My Salvation – Literature & History
By Her Own Hand centers around two decorated soldiers haunted by civilian deaths, abandonment, and the fear that a single terrible moment has defined them forever. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
To begin with, my own fractured upbringing where substance abuse and violence prevailed. Born as an empath, this environment was particularly painful to one of my nature. But irony emerges in strange places. My older brother tutored me at an early age to love literature and history, both ancient and contemporary. That was my salvation.
The novel contains elements of war fiction, psychological drama, romance, and thriller. What drew you to blending these genres?
In terms of war fiction, my extensive reading of conflicts in the Middle East. On a more personal level, the friends who died in the Viet Nam war and those who came back with the horrible affliction of PTSD. As far as psychological drama, the setting of the novel and the characters involved dictated high drama.
In reference to romance, most of my emotional responses would be classified as feminine. I relate to women’s feelings more than men’s. Thus, I write more directly to them. Moving on to thriller, once again, given the setting of high conflict and the personal inner conflicts of my characters, thriller was a necessary component.
Madeline’s relationship with Eliot and Mira reveal different aspects of her personality. What did each relationship teach readers about her?
Even as horrible as her family life was, she did not become hardened. She still has the will and the strength of character to open herself to vulnerability. In Eliot’s case, it led to an enduring love. In Mira’s case, Madeline’s nature was manipulated into lies and deceit. Yet, in the end, Madeline does not seek revenge. She knows that would only tarnish the real love she has found.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I do have a new novel in mind, but you know how superstitious novelists can be when it comes to divulging details too soon. Fortunately, I’m married to a loving and levelheaded wife who keeps her crazy writer in check!
I do promise you’ll be among the first to know when my next book comes out.
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She escaped one war—only to be hunted in another.
When Madeline Crowne flees an abusive home by joining the army, she rises from survivor to hero during her deployment in Afghanistan. But everything shatters when she’s falsely accused of a war crime and becomes the target of a global manhunt.
Saved by Mira, a survivor of Lebanon’s civil wars, Madeline finds comfort in their shared scars—until Mira’s dangerous double life as an illegal arms dealer turns obsession into betrayal.
Back in the U.S., Madeline crosses paths with Eliot Lange, another soldier on the run after being accused of desertion. Their chemistry is instant, their trust fragile. Together, they try to rebuild a future.
But the FBI is closing in.
And Mira wants revenge.
A Character’s Voice is Unique
Fangs for Hire follows a resistance fighter who, after being executed during WWII, is resurrected as a vampire and transforms personal tragedy into a lifelong quest for justice. What inspired you to combine wartime history with vampire fiction?
I am a history buff as well as a science buff, and I enjoy reading historical magazines, historical novels, and watching fascinating documentaries about World War II. I was inspired to write this novella by several influencing creative forces, such as the TV series Forever Knight, about a 13th-century vampire who became a 20th-century cop to save as many innocent humans as possible and redeem his past sins when he fed on the innocent and guilty alike. Another inspiration came from reading about the resistance against the Nazis in occupied Belarus, from 1941 to 1944. I thought: why not combine the dark fantasy and realism of real military conflict to tell a story of an ordinary teenage girl who fought for her country and was presented with a unique opportunity to strike at her enemies after her moral death? The result was Fangs for Hire, and I am very proud to be able to see this project from start to finish. Larisa Tokar is a unique character who is a survivor and a vampire with a human heart that is no longer beating.
Larisa balances confidence, compassion, and ruthlessness throughout the book. How did you approach creating her voice?
This is a very good and interesting question. A character’s voice is unique, and since Larisa is the main protagonist of the story, she has a unique voice and actions that define who she is. Born as an average human female with no special powers and no particular or unique talent, she nevertheless is an honest, kind, and compassionate person. The brutal Nazi invasion of her country and her desire to fight back against a brutal oppressor make her a person not only influenced by Soviet propaganda, but also a young woman who learns not only how to survive but also strikes at the enemy from a unique angle. She narrates the story with strong personal feelings based on her life experience. Her execution, death, and resurrection as a vampire alter her perspective about the war and the dark truth that was hidden from her. Born again as a vampire, with inhuman abilities that make her into a unique warrior, Larisa navigates through years in prison, during and after the war. She survives and adapts to her condition, and learns new skills to help those who deserve her love and respect. Larisa Tokar is a unique kind of time traveler.
The Urtama functions more like an international society than a traditional supernatural clan. How did that idea evolve?
Fangs for Hire is a novella that is related to my other vampire novels such as Beyond Sunlight, Eighteen Forever, Innocent Eyes, Heatseeker, and Before the Dawn. All of them feature a secret race of nightwalkers who call themselves Urtama. They are a very ancient species that have been living alongside mankind before the dawn of recorded history, stretching all the way back before the time of the last Great Ice Age. My idea about vampires came from the realization that, as a secret species, they had to remain in the shadows while adapting to the new times, as humanity had evolved from hunters and gatherers to farmers and eventually to city builders. Urtama represents a secret race of immortals who depend on human blood to survive, and therefore human lives are precious to them. And while I liked reading about supernatural clans and traditional vampire fiction, I imagined a different and secret world of vampires with their own rules and traditions and system of punishments for the crimes against humanity and their fellow immortals. No society can exist without rules and regulations, and Urtama has their own.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I am currently working on a sword and sorcery story, which has evolved from a short story I wrote in my experimental science fiction and fantasy writing group in the year 2012. It will most likely be a novelette-length, but with a rich, dense, and hopefully interesting story about kingdoms, battles, knights, love, ambition, and ancient super weapons. This is a unique project, because I seldom work on fantasy tales involving warriors and magic. I hope to complete and present the next book for review sometime in the early Fall. For me, writing is a labor of love, and I want to make this story a unique tale that is not only about action, adventure and magic, but also a morality tale with values that remain true both in the real and magical realm. The best part is that my work schedule permits me two days per week to work on my novels, and each novel I write, I want to make it interesting and informative for my readers. Please stay tuned. A new book is coming!
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Released From Prison to Fight a War
Scars of Sand and Soil follows a deeply scarred soldier who escapes a brutal Confederate prison camp and struggles to build a life away from the violence and loss he has suffered. What first inspired Gabriel Cooper’s story?
I had a nagging question about what would happen if someone were released from prison to fight a war. What kind of experience would that be? I realized that it depended on the person and so I started to build a character and he had to be organic with a backstory. I was looking for something less common, a story that is not always covered in Civil War or Reconstructionist stories. Gabriel as an ex-convict was the starting point and then there had to be the emotions that would go with someone who was in prison and was desperate to get out. Yet beneath those immediate emotions there was a core of someone who had once been good and I wanted to explore how Gabriel could once again find himself.
Gabriel is both sympathetic and deeply unsettling. How did you approach creating such a morally complicated protagonist?
I treated Gabriel as a whole person and did not focus on any one particular dimension of his personality. Gabriel had hopes and dreams and fears; depending on what he was feeling and where he was in life, it propelled his actions. Gabriel is intelligent and feels deeply, therefore the results of his assassinations, his lies, his secrets are not lost on him and as he gains life experience and wisdom, his conscience catches up with him. While he might seem a psychopath in the beginning, this is his trauma on display. As he gets a foothold in a life where he experiences love and success (albeit a dubious success given his profession) he begins to question the value of some of his choices.
The story explores questions of class, race, gender, and social change. Which of those themes felt most urgent while you were writing?
Gender is what really d rove the story for much of the writing. Simone plays a pivotal role in female empowerment in this novel. As a woman she is presented with very few options for living the life she would want, but this is not evident to her until she meets Lucinda who tells her in so many words that while she is not a black woman nor a slave, she is still downtrodden. Then Simone is faced with the unthinkable; the inability to have a baby. She now must create a life of purpose outside the proscribed social mores of the time. She succeeds at this, but then is once again presented with the opportunity to take up with an old romantic flame. Her choice in this matter and then her choice in dealing with the discovery of Gabriel’s deceit is a tribute to a woman making choices for herself rather than what would be expected of her from the dominant gender of society.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I have a second novel completed, but it is in need of a re-write. Then, it depends on getting it to a publisher, which as you know, is no easy feat!
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It’s 1864, and Gabriel Cooper couldn’t care less about the civil war raging around him. Framed for crimes he didn’t commit, he’s been sentenced to a Confederate chain gang, where swampland justice rules and alligators prey on the unwary.
So when Colonel Robert Tremont rides into camp offering freedom in exchange for fighting on the front lines, Gabriel jumps at the opportunity. He thrives as a soldier, but the end of the war leaves him adrift.
Gabriel ends up in New Orleans, where he meets Simone Livingston, a fiercely independent woman with hidden scars of her own. Kept on a tight rein by her overbearing father, Simone only wants freedom—and the enigmatic Gabriel.
But Gabriel has unfinished business and a mind for vengeance. Will he be able to create a peaceful life with Simone? Or will his greed and thirst for retribution keep them trapped in a dangerous web of deceit—a web Gabriel fears can only be untangled with murder?
Hypnotized: A Turnbull Canyon Mystery
W. B. Edwards’s Hypnotized: A Turnbull Canyon Mystery is a historical mystery novel set in Whittier, California, during the summer of 1969. The story opens with an ominous encounter near Turnbull Canyon, then moves among several characters whose lives become connected through attraction, deception, buried family history, and the unsettling possibility of hypnosis. Nick O’Brien, a drifting Army veteran, remembers that summer as the end of an era and a season filled with unexpected turns. With its Southern California setting and late-sixties atmosphere, the novel blends historical fiction, crime fiction, psychological suspense, and supernatural mystery.
Rather than following a single investigator, the book builds its mystery through multiple viewpoints. Nick’s conversational narration gives the story much of its personality, while Hampton Masters III brings vulnerability and growing confusion to the psychological suspense plot. Retired detective Harry Roach supplies the traditional cold-case mystery element as he investigates the 1943 disappearance of fourteen-year-old Margaret “Margo” Stewart near the abandoned property known as Hell’s Gate. Imelda’s story adds another layer involving identity, performance, ambition, and a strange ability that becomes increasingly important as the characters’ paths cross.
The novel’s strongest quality is its lived-in sense of time and place. Pool halls, drive-ins, hot rods, stereo equipment, cigarette smoke, smoggy sunsets, and Whittier Boulevard cruising give the historical fiction setting real texture. Edwards lets conversations wander and relationships develop gradually, so the characters feel like people caught up in an increasingly bizarre situation. That unhurried approach also suits Nick’s reflective voice, which often circles around the uncertain nature of memory. The result is a mystery novel where personal regrets and half-remembered experiences matter as much as physical clues.
As the separate storylines come together, Hypnotized grows into an offbeat Turnbull Canyon mystery about manipulation, obsession, desire, and the stories people tell themselves. Its crime-fiction plot reaches a satisfying confrontation, but the supernatural questions remain slippery enough to keep the ending in your mind. The book’s final reflections on memories, dreams, and possible spells fit its hazy 1969 world especially well. Readers who enjoy character-driven historical mysteries, California noir, psychological suspense novels, and supernatural crime fiction will find plenty to discuss here.
Pages: 270 | ISBN : 9798235560857
Drop (The Police Annals of Jax Book II)
Drop by J.R. Lightfoot is a fast, violent blend of urban fantasy, police thriller, and martial-arts adventure. The story follows Jax Ferris, a Fort Worth officer turned supernatural enforcer, as he hunts the sorceress Debro and the creatures serving the Order of Light. Jax is driven by grief, revenge, and a belief that he’s the person best equipped to confront threats most people don’t even know exist. The book establishes that mission early, placing him on a joint FBI and Fort Worth task force charged with hunting sorcerers, berserkers, and harpies. From there, the conflict expands into a much larger war involving portals, rival factions, hidden alliances, political influence, and powerful beings stranded between worlds.
Jax gives the novel its personality. He’s cocky, funny, ruthless, and often genuinely frightening, even when he’s fighting on the side readers are meant to support. His magical gauntlets let him summon weapons suited to each battle, which gives the action scenes plenty of variety. Lightfoot writes those confrontations in close detail, tracking blades, kicks, spells, injuries, and tactical decisions almost move by move. The result feels like an action movie translated directly onto the page. Jax’s relationships with Mary, Mahla, Robin, Linda, and the rest of the team also give the story an emotional center. As the casualties mount, his swagger starts to sit alongside exhaustion and guilt, making him more interesting than a simple unstoppable hero.
The novel moves through a large cast and several competing groups, including Debro’s Order, Zach’s organization, law enforcement, supernatural outsiders, and characters whose loyalties keep shifting. That broad scope gives the book a busy, unpredictable quality. The dialogue is blunt and frequently profane, while the narration has the direct energy of someone telling an outrageous story without slowing down to soften it. Betrayals, romantic tensions, gruesome deaths, and sudden reversals arrive quickly, particularly in the final chapters. The ending is especially effective as a continuation hook. It changes the meaning of Jax’s apparent victory, advances him into a new position of authority, and brings his conflict with Debro back into the everyday world in a clever way.
This book will appeal most to readers who enjoy hard-edged urban fantasy with antiheroes, graphic combat, police-team dynamics, and comic-book-sized supernatural stakes. It’s also a good match for fans of action stories where the main character solves problems through nerve, physical skill, and overwhelming force. Since it’s the second entry in the series and refers often to earlier battles, deaths, and relationships, readers who begin with Book I will get the fullest experience. For someone who likes relentless confrontations, dangerous magic, dark humor, and heroes who operate far outside ordinary rules, Drop offers a wild and energetic ride.
Pages: 350 | ASIN: B0GLGVLQ2X
Fortress of Wind
Christian Cura’s Fortress of Wind is an expansive fantasy novel centered on a world struggling to survive the return of Malsumi, a destructive goddess determined to reshape creation in her own image. The story begins in the aftermath of a devastating attack on Califare and quickly broadens to include refugees, soldiers, royal families, mages, and divine powers across several nations. Although the novel draws on events and relationships established in earlier books, it develops a substantial conflict of its own, with the forest city of Ardomir becoming the focal point of an approaching war.
The novel’s greatest strength is its detailed setting. Cura distinguishes each culture through its geography, magical traditions, political history, and social structure. Dagrund’s cities are built among living trees, Khione is defined by ice and winter magic, and Cordacia carries the complicated legacy of a former empire. These places shape the characters’ values and decisions. The book also examines how historical grievances influence present alliances, particularly when displaced Cordacians must seek protection from a nation their ancestors once conquered.
At the emotional center of the story is the relationship between Tama and Liseli. Their devotion gives the large-scale conflict a personal dimension, especially as Malsumi attempts to control Tama and isolate her from those she loves. Liseli’s assurance that “You are my companion. You are a warrior and a champion of the light” expresses the novel’s interest in identity as something sustained through love, loyalty, and choice. Princess Una’s development provides another compelling thread as she confronts military responsibility, personal loss, and the demands of leadership. Through these characters, the novel connects heroism with endurance, responsibility, and the willingness to act despite fear.
Cura’s prose favors direct action, vivid physical detail, and rapid shifts between intimate moments and violent confrontations. The battles are energetic and often graphic, while the quieter scenes allow grief, affection, faith, and political tension to emerge. The warning that “things will grow darker before they get better” captures both the structure and tone of the narrative, which repeatedly tests its characters before offering them new purpose. Fortress of Wind is a dramatic continuation of Cura’s fantasy saga, combining elemental magic, divine conflict, romance, and wartime leadership within a carefully constructed world.
Red Scorpion: Rising
Red Scorpion: Rising by Patrick Greenwood is a sprawling geopolitical techno-thriller that combines cybersecurity warfare, covert intelligence operations, military action, political intrigue, and a surprisingly warm family story. As the third and final Jack Kendall novel, it brings the series’ long-running themes of sacrifice, loyalty, grief, and service into one high-stakes conclusion. Greenwood draws on his Marine Corps background and decades of cybersecurity experience, which gives the book’s digital threats and intelligence conflicts a convincing sense of urgency.
The plot moves across the United States, China, Taiwan, Japan, Hungary, Switzerland, and other international locations as several crises begin feeding into one another. China prepares to move against Taiwan, the criminal hacker Dimi Zosh targets the Green Kyoto cryptocurrency network, and NSA Director Valerie Jones activates the secretive Red Scorpion program. Jack Kendall and his children, Regina and William, are pulled into a conflict involving stolen billions, blockchain vulnerabilities, assassins, deep-cover agents, military brinkmanship, and competing national agendas. This blend makes the novel a strong fit for readers searching for a cybersecurity thriller, military thriller, espionage thriller, political thriller, or international action novel.
What gives the story its personality is the way Greenwood keeps returning to the people caught inside the machinery of governments and intelligence agencies. Jack is a veteran and troubleshooter, but he’s also a father, grandfather, grieving partner, and man wondering how much of his life should still belong to danger. His developing relationship with Li Cao adds tenderness without disconnecting from the larger suspense plot, while Regina and William get meaningful roles in both the technical and emotional sides of the story. Valerie Jones, Red Scorpion One, Poppy Ledger, Hai Ming, and Dimi Zosh add different shades of secrecy, ambition, trauma, and obsession, creating a large cast whose choices continually reshape the crisis.
The book’s greatest strength is its scale. It reads like a season of an international espionage series, with short chapters, frequent location changes, technical problems, political confrontations, and action sequences that keep the pressure building. At the same time, its final movement understands that Jack’s real destination isn’t simply another successful operation. His quiet reunion with Li in Basel, where he chooses the life in front of him even though Dimi remains at large, gives the ending emotional weight. Red Scorpion: Rising is an ambitious geopolitical thriller with cyberwarfare, military suspense, romance, and family loyalty at its center, offering the Jack Kendall series a tense and heartfelt conclusion.
Pages: 320 | ASIN: B0H47Z6GBJ
A Storyboard Life: From $20 to Two Hundred Documentary Film Adventures
Kristin Fellows’s A Storyboard Life is a warm, energetic memoir about a creative career assembled through instinct, persistence, and a remarkable number of unexpected encounters. Fellows organizes the book into 83 short “story frames,” a structure that reflects her decades in documentary filmmaking and lets the narrative move like a collection of vivid scenes. It begins with her losing a beloved job while six months pregnant, then follows her as financial pressure, curiosity, and what she calls “sideways thinking” pull her into public television and eventually into work on nearly two hundred films. The book’s central promise appears early, when Fellows imagines comforting her younger self: “You won’t believe the pivots and plot twists that await you.”
The early chapters are especially lively because Fellows understands how to turn small decisions into satisfying stories. A twenty-dollar PBS pledge leads to fundraising work. Following a stranger with nice shoes leads to documentary research. Sophia Loren’s bedsheets, a deserted island, and a chance meeting at a town hall all become links in the same professional chain. Her humor keeps these episodes from feeling like polished career mythology. When she explains why her unlikely film career began, she cuts through the inspirational language with the wonderfully blunt line, “But broke, we were.” That mixture of candor and comic timing gives the memoir much of its personality.
As the book develops, the documentary projects become more than colorful professional anecdotes. They influence the way Fellows understands grief, family, spirituality, aging, and responsibility. Her sister Karen’s illness and death form one of the memoir’s emotional centers, while her divorce, single motherhood, her parents’ final years, and the gradual independence of her children deepen the personal story. Encounters with artists, filmmakers, religious thinkers, activists, farmers, and other memorable figures continually feed back into her own life. Fellows presents creativity as a practical way of responding to upheaval, not simply as artistic self-expression.
The storyboard format suits Fellows’s conversational voice, though it also creates a deliberately episodic rhythm. Some chapters have the snap and shape of complete short stories, while others work as connective frames that move her toward the next project, relationship, or revelation. The large cast and abundance of film titles can be a lot to absorb, but they also convey the collaborative nature of documentary work. Fellows is generous about naming the people who opened doors, offered advice, trusted her with a project, or simply appeared at the right moment. That generosity makes the memoir feel less like a solo success story and more like a long record of creative exchange.
What I liked most is the book’s confidence that a meaningful life can reveal its shape only in retrospect. Fellows doesn’t claim to have followed a master plan. She watches one opportunity create another, then looks back and recognizes a pattern that wasn’t visible while she was living it. A Storyboard Life is an expansive memoir of resourcefulness, reinvention, and the strange intelligence of accumulated experience. It’s funny, candid, emotionally open, and deeply interested in the people behind creative work. By the final pages, the storyboard metaphor feels fully earned: each frame matters on its own, but its greater meaning comes from the life that emerges when all the frames are placed together.
Pages: 458 | ASIN : B0GMZBN15P
