PABLO
Pablo, written by Mar Andersons and illustrated by Irvin Walkes, is a lively children’s adventure about a beach-town dog in Mexico whose life suddenly takes an unexpected turn. Pablo is excited about becoming a father, but a trip to a resort leads to him being mistaken for a stray, taken away, and eventually transported all the way to Seattle. From there, the story becomes a cross-country journey as Pablo tries to get back to Arianna and their new puppies. Along the way, he meets Grandma Joan, a lonely widow traveling in an RV, and their separate stories gradually come together in a way that gives the book more emotional weight than its wild opening might suggest.
The story moves quickly and has a playful sense of humor. Pablo is dramatic, expressive, and constantly reacting to whatever bizarre situation he lands in next, whether he’s wearing a pink dress, escaping through a backyard, flying toward a highway, or helping Joan change a flat tire. The rhyming text keeps the pace energetic, and the Spanish words scattered throughout the story give Pablo a distinctive voice while also introducing young readers to simple vocabulary. A Spanish-to-English glossary near the end helps readers understand words such as amor, familia, gracias, and corazón. The humor and action make the book fun to read aloud, while Pablo’s determination to get home gives all that chaos a clear purpose.
The illustrations are fantastic. Walkes uses bold colors, exaggerated expressions, dramatic perspectives, and almost cinematic scenes to make Pablo’s journey feel big. Some pages are bright and cartoonish, such as the resort scenes with the mischievous twins, while others become darker and more atmospheric when Pablo is frightened or lost. The scene with the enormous cat Buttons feels almost like a suspense movie, while later pages showing Pablo and Joan traveling down the coast become warmer and calmer. The final beach scenes are especially striking, with soft sunset colors and the whole family gathered together by the water. The pictures don’t simply repeat what the text says. They add jokes, emotion, movement, and small visual details that give readers more to notice each time through the book.
What gives Pablo its heart is the way the adventure becomes a story about family, grief, companionship, and finding your way home. Pablo spends most of the book trying to return to Arianna, while Joan is quietly trying to cope with losing her husband. Their friendship helps both of them move forward. By the time they reach Mexico, Pablo is reunited with his family, and Joan finds a new sense of connection with them as well. The book even includes a section for adults about talking to children about grief, connecting Joan’s experiences to the stages of grief shown throughout the story. Pablo packs comedy, action, Spanish vocabulary, and some tender moments into one energetic story, making it a colorful read that can entertain kids while also opening the door to conversations about love, loss, responsibility, and belonging.
Pages: 53 | ISBN : 978-1-7381704-0-1
Dignity
Craig Brown’s Dignity is a warm, quietly observant coming-of-age novel set in 1980s Petone, New Zealand, built around an unlikely friendship between a schoolboy narrator and Malcolm Beaumont, better known around town as Bogie. Bogie is a council binman, bottle collector, pub regular, former sailor, and a man most people notice only enough to dismiss. The narrator does something different. He sits beside him at lunch, asks questions, watches his habits, and gradually discovers a life far richer than Bogie’s shabby clothes and near-silence suggest. At the center of that life is a dream: Bogie has been collecting refundable bottles for years so he can buy a boat. That simple goal gives the novel its structure, but the real story is about the relationships that form around it and the way a boy’s understanding of other people slowly becomes more generous and complicated.
One of the book’s strengths is the way Brown lets Bogie reveal himself without turning him into a speechmaker. He’s famously economical with words, sometimes answering questions so literally that the narrator has to puzzle out what he means. Much of what we learn comes instead through Bogie’s routines: collecting discarded bottles for their few cents of value, carefully depositing his coins, restoring an old sailboat plank by plank, quietly absorbing insults, and refusing to perform his goodness for anyone. His patience becomes especially meaningful after his boatshed is set on fire and the vessel he has spent so long restoring is damaged. Rather than letting anger define what happens next, Bogie repairs the boat again. Eventually he replaces its old name, BIT BY BIT, with a single word painted in gold: Dignity. The choice captures what the novel has been showing all along. Dignity here isn’t status, polish, or respectability. It’s the ability to know your own worth without demanding that everyone else recognize it first.
The first-person narrator gives the novel a second coming-of-age story alongside Bogie’s pursuit of the sea. He’s funny, insecure, observant, occasionally selfish, and believable as a boy who doesn’t yet have the language for everything he’s learning. His friendship and early romance with Katie Parata bring some of the book’s sweetest scenes, while his encounters with Willy Simmonds and Willy’s friends bring out fear, resentment, jealousy, and eventually a more difficult kind of empathy. These schoolyard relationships could easily have stayed fixed in simple categories, but Brown allows them to change. One of the most satisfying developments comes when hostility begins to loosen its grip and the boys are forced to see one another as more than enemies. Bogie’s influence is central to that change, though he rarely teaches through explicit advice. Near the end, the narrator reflects that it was through Bogie’s “silences and actions, through his patience and forgiveness” that the lessons came. That feels like a good description of the novel’s method too.
The setting gives Dignity much of its personality. Brown fills Petone with paper rounds, dairies, rugby fields, pubs, school socials, Guy Fawkes fireworks, battered bikes, returnable bottles, working-class homes, and the windy waterfront. The detail creates a community that feels inhabited. There’s also a strong awareness of class throughout the story. The narrator grows up among people who’ve learned to keep their ambitions modest, while Bogie occupies an even stranger social position, known by almost everyone but understood by very few. That makes his eventual decision especially powerful. When the narrator asks where he plans to go once the boat is ready, Bogie finally gives an answer expansive enough for the life he wants: “Wherever I want.” It’s a small line, but after watching him save, endure, repair, and wait, those words feel enormous. Freedom in Dignity isn’t abstract. It has been purchased bottle by bottle and earned through years of persistence.
What I liked most was the novel’s affection for people whose inner lives can be easy to overlook. Bogie becomes memorable because Brown doesn’t reduce him to a symbol of virtue. He drinks, smokes, holds grudges, dislikes certain people, enjoys his solitude, and can be frustratingly difficult to read. His dignity comes from being fully himself. The closing chapters give that idea a lovely payoff. Bogie sails away without fanfare, and years later a postcard arrives for the narrator from somewhere warm and distant. There’s no long explanation, just a photograph of Dignity on clear water and two words from Bogie: “ALL’S GOOD.” By then, that’s enough. Dignity is ultimately a novel about seeing people more closely, about the understated ways one person can shape another, and about a man who spends years building the means to choose his own horizon. The book earns its emotion patiently, which makes its final image of Bogie living on his own terms feel deeply satisfying.
Pages: 296 | ASIN : B0GX2WSJ59
Still Good: A Cookbook for Forgotten Food
Still Good, by Sid Sharma, is a practical, visually inviting cookbook built around a familiar kitchen problem: food that’s no longer at its prettiest but is still perfectly usable. Sharma’s guiding idea is simple, “Ugly is usable. Spoiled is not.” From spotted bananas and wrinkled berries to stale bread, soft tomatoes, aging dairy, and leftover rice, the book helps readers recognize the difference between food that needs to be discarded and food that just needs a new purpose. Sharma organizes the book around ingredients people commonly forget about, which makes it especially useful when you’re staring into the fridge wondering what can still become dinner.
One of the book’s strongest features is how easy it is to use. Ingredients are divided into stages such as “Still Good,” “Past Prime,” and “Last Call,” and the recipes match those stages. A soft banana might become pancakes, bread, or frozen banana ice cream, while tired tomatoes can turn into sauce, chutney, soup, or shakshuka-style eggs. That same approach continues through herbs, bread, rice, dairy, eggs, root vegetables, avocados, and assorted leftovers. The recipes are generally short, approachable, and built from ordinary ingredients. Small author’s notes keep the instructions personable, while the safety notes are a smart addition because they remind readers that reducing waste doesn’t mean taking chances with spoiled food.
The book also succeeds as something you can browse, not just cook from. Its warm photography and consistent page design make aging ingredients look surprisingly appealing, and the ingredient guides are especially useful because they give quick visual and written cues for deciding what to cook now and what to toss. The final section expands the idea beyond individual recipes with a leftover cheat sheet, freezer guide, substitution guide, kitchen notes, and a reflection on the habits that lead to less waste. That broader structure gives Still Good a practical philosophy: cook with what you have, pay attention to the condition of your food, and get comfortable adapting. The result feels less like a collection of fixed recipes and more like a friendly kitchen reference you’d keep nearby.
I’d recommend Still Good most to home cooks who regularly buy groceries with good intentions and then discover a soft vegetable, aging yogurt, half-used bunch of herbs, or container of rice a few days later. It would also be a good fit for students, newer cooks, budget-conscious households, and anyone trying to waste less food without turning meal planning into a major project. Experienced cooks may appreciate it too, especially as a source of quick ideas and reminders, but its greatest value is for someone who wants more confidence deciding what can still be saved and what to do with it. Still Good makes that decision feel manageable, and it turns the neglected corners of the fridge into a surprisingly useful place to start cooking.
Pages: 79 | ASIN : B0H6S6H6C7
The Bear and Cat Chronicles
Kris Neely’s The Bear and Cat Chronicles is a warm, thoughtful book built around the everyday lives of two old friends. Bear is earnest, reflective, and prone to overthinking, while Cat is older, sharper, and often able to cut through a problem with one well-placed question. Their cottage, garden, checkerboard, and nearby Fine Gold Creek become the setting for short stories about presence, acceptance, change, friendship, and the odd ways we complicate our own lives. The book describes its chapters as small meditations that can be read in sequence or individually, and that structure suits the material beautifully.
What gives this book its personality is the way big ideas arrive through wonderfully ordinary things. A broken vase becomes a lesson in seeing obstacles differently. An empty bowl opens a conversation about making room for what comes next. A buried seed exposes the difference between patience and mentally living in the future. Checker games, muddy paw prints, a scratched gate, spilled coffee, an old fishing net, and even a badly chosen hat all become opportunities for Bear and Cat to notice what’s really happening. Neely draws heavily from Zen and Taoist philosophy, but the stories work because the philosophy is attached to recognizable emotions: embarrassment, grief, impatience, anxiety, loneliness, self-consciousness, and the desire to control an uncertain world. The recurring humor, especially Cat’s dry observations and Bear’s occasional physical mishaps, keeps the reflective material lively.
As the book progresses, the friendship gains more emotional weight. Cat’s history as a frightened stray, the death of her mother, her aging body, and her memories of people and creatures who have disappeared from her life add depth to what might otherwise have remained a collection of charming philosophical exchanges. Some of the strongest chapters deal directly with loss and letting go. In “The Impossible Move,” grief becomes something one moves through, while “The Unfinished Game” explores the painful habit of waiting for another person to provide closure. Cat eventually puts away a checker game left unfinished by her absent friend Pim, keeping one piece simply as a remembrance, and that small action captures one of the book’s most affecting ideas: loving something and waiting for it aren’t the same thing.
That emotional foundation makes The Bear and Cat Chronicles an inviting example of inspirational and contemplative books about mindfulness for readers who like their reflection delivered through story. Its final chapter, “The Purr,” is especially fitting because it brings the book’s philosophy back to the friendship at its center. Bear is overwhelmed by practical worries, and Cat doesn’t respond with a solution. She simply sits with him and purrs until the problems feel like circumstances he can face instead of emergencies swallowing the moment. Her conclusion that friends can’t fix one another’s lives but can refuse to let each other face them alone gives the collection a satisfying emotional destination. The Bear and Cat Chronicles ultimately feels like spending time with two companions who’ve learned that wisdom often shows up while making tea, playing checkers, watching the creek, getting muddy, and staying close when somebody needs a purr more than an answer.
Knowing Winning Material
Multiverses of Entertainment explores how Hollywood, technology, finance, and filmmaking can converge into a new entertainment ecosystem without sacrificing the human creativity that gives stories their power. What motivated you to write this book?
The greatest motivation came from pure love for the cinematic arts. Working in so many of the filmmaking arenas gave me arguably the most diverse experiences. The love for this industry grew like a garden growing a dozen exotic flowers, each one beautiful in its design and complexity. Work – from being an extra, to a stunt double, actor, screenwriter, Producer, Director, technology innovator, and mentor, to running a Mini-Major studio – gave me multiple perspectives I refer to in my books as Parallax View. The vision in 2016 that Hollywood, in its role to deliver the Power of Story, Hero’s Journey, and great performances in motivating films, would be burned to the ground motivated me to sacrifice ten years to deliver a separate Multiverse for the highest quality films and series. The books are the foundation, the tech innovation is the ROI for investors, the products are over 100 of the most valuable screenplays, and the payoff for Talent, crew, and audiences is symbolized in the Imagii Avatar. This does more than save Hollywood – Hollywood saves humanity.
The book combines material written around 2016 with your 2026 perspective. Which assumptions about Hollywood, China, streaming, and entertainment investment from that earlier period turned out to be most right, or most wrong?
Great question. Simple answer: learn from the past. First, let’s tackle the question as it relates to the past and why so many chapters feature China’s rise, which was happening at the same time Hollywood began its death spiral. Crystal-clear success and disaster examples were in motion from 2008-2018, when China was not only the biggest investor for Hollywood films but also the biggest investor in the world. At the same time, it was learning to improve filmmaking as an art. Hollywood would have starved for money without China’s tens of billions in investment and box office – yet the Industry was screwing over Chinese investors at an unprecedented level. My book began as tutorials on the sins and dire future of Hollywood and became a book. Barry London, who just left Paramount and was mentoring me so we could open our own Mini-Major using my formulas for success, gave me a lot of insight into what nobody is supposed to know about major Studio good practices and also their worst mistakes. Every one of my predictions came true. The most useful half of my book is the first half that presents the concept of the film Multiverse I created; however, the second half spells out what was leading to the collapse I saw as inescapable. So how do we go forward? We can’t assume anything we read is true today due to the skewing of news and information by technology. Most of Hollywood is too young to know what a great film requires. 90% of agents and entertainment lawyers have never spent one full day on a set. Not one of them could survive a day of decision-making. The veteran lawyers and agents have surrendered to the idea that the Earth of filmmaking revolves around the Sun of Streaming. That gravity keeps them in an orbit that only intersects what the Streaming Giants allow, and this includes AI replacing film artists. There is a place for that in the world of eyeball time, but not in the world of great filmmaking. The two cannot coexist in the same universe, so a Multiverse is formed. It obeys the laws of the greatest era of filmmaking. The gatekeepers to powerful execs are usually under 25, and they rely on AI to make decisions. It’s laughable. Here is an example from the past that shows how few graduates can handle production pressure to be excellent at a job, your position determined as a meritocracy: If I needed 4 Production Assistants when I was Producer-Director, I would hire 6 and fire all but one or two. Then go through the cycle again until I got my four. Today, I’d have to go through 50 wannabe filmmakers to find 4.
You argue that better movies require a business structure that works for both investors and artists. What is the biggest change Hollywood could make today to give filmmakers more creative freedom while still making projects financially sustainable?
Even in the best era, every production wanted more time and money. But they could justify it with who starred in the film and their foreign pre-sale value. There is no guarantee any film will hit a theater anymore because Streaming Giants lie to top talent like Gal Gadot and Jake in Road House about guaranteeing a theatrical release. Hollywood Studios cooked the books, faked costs for production and advertising, to screw investors out of a big profit. The big test to this, of course, for any veteran of the 80s, was Coming to America, based on the story pitch by Art Buchwald. Paramount first claimed it wasn’t, and then lied to say it never made a profit. Paramount lost and paid a huge settlement. Films were commonly thought of as a bad investment, but this was not due to revenue; it was mostly due to every system in the Industry agreeing to screw investors who don’t know enough. This was the Nash Equilibrium then. The only way to get longer shooting schedules to ensure fine cinematic moves is to guarantee a new revenue stream far greater than box office and tied merchandise. This is where the patented tech innovation and ability to tap into the next generation of social Apps, and Gamer and Influencer revenue and fanbase comes in. The deals and IP Event Horizon presents investors will hold pages of unimaginable legal language developed by me to guarantee Actors, Writers, and Directors get a share of Multiverse revenue, exactly like how Death Row offered pennies of every sale to rappers and made them worth $200 million in a year. New legal also includes massive revenue streams for each Mini-Major investor from the Next Gen Apps, which returns revenue even before a film or series is released. This makes the stock of the investor skyrocket more than how much they committed to spend on production. This is the future. This is how to get a shooting schedule long enough to honor the greatest Actors in Hollywood. And there must be enough IP to last 3 years so Actors cannot be blacklisted by Streaming and law firms, which they are now if they do not bend the knee to Streaming’s shitty pay and schedules that would turn the best performance of anyone into mediocrity (ask Affleck and Damon the weird changes forced on them in scenes for The Rip.). Every Mini-Major is a group of one television series that can get on air within 8 months and Apps with them so ROI begins within two quarters for the investor. And being on the first Multiverse guarantees billions. If they go for an IPO the investor makes several billion before the big payouts begin for production. This is the perfect investment model for entertainment for the next 5 years. It’ll take that long for any tech competitor to copy the model.
After decades around filmmakers, producers, actors, agents, and executives, what have you learned about the qualities that make a story powerful enough to endure across changing technologies and platforms?
So much of knowing winning material is a gut feeling – an ability to feel chemistry brewing, an ability to know original concepts that will win. A good example is Speed. This movie was the first to not follow the formula for action films where there were low points of action, for the audience to calm down like in Die Hard. Speed was nonstop action and tension. Romance was thrown in. Next major change was Apatow’s formula for breaking a film into 12 sets of scenes that can stand alone so they could be binge-watched by teens on phones. You had to be around then to “feel in your gut” what High Concept requires. At the same time, the power of the story to win over audiences had to tickle your senses with surprises, like in the unpredictable humor of The Hangover. The new generation of assistants, readers, law school grads, production execs, casting people – their gut was never trained, never forced into the field, never went through test by fire, never had a genius like Ron Howard and Brian Grazer to mentor them. And none of them understand the concept that films are often “made great in editing.” If you do not have the coverage, two shots, dolly shots, that great films need, it cripples editors. My Multiverse film financing and production requirements ensure we have the angles and sounds needed to deliver a scene that hits the audience on the three levels of great filmmaking: voyeuristically, vicariously, and viscerally. Great films have most scenes delivering two of those V’s. And then have at least 2-3 scenes that deliver all three at once. THAT is when a film story becomes its most powerful, successful, and impactful enough to improve people and society. It makes the fan believe in being his own hero, waiting for the right love, being the parent that protects, and saving someone for the sake of Integrity or Virtues. The technology and platforms are there in new forms simply because the audience for Influencers, Gamers, and Social Media is evolving and likes using these in Apps. The methods for outstanding filmmaking and stories they seek remain the same: devotion to “the film always comes first.”
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Instagram | TikTok | Website | Amazon
The Invisible Soul Anthology: Healing With Words
The Invisible Soul Anthology, by George Beasley, is a deeply personal and inspirational Christian memoir built from nearly fifty stories, reflections, memories, and poems about trauma, faith, family, grief, mental health, and healing. Beasley describes the collection as a journey from hidden struggles toward emotional healing and redemption, and that idea gives the book its shape. Readers are led through memories as they surface, taking them from childhood abuse and group homes to marriage, fatherhood, ministry, therapy, loss, and the quieter moments that have helped him make sense of it all. As a faith-based memoir, the book feels personal in the way a long conversation with someone can be personal. Beasley isn’t standing at a distance from these experiences. He’s writing from inside them.
One of the most compelling parts of this trauma recovery memoir is the way ordinary places and objects become containers for much larger emotions. A sandbar becomes a place of belonging, a river becomes an image of grief and the undertow of despair, a childhood closet holds both terror and an imagined fire of hope, and a catfish pond becomes a mental refuge first learned in a group home and rediscovered decades later through therapy. These recurring images give the book its own language. Beasley also writes openly about suicidal thoughts, childhood trauma, triggers, therapy, and the difficult work of recognizing emotions he spent much of his life avoiding. That makes The Invisible Soul Anthology as much a mental health memoir as it is a Christian testimony. Faith and professional help aren’t treated as competing ideas here. They become parts of the same healing journey.
The heart of the collection, though, is connection. Beasley returns again and again to the people who helped him survive and grow: his wife Lisa, his daughters and grandchildren, his brothers, old friends, therapists, house parents, ministry partners, and even people encountered briefly along the way. Some of the strongest pieces look at relationships from the distance of many years and allow an old memory to take on a different meaning. In “Was It Love or Was It…,” for example, what he carried as childhood betrayal gradually becomes an understanding of his mother’s desperate attempt to protect him. That willingness to revisit the past is central to this Christian healing book. The prose is direct, emotionally exposed, and often devotional, with scripture and faith woven naturally into the author’s interpretation of what happened and why those experiences still matter.
What stayed with me most is the book’s conviction that words can become part of the healing process. Beasley repeatedly shows writing as a way of bringing buried memories into the light, giving language to pain, and leaving something useful for the people who come afterward. Late in the collection, he writes about opening himself to emotions while spending time with his grandchildren and discovering that something as simple as giving them his time can become an expression of love and a repair of what was missing in his own childhood. That captures The Invisible Soul Anthology well. It’s a Christian memoir about healing, but it’s also an anthology about being seen, listening closely, loving people while there’s still time, and finding meaning in memories that once seemed too painful to revisit. Readers drawn to inspirational Christian books, spiritual memoirs, and trauma recovery stories will find plenty here to sit with long after the final page.
Pages: 275 | ASIN : B0HD3W8G2V
The Evolution Of This Novel
Operation Black Horse follows a gifted surgeon who uncovers a deadly secret behind humanity’s salvation, forcing her into a dangerous struggle for survival amid global famine, political conflict, and forbidden love. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
To understand the evolution of this novel, you have to know that the first draft was written in 2015. At the time, I’d been an English and Political Science undergrad at Villanova University, and had just finished reading Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal a few months earlier. I was absolutely floored by the haunting imagery in his writing—inspired by his unique perspective as a surgeon dealing with death on a daily basis. It made me want to explore the idea of a novel based on a doctor dealing with her own insecurities about life and death. I decided to peel back the layers of a surgeon working during a global crisis. I wanted readers to experience for themselves the immense pressure placed on medical staff to perform miracles in dire situations. Dr. Caitlyn Svendsen was born during this time frame. Being a doctor in a dystopian future raised the stakes for this novel, allowing me to push Caitlyn’s ethics to its limits. People are programmed to think that doctors are infallible beings, trained to do the impossible. I wanted Caitlyn to be the kind of character that reminds all of us that doctors are mere mortals, plagued with the same moral dilemmas and character weaknesses as their patients.
It wasn’t until much later that I decided Caitlyn’s perfect counterpart was a soldier—perhaps the only other profession on the planet that deals with the trauma of life and death to the same extent that doctors do. Spetsnaz Commander Kaleb Volkov is the most morally gray, dynamic character I have ever created. Learning about the training and mindset of Russian special operators took months of painstaking research. Even now, I’m still learning about Russia’s military technology and command structure as warfare in general continues to evolve at a breakneck pace.
Big Agriculture and its impact on the environment was on my mind when I came up with the idea for Operation Black Horse. I had just finished an archaeology dig in Ecuador a summer earlier, where the cash crop is roses. Fun fact—nearly one quarter of all roses sold in America are grown in Ecuador. Although I was in the Andes to work on an Incan site, battling altitude sickness and digging through layers of ancient earth at an agonizingly slow pace, I could not help but notice that rose plantations were everywhere. After a few weeks of talking to researchers and locals, I was absolutely floored by the environmental and health impact of growing roses. Who knew that something so beautiful could be so deadly? Poison, it seemed, was everywhere—in the water, in the soil, and seeping into the very blood and bones of the locals who worked inside the greenhouses. So many of them were sick without knowing why—lung and skin cancer were especially rampant, for obvious reasons. Many of the workers were fumigated right alongside the roses with no protective gear whatsoever. Pesticides have a nasty habit of creating stunning flowers while destroying everything else they touch. Unsurprisingly, I never bought another rose again.
What was the most challenging part of creating a future in which famine has reshaped nearly every aspect of society?
THE RESEARCH. I wanted this novel to be as realistic as possible, and to have this chilling, dystopian near-future grow naturally out of the past and present that we are already familiar with. That meant being as historically accurate as possible, while also imagining the kind of political dynamics that we might see in the future based on current international relations. I had to try to imagine how famine would change nations on a mirco and macro level. That meant this book could have become nearly overwhelming in its scope. Caitlyn and Kaleb helped to center this future, allowing me to really dig in on a micro-level, shedding light on how America and Russia might navigate a global famine based on how they have reacted to challenges in the past. The military research was definitely the most daunting. Unsurprisingly, Russia does not broadcast its military projects and weapons research. It took a lot of digging to be as accurate as possible.
Caitlyn and Kaleb begin from opposite sides of a conflict, and trust is almost impossible between them. What did you want their relationship to say about trust in a world shaped by war?
Caitlyn and Kaleb’s relationship is supposed to show us that war between nations does not mean that the civilians of those nations are incapable of thinking for themselves or breaking from their governments’ political interests in order to do the right thing. I wanted to highlight that trust can be built by standing strong in one’s personal moral compass, even if that means defying orders. Kaleb is able to gain Caitlyn’s trust not because he saves her life, but because he proves to her that he sees her as a person, not as a pawn for his government to use. Kaleb watches the way Caitlyn is willing to sacrifice pieces of herself to save other people. His trust is born of respect, not just for her intelligence and determination to expose the truth, but her empathy as well.
If you could ask readers to think about one real-world issue after finishing the novel, what would you want it to be?
Pesticides are a HUGE topic across the nation right now, especially in the Midwest, where commercial farming is widespread. We now know how insidious they are: impacting our water, food, animals and ecosystem. It’s not just the Midwest dealing with the fallout. My hometown in California is investigating a cancer cluster. Those of us who grew up there know that it is tied to pesticides that are excessively sprayed on our golf courses and residential areas. We have been complaining for years about the overuse of pesticides without community approval. And now we are seeing dire consequences of not fighting harder. We have to ask the question: is it worth it? Is it worth the health of our children, who are developing rare cancers at an alarming rate? Is it worth the health of our pets who are dying young and younger, also from aggressive cancers? It’s a very controversial topic, but we can no longer ignore the poison that is literally on our front doorstep, contaminating our food supply and our backyards. Operation Black Horse mirrors this issue we watch Caitlyn struggle to expose the truth as corporate and government interests attempt to silence her. I want people to think about what they would be willing to sacrifice to fight for the truth and save the ones they love.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Website
Sixteen years into the Great World Famine of 2025, Dr. Caitlyn Svendsen’s patients are no longer hungry thanks to America’s classified growth formula designed to outsmart famine, but they are still dying. The cause of their illness is a mystery that Caitlyn seeks to unravel despite the risk to her career-and life. Meanwhile, Spetsnaz Commander Kaleb Volkov is as restless as his motherland. Russia is still starving, denied access to America’s growing techniques.
Caitlyn and Kaleb are the epitome of clashing personalities, raised to resent each other in a world teetering on the brink of destruction. She is Russia’s salvation. He is the eye of a storm heading for America, ready to tear her reality apart.
While America blackmails enemies and allies alike into submission with the promise of food, Russia is desperate to restore its influence in the wake of America’s agricultural domination. To level the playing field, Kaleb is tasked with a mission that leads him to Caitlyn, forcing the two natural enemies to work together in a world plagued by famine, disease and now … WWIII.
Can they overcome their mutual distrust to save what’s left of humanity?
Murder (and Other Unpleasantries)
Murder and Other Unpleasantries, by Julie Titterington, is a cozy mystery built around one very inconvenient day in Cornwall. Tamsin Castle is trying to keep her struggling bakery afloat when she meets Clarence Crumpet, a relentlessly friendly American with a dachshund named Fritz and a talent for turning casual conversations into marathons. Tamsin reluctantly accepts his help delivering food to a tearoom on the tidal island of St. Peter the Rock, where a storm traps them with a wealthy, deeply dysfunctional family and the suddenly dead Lady Atherton. The setup gives the book all the ingredients of a classic closed-circle mystery: a limited group of suspects, a poisonous cup of tea, old grudges, money problems, family secrets, and no easy way for anyone to leave.
What makes the book especially fun is the pairing of Tamsin and Crumpet. Tamsin begins the story committed to routine and suspicious of anything that might complicate her life, even making a reluctant promise to spend one day saying yes to new experiences. Crumpet is almost her opposite. He talks constantly, follows every stray thought that catches his attention, and seems genuinely delighted by nearly everyone he meets. Once the investigation starts, though, his rambling personality reveals a surprisingly sharp mind, while Tamsin discovers that she’s good at noticing inconsistencies and keeping him focused. Their friendship develops naturally because each supplies something the other needs. The dachshunds, Bundle and Fritz, add another layer of personality without feeling like accessories pasted onto the mystery.
The novel clearly has some Agatha Christie in its bloodstream. There’s even an early reference to Christie’s Bundle Brent, which signals the author’s affection for Golden Age mysteries. The isolated setting and hostile group of relatives bring And Then There Were None to mind, while the poison, inheritance questions, interviews, and carefully planted physical clues feel closer to a Poirot investigation. Titterington takes that familiar puzzle-box structure and gives it a much more playful voice. The book keeps bouncing between murder clues and wonderfully specific distractions involving scones, British vocabulary, bad tea, dachshund behavior, class manners, and the differences between American and British ideas about food. Tamsin’s position between Oregon and Cornwall also gives the culture-clash jokes more substance than simple tourist humor. She understands both worlds while feeling completely settled in neither.
The structural choice is one of my favorite things about the book. The first half largely lets us experience Crumpet from the outside, where his endless stories can make him look scattered, while the second half moves into his first-person perspective and shows how much is actually happening underneath all that chatter. The eventual solution is carefully tied to details that have been sitting in plain sight, particularly the almond-heavy menu, the tea, the family’s behavior, and Lady Atherton’s peculiar plans for the gathering. That makes the conclusion satisfying as a mystery. More importantly, the case changes both lead characters. Tamsin’s accidental adventure gives her a taste for a life beyond protecting her routines, while Crumpet finds in her the kind of partner who can steady a detective who’s been struggling since losing his wife. By the final pages, their proposed partnership at the Sausage Roll Bakery, with the possibility of future investigations, feels earned. Murder and Other Unpleasantries is a warm, eccentric mystery about murder, pastry, loneliness, friendship, and the strange things that can happen after one badly timed yes.
Pages: 314 | ASIN : B0H7SWNQ4W
