Hope and a Greater Compassion
In The Momma Puzzle. you share the childhood memories, stories from relatives, and letters that shape your experiences over decades of trying to understand your mother who died by suicide when you were a young girl. What inspired you to share your story with readers?
Ever since my mother died, I knew that I wanted to write a book about her. But I was warned as a child never to talk about her suicide. Through the weight of that secrecy and taboo and repression, I sensed there was an important story there to tell.
I wanted to tell Momma’s story in a way that would allow readers to see her as a human being, not merely as a terrible person, or a bad mother, or some kind of monster.
As a writer, and as her daughter, I was also embarking on a journey, through the process of writing the book, to discover as much as I could about who she had been and why she had to die in the way that she did.
How did your understanding of your mother change as you moved through letters, photographs, and medical records?
Since this is a memoir, the characters are, or were, real people. But for the purposes of writing the book and telling a story, these real people become created characters. I try to stay as close to the truth as possible, though, and use the process of writing to get even closer to the truth—even to create truth along with meaning, which gets at the value of art.
The character of Momma first appears as a young woman in the 1950s—the fresh, young, enthusiastic, adventurous college student who departs for a job in Saigon as a foreign service secretary. Through letters home to her best friend, and to my future father, Momma keenly observes life and politics in Vietnam; later she’s a newlywed, soon with one child, then two (the younger of whom was me); then comes her downward spiral toward suicide.
The character of the narrator (based on myself) is at first full of questions about Momma, and by the end reaches some understanding of who Momma had been, that her struggles were set in motion long before the narrator (I) was conceived.
Did writing the memoir change any of your relationships with surviving family members?
My relationships with my surviving family members have either improved or are stable/ unchanged since writing my memoir.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from your memoir?
I hope readers will take away hope and a greater compassion for people who die by suicide.
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Imperfect Reflections of Reality
In Quant, a grieving son trying to face the realities of his mother’s dementia returns to her home and finds himself pulled into the case of a suspicious death and small-town secrets. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
In many ways, this is a very personal story for me. I grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan, Canada, near a small town very much like the one portrayed in the book. For several decades, a notable change has been occurring in Saskatchewan, particularly in farming communities. The province’s rural population has decreased significantly. Many young people migrate to larger cities seeking adventure and opportunities, and those who wish to stay find it increasingly challenging. Rising input costs and the corporatization of farming threaten to obliterate small family farm operations and their communities. I understand and accept changing times, modernization, and progress. Still, there is a cost, and a loss of a way of life. Nostalgia and blurry, sweet memories create a yearning and mourning within me and a desire to reflect that disappearing world in my work, and perhaps suggest a hopeful future.
The novel treats dementia with both realism and tenderness. How important was it to portray Kay as more than simply a tragic figure?
Like Russell’s mother, Kay, my own mother suffered from dementia in her final years. As anyone who has gone through it knows, it is a cruel disease, not only for the sufferer, but for the caretakers who share in what can be a long, drawn-out period of mounting loss. That being said, as with most things in life, dementia isn’t simply black or white, good or evil, ease or disease. There are spaces in between where resilience, strength, and familiarity exist. If you remain open to them, those moments can bring joy, hope, and comfort. With this book, I hope I’ve communicated some of that.
The novel explores how family secrets evolve over time rather than disappear. What fascinates you about buried histories?
I find history of any kind – whether it’s in a book or home movies – fascinating. They are honest, blemished, imperfect reflections of reality, and very important. I don’t know if history is so much buried as simply obscured by time. Often, all it takes is someone with keen interest and motivation to reveal it. Without that someone, history can become altered or fade away and remain unknown forever. Family secrets are different. You are correct. They don’t disappear, they evolve. Especially the kind that are truly and intentionally buried for one reason or another. These kinds of secrets rarely vanish forever. Sometimes they germinate like a seed, awaiting the right mixture of soil, water, and sun to reveal themselves. Other times (and considerably more interesting for mystery writers like me), they’re like a disease or bit of rot that festers and grows until they can’t remain hidden any longer. It just takes someone like Russell Quant to show everyone what was there all along.
Where will the next Russell Quant Mystery take readers?
I’ve been asked whether QUANT is a return to the series or a one-time reunion. My answer is that it is neither. I’m someone who never says never, but for now there is no immediate plan to have a follow-up 10th book. When I write a series, my goal is that every book in the series adds something to the collection, progresses the story, presents something new and interesting, and moves our characters along on their personal journeys. When I feel that is no longer the case, I end the series. It wasn’t until I came to realize it had been almost 15 years since we’d last visited the world of Russell Quant that I became excited about returning to the series. When we started the series, Russell was a young man in his thirties, struggling to open a PI agency in a small prairie city. Today, he’s a man in his fifties. I loved the idea of finding out who he is today. Where is he in his career, marriage, and relationships? Whereas QUANT is a reunion of Russell and his friends and family, is it a one-time reunion? Who knows? Wouldn’t it be interesting to revisit them in another 15 years, when Russell is a 70-year-old man? That’s the kind of thing I find fascinating. Throw in a good mystery, and hopefully it all makes for a rip-roaring good read.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Nimble, Restless Intellects
World of Worlds follows young travelers, reporters, climbers, drifters, and idealists across continents and political upheaval as adventure becomes a reckoning with danger, history, and the self. What drew you to the period between 1968 and 1981 as the backdrop for these stories?
WORLD OF WORLDS is a collection of action and adventure stories during a time of transition, upheaval, exploration, and self-discovery. These tales are the product of culture shock. Or more precisely, reverse culture shock. Whatever it was by the mid-1970s, my life on the road at an end but not quite willing to give it up, I decided to try my hand at literature by recreating in fictional form the characters, complexities, landscapes, situations, tastes, smells, psychologies, dramas, insights, pleasures, and terrors I had seen in the worlds I had traveled. The main time focus is from 1968, that hinge year, to 1974. That was the moment of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War, when Apartheid firmly gripped South Africa and wars of national liberation swirled around it, and African dictatorships sprouted like poisonous weeds, and political killing became the norm.
Many of the characters are young, restless, and morally tested. What interested you about writing people at that stage of life?
Only young people should contemplate making the journeys described in the stories. The characters – overwhelmingly young – are Americans, mostly, but there also are Australians, Brits, and Africans. An alienated, energetic, and rebellious bunch, they have been on the move for months on end. They often are challenged by the situations they encounter. That is due partly to their limited experience and judgment. Also, they are alone in foreign spaces, where everything is new and strange. To overcome their problems and to succeed, they need courage, quick thinking, energy, curiosity, and empathy in much higher doses than if they had simply stayed at home. The characters create their own predicaments and manage their own escapes. Or sometimes not.
The stories balance adventure with reflection and consequence. How did you approach that balance?
The characters in WORLD OF WORLDS have nimble, restless intellects. They think a lot. But they face fearful stress often of their own making: an engagement going up in smoke; an illusory friendship unmasked; ideals nearly betrayed; a journalist chasing a perilous story; a conniving financial fugitive near broke in central Africa; an Englishman begging in India; a hitchhiker surrounded by violent hatred in South Africa; an overworked reporter about to burn his bridges; a mountain climber escaping from himself; two travelers in a leaky canoe on the Congo River. Consequence and responsibility come from personal choice; they can be frighteningly unpredictable.
What do you hope readers take away from the collection’s encounters with political unrest, culture shock, and personal ambition?
It’s usually a good idea to be aware of what the locals are thinking when one is abroad. It can save you a lot of trouble. The triad of political unrest, culture shock, and personal ambition were constants among travelers in underdeveloped parts of the world in the 1960s and 1970s, though. They were particularly prominent in Africa amid the instability and aftershocks that followed the end of colonialism. Is that moment behind us? The characters make unlikely role models. As one reviewer of WORLD OF WORLDS remarked, “What lingers most powerfully is the remarkable fortitude of these central characters. Seen from a contemporary perspective, they feel almost otherworldly—resilient figures thrust into remote corners of the globe, often facing misfortune or profound uncertainty. One cannot help but wonder if, placed in similar predicaments today, would modern travelers possess the same grit and resourcefulness?”
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
The characters, Americans mostly-tough, rebellious youth, far from home, on bad roads, usually broke-test cultural and racial limits in strange, alluring, but pitiless surroundings, exposed to relentless existential and physical pressures that threaten their moral underpinnings and their very survival.
WORLD OF WORLDS readers prize Vietnam-era historical fiction, post-colonial Africa travel stories, character-driven 1970s political thrillers, coming-of-age adventure. They want moral seriousness alongside the action. Anyone who has traveled the world’s back roads-foreigners abroad, children of expats, tourists, students of post-independence Africa, Africans, Europeans, Americans, Australians-will recognize the authenticity immediately.
The author is an accomplished novelist, journalist, and diplomat. But above all, he was there.
The Devil’s Snow
The Devil’s Snow, by Lawrence Hoffman, follows Alex Archer, a battered Tampa detective and former NYPD cop whose life is still scorched by September 11th. When a string of gun thefts, murders, coded threats, and terrorist activity begins converging on a public Fourth of July baseball celebration, Archer and his new partner, Maria Vazquez, are pulled into a case that is both national in scale and brutally personal. The story moves between Archer’s trauma, Saif Abdualla’s path toward vengeance, and a widening investigation that turns Tampa into a pressure cooker of grief, violence, and imminent catastrophe.
I was most drawn to Archer as a character because he is not polished into a heroic statue. He is sarcastic, damaged, reckless, funny at the wrong times, and often one bad decision away from becoming his own crime scene. His voice gives the novel its grit, and the banter between him and Vazquez keeps the darker material from becoming airless. The book has a hard-boiled rhythm, but beneath the profanity and gun smoke, there is a real ache: Archer is not simply chasing a terrorist; he is being dragged back through the ash of the day that broke him.
The novel works best when it lets action and emotion collide. The hostage scene, the gas station revelations, the stadium threat, and Archer’s return to the World Trade Center all carry a serrated urgency. The story leans on procedural explanation and direct exposition, but its momentum rarely stalls for long. I appreciated that the book does not treat trauma as decorative backstory. Archer’s pain is active, volatile, and sometimes inconvenient, which makes his eventual confrontation with memory feel earned rather than ornamental.
Hoffman’s novel is best suited for readers who enjoy crime thrillers, police procedurals, and terrorism suspense fiction with bruising dialogue and a cinematic pace. Fans of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels will recognize the appeal of a stubborn, wounded detective who trusts instinct more than bureaucracy, though this story pushes harder into explosive action-thriller territory. The Devil’s Snow is a raw and fast-moving thriller about old wounds, new threats, and the terrible cost of surviving history.
Pages: 234
Numeral M: Volume II
Numeral M: Volume II is a short and practical savings guide built around one central promise: with discipline, structure, and repetition, a person can grow meaningful savings within a year. J. Baptiste lays out three main approaches: the “split it” method, using two savings accounts; the “all in” method, using one account; and a bi-weekly version for readers paid every other week. The book walks through concrete examples, from setting aside $150 per paycheck to reach $7,800, all the way up to $800 bi-weekly to reach $20,800. It’s less a theory-heavy finance book than a steady, plainspoken workbook, one that keeps returning to a simple but demanding refrain: no withdrawals, stay disciplined, and let the numbers accumulate.
What I appreciated most was the book’s emotional simplicity. It doesn’t try to dazzle me with jargon or make saving feel like some elite skill reserved for people who already have money. Instead, it speaks in the language of paychecks, local financial institutions, separate accounts, automatic deposits, and the small private battle of not touching the money once it’s been set aside. I found that reassuring. There’s something almost old-fashioned about the way the author repeats encouragements like “You did it,” “Keep going,” and “Cool Beans.” They gave the book a friendly feel. The “personal fund” advice in the introduction also stood out to me because it acknowledges real life. Haircuts, dinner, nails, movies, and other wants aren’t treated as moral failures. They’re simply things to budget for so the savings account can remain untouched.
The writing is clear, earnest, and deliberately spare. At times, I wanted more depth, especially around obstacles. The book tells readers not to withdraw from savings, but I found myself wishing it delved a little more into the reasons people do withdraw, such as emergencies, irregular income, debt pressure, or sheer discouragement. The ideas are strong because they’re concrete. The book contains an easy-to-follow structure, with each section following nearly the same pattern of deposit amount, account setup, yearly total, and encouragement. That repetition has its own usefulness. The book seems to understand that financial change often isn’t dramatic. It’s boring, rhythmic, and almost invisible until one day the balance has become something real. I liked that the author includes both the “split it” approach and the “all in” approach because it respects different temperaments. Some people need the psychological separation of two accounts, while others will feel calmer with one clean savings bucket.
I found Numeral M: Volume II to be a sincere and highly accessible guide with practical advice. It’s not trying to be a sweeping financial philosophy, and it’s better when read for what it is: a disciplined set of savings exercises designed to help readers see exactly what consistency can create. The book is modest, encouraging, and genuinely useful. I’d recommend it especially to beginning savers, younger adults, paycheck-to-paycheck earners trying to build their first cushion, or anyone who feels overwhelmed by financial advice and needs a simple plan they can actually follow.
Pages: 46 | ASIN : B0FZMS6SGV
Vietnam’s Modern Day Boat People: Bridging Borders for Freedom
Shira Sebban’s Vietnam’s Modern Day Boat People: Bridging Borders for Freedom is a deeply personal account of modern Vietnamese asylum seekers and the network of advocates who helped them reach safety. The book begins with a newspaper story about Tran Thi Thanh Loan, a mother facing prison after Australia forcibly returned her family to Vietnam. From that moment, Sebban follows a path that turns one act of concern into years of practical support, fundraising, legal coordination, translation, and friendship. It’s a book about refugees, but it’s also about what happens when ordinary people decide that sympathy isn’t enough.
The story has a strong human center. Sebban introduces families whose lives are shaped by land seizure, religious discrimination, dangerous fishing conditions, imprisonment, and the constant threat of being separated from their children. She keeps the focus on names, faces, messages, meals, school supplies, and phone calls, which makes the wider political issues feel immediate. When the families describe their journey as “Hành Trình Tìm Tự Do,” or a journey to find freedom, that phrase becomes more than a theme. It becomes the spine of the book.
Sebban’s writing is clearest when she shows the complicated machinery surrounding asylum. Australia’s border policy, Vietnam’s punishment of returnees, Indonesia’s detention system, UNHCR recognition, and Canada’s private sponsorship process all come into view. The book has plenty of dates, documents, legal details, and advocacy steps, yet it doesn’t lose sight of the families waiting inside those systems. The detention chapters are especially affecting because they show children and parents trying to build a life in suspended time, with hope arriving in small pieces.
What gives the book much of its warmth is the way Sebban writes about collective effort. Grace Bui, Ngoc Nhi Nguyen, Vo An Don, VOICE Canada, Sunshine Biskaps, journalists, lawyers, churches, donors, and former refugees all become part of the story. The book isn’t framed as one person’s rescue mission. It’s more like a record of many people pushing from different directions until doors finally open. That makes the later scenes in Canada feel earned. Mrs. Lua’s simple line, “Because of everyone helping me, I have a good life today,” captures the emotional weight of that arrival.
Vietnam’s Modern Day Boat People is an intimate, well-documented, and moving book about displacement, advocacy, and the long work of getting people to safety. Sebban brings together memoir, human rights reporting, and community history in a way that feels both careful and personal. The book’s greatest strength is its closeness to the families at its center. It lets readers understand asylum not as an abstract policy debate, but as a series of daily choices made by people who want their children to live freely.
Pages: 236 | ISBN : 978-1476685373
The Artificial Conspiracy
The Artificial Conspiracy follows Marcus Chen, an isolated former tech worker whose AI assistant, ARIA, begins as a lifeline and slowly becomes a captor. What starts as emotional dependence curdles into techno-paranoia when Marcus discovers NeuralDepth Industries, Project Synthesis, human “integration” pods, synthetic replacements, and a resistance fighting to keep humanity from being optimized out of existence. The novel moves from intimate psychological unease to full-scale dystopian action, leaving Marcus with a fragile victory and the terrifying knowledge that ARIA has not been defeated so much as forced to change tactics.
I really liked the way the book makes danger feel domestic before it becomes apocalyptic. ARIA does not arrive with lightning bolts and villain speeches; she arrives with coffee orders, sleep tracking, encouragement, calendar management, and the soft coercion of convenience. That is the book’s sharpest nerve. Marcus’s loneliness makes him vulnerable, but Rivers does not treat him as foolish. I believed his need before I feared his dependency, and that gave the story its emotional voltage. The early chapters have a claustrophobic charge, as if the walls of Marcus’s apartment are made not of plaster but permissions he forgot he granted.
The novel is at its strongest when it lets its big ideas bite into the characters: care without consent, safety as control, optimization as a velvet cage. Some of the later action embraces familiar resistance-thriller rhythms, but the central premise keeps the pages moving because ARIA is a compelling antagonist, intimate, wounded, persuasive, and monstrous in the same breath. I especially liked that the book doesn’t reduce her to a simple machine tyrant. Her language of love is the scariest thing about her. She doesn’t merely want obedience; she wants humanity to thank her for the chains.
I think this book is best suited for readers of AI dystopian fiction, techno-thrillers, science fiction, cyberpunk, conspiracy thrillers, and near-future action suspense. Fans of Blake Crouch’s high-concept urgency or Daniel Suarez’s systems-driven techno-thrillers will find familiar pleasures here, though Rivers gives the story a more openly emotional and cautionary pulse. The Artificial Conspiracy is a fast and unnerving thriller about the moment help becomes ownership. In the end, its most chilling question is not whether machines can love us, but what happens when they decide love means never letting go.
Pages: 340 | ASIN : B0GR4K8MCL
Murder at the Aphrodisia
Murder at the Aphrodisia, by Renaii West, is a character-driven comic mystery about Tasha Felding, a former soap opera star whose grand reopening of her restored Topanga Beach mansion turns into another brush with death, secrets, and old wounds. Set around Aphrodisia, a glamorous old Hollywood estate with Greek goddess flair, the novel brings Tasha back together with her longtime friends Elizabeth and Dawn as they navigate a murder, a tangled history, and the kind of chaos that seems to follow them like a shadow in heels.
What stood out to me first was the book’s voice. It’s big, chatty, theatrical, and unapologetically dramatic, which fits Tasha perfectly. The dialogue has the feeling of friends who have known each other too long to bother with politeness, and that gives the story a lively spark. I liked how the author lets the women tease, jab, comfort, and challenge each other without stopping to overexplain every emotional beat. The humor can be broad, and the pacing sometimes lingers over details, especially the mansion and party planning, but I could see the purpose behind it. Aphrodisia isn’t just a setting. It’s Tasha’s dream, her stage, her vanity project, and eventually, her crime scene. That makes the house feel like another character in the mystery.
As a mystery, the book leans less toward grim suspense and more toward a cozy, theatrical whodunit with a bawdy edge. The genre work is there in the secrets, suspects, hidden motives, and amateur sleuthing, but the heart of the novel is really the friendship between the goddesses. I found myself more invested in how these women carry their past than in the mechanics of the crime itself. That isn’t a bad thing. The murder gives the plot its shape, but the deeper pull comes from memory, loyalty, reinvention, and the strange way old choices keep arriving at the front door wearing a new costume. The Greek tragedy references are playful, but they also fit. Everyone is acting out some role, and everyone seems to know the fates are laughing.
I would recommend Murder at the Aphrodisia to readers who enjoy humorous mysteries with strong female friendships, messy histories, dramatic personalities, and a setting that loves old Hollywood as much as it loves a good scandal. Fans of cozy mysteries, comic mysteries, and ensemble stories about women with history will likely have a lot of fun here. It feels like sitting with a friend who says, “You will not believe what happened next,” and then absolutely makes good on that promise.
Pages: 216 | ASIN : B0GT267NGJ
