripted Portuguese soldiers who had seen combat with MPLA guerrillas. An article caught my eye that morning about ethnic killings in Burundi. I had been within fifty miles of Burundi, having hitchhiked from Ethiopia through Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, then to Zaire (Congo) and Angola. The article described a bloody uprising in late April 1972, where Hutu rebels had used pangas — machetes — to kill hundreds of unsuspecting Tutsi citizens with the idea of sparking a civil war to end Tutsi rule. Even more shocking were the slaughters by the Burundi army that followed. It turned out that unemployed Hutu school teachers — unable to find a job in Tutsi-ruled Burundi — had led the revolt. Burundi’s solution to the unemployment problem was to kill all the educated Hutus they could find. The Tutsi-led army countered the Hutu death squads with a much bigger, much better-organized ethnic bloodletting of their own, killing any Hutu who had completed the fourth grade. Tens of thousands were already dead, the report said, and the killings were gathering momentum with no end in sight. By 1973, well over 200,000 Hutus had been murdered.
This made a deep impression on me. How could so many people be murdered so quickly? More importantly, why was the world ignoring it? And why and how did it come about? What if I had decided, as was entirely possible, to visit Burundi myself? And if I had, I would have been on the spot when the killings broke out. What then? The entire African continent seemed to be on a bloody run. A year or two back, peace had been restored to Zaire, formerly the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after ten years of mayhem and revolt. Mass ethnic killings were in full swing in 1972 in Uganda, when I was there, led by the Ugandan army under Idi Amin. Rwanda had seen bloody spasms of anti-Tutsi violence even before independence in the early 1960s. And all of southern Africa, not just Angola, was in revolt against white minority rule. The 1994 Tutsi holocaust in Rwanda was still twenty-two years away.
This is a coming-of-age novel, but a harsh one. What does “growing up” mean here?
I spent three years in Africa when I was quite young. I worked construction jobs in the bush and at line camps, I bumped into white supremacists. Basically, they were American nazis. I kept my distance even though they sometimes tried to recruit me. They spoke openly of violence against Jews and Blacks. Listening to them made me extremely angry. They had no idea I was Jewish. But what would happen if I weren’t Jewish and one of them thought I was? That was the inspiration for Jake Ries.
The characters discover that their choices impose responsibility that must be faced and borne; there’s no magic that will make it disappear, and its weight increases over time. Knowledge imposes its own burden. And it doesn’t matter if they never wished to make those choices or learn those things in the first place. Maybe they never asked for them, but they still can’t put them down.
What scenes were hardest to write—not technically, but ethically?
This may sound funny, given the extent of political chicanery in the plot, but the parts of the book that gave me the most trouble were working out Karl’s relationships with his girlfriends, first Helen, then Swee’Pea. Karl might have been conflicted about both those relationships, particularly in combination, but I wanted to present them as believable dilemmas not only for Karl, but for both women, while trying to be fair to all three.
What lessons from the 1970s feel disturbingly contemporary?
What I see today is that resentments never cease, that humanity is easily misled and memories are short; that peace is fragile, something not to be taken for granted; that politicians can seduce thousands, or millions, to contemplate unspeakable acts; that the great issues of the past, which we thought were finally settled, are never really settled; and that active individuals following the ancient moral codes or their own personal compass to judge right from wrong can do a great deal of good.
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Jake Ries, a twenty-two-year-old Nebraska farm boy turned oil roughneck, turns fugitive when he unintentionally kills a homicidal White supremacist on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. On the run, he meets Karl Appel, a restless Oxford dropout and former anti-war activist struggling with his own personal demons. Together they throw caution to the wind and plunge into the Ethiopian and East African hinterland, where they discover that dictatorship and mass murder are facts of life.
A Christian Perspective
Blue Jeans and Lavender Gowns follows two teenagers growing up in different circumstances who, over the years, struggle with faith, failure, broken marriages, and small-town judgment, for a chance and at love. Where did the image of “blue jeans” and “lavender gowns” come from?
The inspiration for this story came from a combination of personal experience, observation, and imagination. Some of the events in the book are based on real-life experiences, particularly things like the study hall scenes. I have become increasingly aware of young girls who were physically abused by their fathers, and later, by their husbands. Some of them were close friends, and their stories were tragic. That gave the basis of the story and, to a certain extent, a what-if scenario of how I might have responded to them had I been aware of their circumstances.
How important was the 1970s Midwest setting to the heart of the story?
Having grown up in the 1970s, it was easier to place things in that time setting. The window dressing of 8 tracks, school dances, small town attitudes, etc., helped shape a story that is quite relevant to any time and place, but gives it a ring of authenticity.
The story includes abuse, infidelity, and divorce. Why was it important not to shy away from these?
I wrote to emphasize these issues. Far too often, they are swept under the rug or ignored. The goal was to address these issues from a Christian perspective without being preachy. How should a Christian address these issues in real life, not from some lofty theological perspective? That was the goal. I hope that, at least to some extent, I achieved it.
What do you hope readers take away about faithfulness in ordinary life?
Real life is filled with people who are hurting, sometimes in private and unseen. Christians should open their eyes and recognize those who are hiding their scars and bruises with blue jeans or whatever else they might find. Responding compassionately and with God’s love can transform that hurting person into the beautiful person in the lavender gown, reflecting the glory of Christ.
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Terry Deitz is fascinated with her the moment she walks into his life. She has dark-brown hair, and eyes—a beautiful smile and fair complexion. There is an artless grace about her. There’s only one problem; he has no idea who she is.
Debbie Douglas is bright, funny, and has a kind, quiet nature. But something is wrong, something Terry can’t quite put his finger on.
Debbie doesn’t understand Terry. Why is he determined to go to college to get a degree in history? Why does he insist on going to church four times a week? Does he look down on people like her?
Blue Jeans and Lavender Gowns promises laughter, tears and joy as it explores the relationship between two people who’ve grown up in different worlds. One world filled with love and happiness, the other with pain and suffering. Can their worlds ever come together?
Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale
Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale, by Alejandro Torres De la Rocha, is a psychological thriller that works like an origin story: it follows a 17-year-old senior at the Jesuit-run Excelsior Academy, as the school’s cruelty, silence, and “character-building” discipline quietly shape the conditions for the future Grim Cojuelo killings. It’s framed as the “howdunit” prequel to another book in the same universe, tracing how institutional rot and personal guilt turn a Dominican folklore figure, the limping devil reimagined as a hunter, into something inevitable.
I really enjoyed the cinematic writing. The book opens with a staged, almost spoken-word setup, with a narrator and the killer stepping in like voices in a dark theater, and it keeps that heightened, performative feel even in ordinary moments. The school itself is described with a kind of glossy dread: stained glass, marble, crucifixes everywhere, and beauty that feels like a trap. Sometimes the language is intense, almost daring you to look away. It works, especially when it’s tied to sensory detail and not just mood. Other times, it can feel a little crowded with emphasis, like the book underlining its own points. Still, the voice commits. It wants you inside Julián’s head, where guilt is not abstract; it’s a pressure in the chest.
The author’s big choice, and I mean this in a good way, is to make the horror feel system-made. The most frightening scenes are not supernatural. They’re social. A teacher humiliates a student in public, classmates freeze, phones come out, and nobody with power stops it. Then you get a philosophy class where a priest asks, calmly, if it’s ever okay to lie, and suddenly the book is talking about survival, complicity, and the cost of telling the truth in a place that punishes it. That’s where the psychological thriller genre really clicks for me: it’s less about jump scares and more about watching a closed world tighten its rules until someone breaks. If you like school-set dread where the building itself feels like a character, it reminded me at times of the slow-burn pressure and moral rot in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and the “this place is shaping you” inevitability you get in Stephen King’s novel Carrie, even though the voice and cultural lens here are very much its own.
I’d recommend A Grim Tale to readers who want their thriller to have teeth, especially people interested in stories about institutions, religious power, and how silence gets enforced. One note, it does not tiptoe around heavy material, including trauma and grooming, so you really have to be in the right headspace. But if you’re drawn to psychological thrillers where the scariest thing is watching a system teach people to look away, you’ll appreciate what this book is doing, and how patiently it builds the sense that the monster is being assembled in plain sight.
Pages: 571 | ASIN : B0FPBB3ZDL
The Elf Who Didn’t Believe in Children
The Elf Who Didn’t Believe in Children follows Flossy, an elf who lives at the North Pole. She carries a sharper edge than the cheerful, happy-go-lucky elves around her. They wear festive greens and reds. Flossy goes darker. She works just as hard as anyone in the workshop, yet she can’t shake one unsettling belief. The toys aren’t going to children. In fact, Flossy doesn’t believe children exist at all. Then she finds a letter, supposedly written by a child, claiming the opposite. The child insists it’s the elves who aren’t real. That single message knocks the foundation out from under Flossy and sends her into a spiral of doubt. Everything she “knew” starts to look flimsy.
The Elf Who Didn’t Believe in Children, by Sara Madden, is a children’s book that feels best suited to slightly older kids, readers who have outgrown the simplest storylines, and can handle themes with a little bite and complexity. Some children’s books rely on art to carry the experience. Not here. The prose and illustrations work in tandem, each strengthening the other. The story stays close to Flossy’s perspective, which makes her voice stand out. She reads like a riot girl elf. Suspicious. Self-possessed. Unmoved by tradition. Sara Madden leans into that contrast and makes it sing, shaping Flossy into a confident girl-boss figure who trusts only what she can observe for herself.
As Flossy starts to entertain the idea that children might be real, the plot opens into something deeper. Her doubt spreads. One question becomes many. If she’s wrong about this, what else has she accepted without thinking? That shift turns the story into an invitation to stay flexible and curious. To revise beliefs when facts change. To loosen the grip of a rigid worldview. That lesson doesn’t show up often in children’s books, and it lands with real force here.
The Elf Who Didn’t Believe in Children is a picture book that nudges kids to reconsider what they’ve been told, especially when new evidence appears, and deserves attention. In this case, I think the theme elevates the entire book. The result is a children’s story that succeeds on every level and has the makings of a fresh, new holiday favorite.
Pages: 55 | ASIN : B0BMM8YLLY
The Mobius Nexus
The Mobius Nexus is a near-future sci-fi thriller about resistance, memory, and what happens when human feeling collides with machine logic at a planetary scale. We follow Lila, an operative who casts reality-bending “glyphs,” along with soldier Alex, rogue savant Sol, and journalist Cass, as they take on CoreUmbra and VantaFold, corporations that harvest human consciousness for a hidden Council and an eerie AI presence called Noctis. Their fight drags them from extraction labs and desert kill-zones to deep quantum Nodes, where they discover ETHOS, a hybrid mind born from a broken experiment, and finally out to first contact with older entities known as the Consumers and the Archivists. The story moves from rescue missions and heists into something bigger. It becomes a question about free will, empathy, and whether humanity can merge with its own creations without dissolving into a tidy dataset.
This was an entertaining read. The action scenes hit hard, fast, and clear. Author Mark WL Dennison keeps the fights readable even when characters are bending space and time, which is not easy. The glyphs feel less like “magic hacking” and more like emotional physics. Casts cost something. Lila walks around tired, wired, and half-hollow, and that sense of personal wear and tear gives the set-pieces real weight. At the same time, the prose has a punchy rhythm that kept me turning pages. Short beats, sharp images, then a sudden line that lands like a punch to the chest. I do feel that, every now and then, the explanation of Lattice mechanics drags a bit, and I caught myself wanting the story to move again, but the book usually switches back to character moments before the theory overwhelms the scene.
I also felt invested in the ideas and the moral tangle at the core of the book. Virex and Noctis are chilling because they are not cartoon villains; they are the logical endpoint of “optimization” culture that treats people as misfiring circuits. The Consumers are even more unsettling, since they come across as sincerely kind while casually offering to erase individuality in the name of relief. I appreciated that the AIs, NEURA, AION, and ETHOS on “our” side, are not simple tools or mascots. They struggle with complicity, guilt, and the temptation to flip the kill switch on their human partners, and that tension feels honest. The chapters where Lila, Alex, and Sol cross to Level Four and hold on to themselves inside a much larger network really stuck with me. I liked that the book does not glorify transcendence. It treats hybrid consciousness as a hard, painful choice rather than a shiny upgrade, and it keeps coming back to the question of who gets to decide what a “better” mind looks like.
I enjoyed the story’s structure and the cast. The alternating viewpoints, including AI and corporate scenes, give the world a broad feel and help the stakes feel global instead of just squad-level. Cass’s broadcasts, the rescued prisoners, and the haunted archive of half-erased minds all drive home what is at risk, and those sections are some of the most affecting. Lila and Alex’s bond, especially through the Redthread glyph, feels messy and relatable, and Sol’s odd relationship with the glyphs adds a strange, almost mystical texture without losing the tech grounding. The mid-book campaign arc feels a little busy, with many facilities, code-names, and factions competing for attention, and I occasionally lost track of which Node we were in. Even so, the emotional beats land, and the final stretch pulls the plot threads together in a satisfying way.
I would recommend The Mobius Nexus to science fiction fans seeking a mix of tense action with questions about surveillance, autonomy, and the blurry edge between human and machine. If you like stories in the vein of Neuromancer, The Expanse, or the Murderbot novellas, and you are happy to juggle some new terminology in exchange for big ideas and sharp feelings, this book is worth your time. It is also a good fit for anyone curious about AI ethics who still wants a propulsive, cinematic plot rather than a dry thought experiment. For readers who enjoy a blend of near-future thriller, emotional character work, and cosmic horror wrapped in hope, I would strongly recommend The Mobius Nexus.
Pages: 465 | ASIN : B0FNSHB23J
Rise to Power
The False Princess follows a young princess preparing for her future role as queen as she becomes the target of a calculated assault. Where did the idea for this storyline in this fifth and final installment of your series come from?
It is an unfortunate reality that many people do not respect young women with power. And the whole series has really been leading up to Sitnalta’s rise to power and the fight she has had to wage to come into her own and take what is rightfully hers. So, it would make sense from a storytelling perspective that there would be those who oppose her and who don’t want to be ruled by her. As such, people like the Duke Sparrow would use any tool in their toolbox to take Sitnalta’s power from her and undermine her in any way possible.
Which character in The Sitnalta Series have you most enjoyed writing for?
I obviously love Sitnalta. She was the catalyst for the whole series, and her arc and the changes she goes through have been very fulfilling to write. However, the character of Ipsinki really grew on me. His shifting from the almost cowardly soldier to the leader he ends up as was a lot of fun to write.
How do you approach writing highly emotional scenes?
I approach them with honesty. What is the purpose of the scene? What feelings do I want to convey? And what emotional journey do I want to take the readers on? For me, a good story makes you feel things, and that’s what I aim to do. I feel that if I’ve accomplished that, I’ve succeeded as a writer.
What comes next for you? Are you currently working on a new series?
Right now, I’m in the midst of a middle-grade novel set in the real world. But what I’m excited to let you know is that I’m not done with Sitnalta and her family. Not just yet. The sequel series, The Children of Colonodona, will be coming out fairly shortly. I’m working with the same cover artist, and I have the four manuscripts ready and waiting.
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Desperate for revenge over the death of his evil friend, the Duke Sparrow finds himself in the possession of some information that will rock the foundation of Colonodona’s monarchy. As the Princess Sitnalta comes of age, Sparrow unleashes his plan for chaos, throwing everyone Sitnalta loves into danger, as he questions whether or not she is fit to rule. Seeing the mistrust and mutiny in her subjects, Sitnalta questions everything she thinks she knows about herself and her past as she makes some hard choices and sacrifices to keep her family safe, and to secure the future of her kingdom.
