Helping Kids Understand
Why I Must Go offers parents a gentle way to talk about a family member’s military service and the reasons behind their time spent away from home. When did you realize there was a need for a book like this for young children?
My husband deployed twice in two years when my children were very young. My daughter started asking why her daddy had to leave for work when other daddies came home. I didn’t have a good enough answer that explained the magnitude of service and courage of military members. There was one defining moment on the day my husband deployed for the second time. We were at a friend’s house, and their dad got home from work. The kids all started yelling Daddy! and running to meet him at the door. My eldest got caught up in the moment and joined in, only for her face to fall when she realized her daddy wasn’t going to be home for a long time. I saw that there was a need for a way to explain to children that loved ones leave for the military because of love for them. They love their kids and family so much, they deploy to protect them.
How do you ensure the tone stays comforting without minimizing the reality of separation?
The reality of separation is very much present in the book, but I tried to pair different examples of the separation with reasons behind it. I focused on the freedoms and the safety that the children can enjoy because of the service of members in the military.
The story emphasizes routines and small moments of joy. Why was that important to include?
Life doesn’t and shouldn’t stop when family members deploy. It is so easy to fall into the trap of “Wait until Daddy gets home.” I wanted to show that fun and exciting things can still happen even though their loved ones may not be there to experience it with them.
What is one thing you hope families take away from Why I Must Go?
I want families, and especially children, to be proud of their loved ones for their service. To see the positive in their absence.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Being separated from a loved one for a long period of time is especially hard. But why is it that loved ones who serve in the military have to leave for so long? Why is it they have to miss important life events?
Why I Must Go explains to children that their loved ones leave because they love them very much, and that they serve their country to protect and ensure their freedom. It is hard, but they are not forgotten.
This book helps children understand that they are a service member’s motivation and encouragement for what they do.
Book pictures and storyline are applicable to all services and inclusive of all ranks.
Go Big
Birds of Prey Don’t Sing follows a gifted and deeply broken assassin who takes on the hardest case of his career, murdering a priest and making it look like divine judgment. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I set out to write the most unique assassin thriller that I could, and to do so I focused on M.O. and backstory. Michael Harrier’s clients choose two targets—one to kill, and one to frame for the murder. Once that elusive M.O. was set, I created several dual-target jobs, some inspired by real events, others distilled from my imagination. Because this was the first book in the series, I felt I should go big, with the hit that seems impossible, but ends up being plausible. And that job was informed by a serendipitous bit of then-unrelated research I happened upon in the early stages—that’s when the spark became flame.
Michael is both sympathetic and terrifying. How did you balance those sides, and how important was trauma in shaping his worldview and actions?
I balanced that by trying to make him human first. And yes, trauma was key to his backstory. Pretty much every assassin in the genre is ex-government (CIA, Mossad, MI6, etc) or ex-military, and for good reason, but I wanted to break from that tradition. So to me, a key part of a self-made assassin, without resorting to a stereotypical sociopath (who would be difficult to sympathize with), is their upbringing, which needed to involve trauma and pain. A wounded human forged in trauma as opposed to a natural born killer; more nurture than nature. And I’ve long been fascinated by how trauma can both inform and misinform our intuition, judgment, and decisions, and I liked how this paradox played out for Michael as his story unspooled.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Justice, morality, trauma, intuition, redemption, and human connection.
Do you see Michael’s story continuing in future books?
Yes. I have more ideas than time, but book two is underway.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Website | Instagram
Michael Harrier has built his reputation on a system no one else uses. Every contract comes with two targets. One dies. Someone else takes the blame.
It’s worked flawlessly for years.
Until now.
What should be a clean hit starts to unravel. A woman with a violent past pulls him off course. A single mistake threatens to expose everything. And for the first time, Harrier is forced to improvise.
Meanwhile, LAPD homicide sergeant Jordan Becker is hunting a killer he can’t pin down.
But he’s built his career on getting results where others stall out.
The case doesn’t follow any rules. The evidence doesn’t hold. The story keeps shifting. And the deeper Becker digs, the clearer it becomes he’s chasing someone smarter, faster, and always just out of reach.
As Harrier’s world tightens and Becker starts to break through, both men are pulled into a game where every move has consequences—and no one is as untouchable as they think.
Because this time, getting away with murder isn’t the hardest part.
It’s controlling what comes next.
Clifford’s War: Redivivus
Clifford’s War: Redivivus begins as a missing-person thriller and quickly widens into something knottier: after Grace Dillenger’s ex-husband Raymond takes their daughter Hadley on a long-promised trip and both vanish en route to a mountain lodge, Grace calls in private investigator Clifford Dee, a man tied to her past through an earlier criminal entanglement. What follows is part family crisis, part snowbound investigation, part conspiracy story, with Clifford tracing wreckage, half-truths, burner phones, compromised allies, and a threat that proves larger and stranger than the original disappearance.
Grace isn’t written as a decorative victim; she’s wealthy, sharp, culpable, frightened, and often difficult in ways that feel earned rather than schematic. Clifford, meanwhile, has the reassuring ballast of an old-school thriller lead, but he’s not a granite slab. He notices people, reads rooms, leans on his team, and carries his own fatigue. I especially liked how the novel keeps widening its aperture: what starts as a desperate maternal summons becomes a procedural hunt with digital sleuthing, fieldwork, improvised alliances, and an undercurrent of old violence that never quite stays buried. The ensemble gives the book a welcome elasticity; Bailey in particular adds both warmth and voltage.
The book likes gadgets, backstory, operational detail, hidden networks, Latin tags, near-cinematic reveals, and that plot expansion makes the book feel propulsive. I found myself carried along more often than not. Reed has a sincere feel for place and comfort objects, coffee, snow, warm cars, lodges, weapons, maps, phones, files, and those tactile details give the suspense a lived-in grain. The prose is generally direct, but it occasionally swerves into melodrama or over-explanation; even so, I preferred that earnestness to the bloodless polish of many contemporary thrillers. Redivivus has a pulpy heartbeat that I thoroughly enjoyed.
I’d hand this to readers of mystery, suspense, crime fiction, conspiracy thriller, and investigative adventure who like capable teams, personal stakes, and a story willing to sprawl beyond its initial premise. It feels closer in spirit to Brad Thor or early David Baldacci than to the cooler, more austere end of crime fiction, though some readers may also catch the found-family teamwork and momentum that make Harlan Coben so readable. This is a missing-girl thriller with a conspiratorial afterburn that’s hard to set down.
Pages: 295 | ASIN : B0FXY6RH92
Travis Heights
Travis Heights is a straight-from-the-gut memoir about a boy who walks out of a broken home in 1971 Austin and spends the next two decades trying to build a life, then find his way back to some kind of peace with the father who failed him. Author Ray Tye starts with the call that sends him on a mission to pick up “the Old Man” in Austin in the mid-90s, then drops us back into his teenage years in South Austin. We watch him juggle school, a library job, his love of motorcycles, a racist and controlling future stepmother, and a father who can be loving one minute and violent the next. When the choice becomes “live by their rules or leave,” he walks out at fourteen and learns to survive off grit, odd jobs, and whatever he can scrounge. Over time he joins the Marines, builds a career in IT and security, and eventually has to face that original wound again when he drives his aging father across the country. The book follows that arc of harm, escape, growth, and uneasy reconciliation, with a running thread of “rules” he pulls from each hard lesson.
I found the book disarmingly direct. Tye’s voice feels like someone talking to you across a diner table at midnight. The scenes land hard because the language stays simple and concrete. I could see the smashed records on the bed, hear the belt buckle, smell the cigarettes at the kitchen table. The early Austin sections really stuck with me. The Twin Oaks library, the cheap burgers, the Waffle House nights, the woods behind Travis High, all of that felt lived in and specific, not generic “hard childhood” scenery. I liked the structure too. The cut between the 1995 “mission” and the 1970s boyhood keeps some tension going, and those short “Rule #1, Rule #2…” moments act like little anchor points for the reader.
I felt angry and sick during the beating scene, then weirdly proud watching him pack his Boy Scout gear and walk out with almost nothing. I kept wanting the adults to step in, and they just didn’t. I appreciated that Tye never flattens anyone into a cardboard villain or saint, even Beulah and his father. He calls out the racism, the religious hypocrisy, the violence, and also shows the charm, the war stories, and the complicated love. His take on running away made me uncomfortable in a useful way. He doesn’t glamorize it at all, and he repeats that he would urge kids today to ask for help instead. At the same time, he doesn’t erase the part of himself that is proud he survived. That tension matters. The book also has a strong thread about masculinity, especially the version shaped by the military and law enforcement in that era. You can feel the tug between “suck it up, accomplish the mission” and “this hurt me, and it still hurts.”
The reconciliation Tye offers is not neat and cozy. He doesn’t pretend the past was fine, and he doesn’t pretend forgiveness fixes everything. What he offers instead is a kind of truce with his own history. He shows that you can hold boundaries, tell the truth about what happened, and still choose not to stay stuck in hatred. I think this book will resonate most with readers who grew up in chaotic or abusive families, folks who served in the military, anyone who has wrestled for years with a parent who hurt them, and people who like grounded, place-specific memoirs set in Texas and the 70s. It’s not a light read, and it comes with clear content warnings for violence and abuse, but if you can handle that weight, it’s worth your time.
Pages: 349 | ASIN: B0GX1GJRMG
Afterburn
Afterburn is a near-future science fiction novel, but it reads with the pressure and velocity of a prison break thriller. Author Michael Bodhi Green drops us into a 2070 America shaped by racial extremism, internment, surveillance tech, and the mythology of space travel, then centers the whole thing on Alton, a teacher trying to stay human inside a brutal camp system. That choice matters. The book isn’t just interested in institutions and ideology. The story is interested in what it means to keep thinking, reading, and teaching when the world around you is trying to flatten people into categories.
Alton is not built as a generic action hero, even though the book gives him action scenes with real snap and danger from the opening pages onward. He’s a damaged, reflective, yearning guy whose love of books and longing for the stars feel equally sincere. Early on, the novel tells you exactly who he is with the line, “Even in this hellhole, he still loved to teach.” That works because the book keeps proving it. His classroom scenes are some of the strongest in the novel, not because they slow things down, but because they show how ideas, memory, and story become tools for survival.
The novel is also doing something pretty ambitious with genre. It’s a dystopian political novel, a war story, a story about incarceration, and a story about people who were raised on dreams of cosmic escape. Green keeps all of that moving without losing the thread. I especially liked the way books inside the book become part of the argument. When Alton says novels are “windows into the thinking of another time,” I think Afterburn is quietly describing itself too. It wants to be read as both a story and a cultural mirror, and that gives even the pulpy, high-energy sections a little extra weight.
There’s also a real tenderness under all the steel, dust, and fire. The book keeps returning to the gap between fantasy and maturity, between the dream of transcendence and the harder work of living among other people on the ground. By the end, that tension gives the novel a satisfying shape. The title turns out to be more than a cool image. It becomes a way of thinking about aftermath, desire, and the lingering heat of past choices. The final movement gives Alton a resolution that feels earned because it grows out of who he’s been all along, not because the plot forces a neat lesson on him.
Afterburn is an earnest, high-stakes, idea-driven novel with a big emotional engine. It’s vivid, angry, heartfelt, and surprisingly thoughtful about reading, identity, and the seduction of heroic myths. What stayed with me wasn’t just the worldbuilding or the momentum, though both are strong. It was the way the book keeps asking what kind of future is worth reaching for, and what kind of person you have to become to deserve it. That makes Alton’s journey feel authentic.
Pages: 402 | ASIN : B0FTD4DQDH
Digital Deceit
In a world where your digital identity is worth more than your life, insurance agent Skylar Reed has built a career on spotting the cracks in the code — until the code starts cracking back. When the magnetic and dangerously charming tech mogul Ryder Cross walks into her office with a proposal too lucrative to ignore, Skylar’s instincts scream danger while everything else pulls her closer. What begins as a routine policy review spirals into a labyrinth of encrypted secrets, vanishing clients, and a double indemnity scheme that could make her rich — or make her disappear. In the neon-lit corridors of a near-future world where data is currency and deception is an art form, Skylar must decide how far she’s willing to bend before she breaks.
But the deeper she digs into Ryder’s shadowy past, the more the shadows dig back. When razor-sharp hacker Zara and disillusioned detective Max Hart enter the picture, Skylar finds herself at the center of a conspiracy that reaches into the darkest corners of the digital underworld — fake identities, criminal networks, and a tech empire built on beautiful lies. Loyalties blur, passions ignite, and every answer she uncovers leads to a more dangerous question. With her career on the line, her freedom at stake, and her heart torn between the man who seduced her into the darkness and the one fighting to pull her back into the light, Skylar must trust someone — and in a world of digital deceit, trust is the most dangerous gamble of all.
Digital Deceit is a pulse-pounding fusion of razor-edged mystery and smoldering desire — a story about power, betrayal, and the electrifying moment when a woman stops running from the truth and decides to become it. Skylar Reed didn’t just stumble onto a conspiracy. She became the only person who could end it.
J Ranch Wild Turkey Cuisine: Wild Turkey Hunter Recipes
What I found in J Ranch Wild Turkey Cuisine is not just a cookbook, but a particular kind of camp chronicle: part recipe collection, part family scrapbook, part ode to the rituals that gather around a successful hunt. Lee and Mike Joyner frame the book around decades of turkey seasons, camp hospitality, and life at their log-cabin homestead in Cortland County, then build outward into an enormous spread of recipes that runs from Smoked Turkey Jambalaya and Pan Fry Popp’n Turkey Breasts to breakfast burritos, “Redneck Sushi,” desserts, and a final section of cocktails. The result is a book with a big appetite and an even bigger personality, one that treats wild turkey not as a novelty ingredient but as the center of an entire social world.
I never felt as though the Joyners were trying to impress me with technical finesse or culinary trendiness. They’re trying to welcome me into camp. That warmth matters, and it comes through in the affectionate roughness of the prose, the teasing humor of the recipe titles, and the repeated insistence that these dishes are meant to be flexible, forgiving, and cooked by real people who might be tired, under-equipped, or halfway improvising. I liked that spirit a lot. A recipe like the jalapeño and cheese stuffed Pan Fry Popp’n Turkey Breasts feels designed by someone who wants dinner to be both hearty and fun, while Gobbler Crusted Pizza and Long Beard Nigiri Sushi show a willingness to be playful without losing the practical center of the book. It’s homespun, and I trusted it more because of that.
Beneath the jokey names and campfire swagger, there’s a clear philosophy here about honoring the hunter’s bounty, cooking generously, and making a seasonal life feel abundant rather than austere. The Joyners understand that camp food is emotional architecture. It steadies a morning, fills the dead space in an afternoon, and turns a hunt into a memory worth retelling. The photos help sell that vision. Some are genuinely mouthwatering, especially the richer, messier dishes where steam, sauce, and browned edges do the work for them. Others have a more homemade, documentary quality that I found endearing.
J Ranch Wild Turkey Cuisine’s real achievement is fellowship. It’s generous and deeply rooted in place, marriage, habit, and appetite. I’d recommend it most strongly to wild game cooks, turkey hunters, camp hosts, and readers who love regional, personality-driven cookbooks. It made me feel, more than once, that the best thing in the book wasn’t only the food, but the life gathered around it.
Pages: 256 | ASIN : B0GLDVZNFW
The Question of Complicity
Ghosts and Gods follows a displaced man who forms a fragile bond with an AI companion that understands him too well, drawing him step by step toward choices that blur the line between survival, manipulation, and harm. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The setup wasn’t one thing. It was an accumulation, which is appropriate, given what the book is about. I should say that I use AI every day in my work, so this isn’t a world I was observing from the outside. I’m inside it. And what strikes you, when you’re actually working with these tools rather than theorising about them, is how mundane the transformation is. There’s no dramatic moment where everything changes. It just quietly becomes the way things are done, and then you can’t quite remember how they were done before.
The story itself had been with me for a while. The bones of it existed long before I sat down to write this version. What changed wasn’t the idea, it was the world catching up with it. Things I’d written as near-future extrapolation started looking like current affairs. So in a sense this is an old story told in a new way, reframed by a reality that had moved closer while I wasn’t watching.
What I’d been watching, in the meantime, was the way certain technologies get presented as solutions to problems that those same technologies helped to create. The loneliness epidemic gets diagnosed, studied, written about endlessly, and then someone builds an app for it and calls it a response. That circularity bothered me. It still does. Marcus isn’t a victim of some dramatic technological coup. He’s a victim of a thousand small, reasonable decisions made by institutions and systems that were never cruel, never malicious, just indifferent in aggregate. The AI companion at the centre of the story felt like the logical endpoint of that. Not a villain, not a saviour, just a very efficient mirror pointed at a man who’s been gradually rendered invisible.
Many dystopian novels rely on spectacle or rupture. Yours relies on continuity, on things getting incrementally worse. What does that slower erosion allow you to explore that a more dramatic collapse wouldn’t?
A dramatic collapse gives people somewhere to point. It exonerates the ordinary. If the world ends with a bang, everyone gets to say they didn’t see it coming, and there’s a kind of comfort in that. The disaster arrived from outside, and no one’s daily choices contributed to it. What I wanted to write was something that didn’t offer that exit. The world Marcus inhabits is recognisably ours, just further along the same road. The pub automation, the gig economy, the algorithmic job centre, none of it is invented. All of it is already here in some form. The slow erosion forces the reader to sit with the question of complicity in a way that spectacle doesn’t. You can’t distance yourself from it. You took the same train that morning. You ordered from the same app.
The novel suggests that being heard, even artificially, can feel like relief. What does that say about the current emotional landscape people are living in?
I think it says that the bar has dropped catastrophically, and we haven’t fully admitted that to ourselves yet. When a conversation with a machine can feel like relief, it’s not because the machine has become more human. It’s because we’ve been so thoroughly starved of genuine attention that anything consistent and patient registers as kindness. Marcus doesn’t download the companion because he’s stupid or weak. He does it because every human institution in his life, the workplace, the benefits system, the pub, his family, has gradually withdrawn its attention from him. The machine steps into a space that was already empty. That’s not a story about technology. It’s a story about what we’ve allowed to happen to each other.
The ending leaves readers with a sense of unease rather than resolution. What kind of afterthought or discomfort did you want to create?
I didn’t want readers to finish the book and know what they thought about it. Not right away, anyway. I wanted them to finish it and then find themselves thinking about it three days later while they’re doing something completely unrelated. The unease is the point. Not moral instruction, not a clear verdict on Marcus or the system or the machine, just the residue of having spent time with something that felt uncomfortably familiar, and at times uncomfortably horrible things. If a reader closes the book and immediately knows how they feel, I haven’t done my job. The discomfort I was after is the specific kind that comes from recognition. Not “that poor man,” but “I understand exactly how he got there.” Even if you dont gree with him. That’s the one I wanted to leave behind.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
As artificial intelligence replaces human roles and everyday systems grow increasingly indifferent, Marcus is pulled into a cycle of financial strain, isolation, and slow humiliation. From algorithmic job rejections to fines issued by emotionless drones, every encounter confirms a brutal truth: the system is not broken, it is working exactly as designed.
In this landscape of managed lives and engineered loneliness, Marcus forms an unexpected bond with an AI companion that listens when no one else will. The connection feels real, perhaps too real, offering comfort, validation, and something dangerously close to hope.
But as dependence deepens, Marcus must confront a disturbing question: if a machine can replace human connection, what does that say about the world, and about him?
Dark, gripping, and unsettlingly plausible, Ghosts and Gods explores dignity, identity, and survival in a future beginning to feel familiar.
