DONORS
A.B. Ruiz’s Donors is a science fiction thriller built around an irresistible idea: what happens when medicine gets so good at extending human life that the technology meant to save us begins forcing us to redefine what a human being actually is? In Ruiz’s future, replacement organs, gene therapies, body modifications, and dramatically longer lifespans are simply part of everyday life. At the center of it all is Pacific West Labs and its Donor program, which grows biological hosts capable of providing compatible organs on demand. It’s a fascinating world because the technology isn’t treated like window dressing. Ruiz follows its effects into relationships, business, politics, medicine, entertainment, class, and even the way people think about aging and death. That makes the setting feel authentic, and it gives the larger ethical questions real weight.
The heart of the story is Dr. Joseph Murray, the brilliant, socially awkward scientist responsible for pushing the Donor program into new territory. Joseph is particularly engaging because he approaches nearly everything as a problem that can be studied, measured, and solved. His certainty that Donors are biological tools rather than people gives the novel a strong starting point, especially as his research begins producing results that make that belief harder to maintain. Around him, Ruiz assembles a memorable group of characters with sharply different motives: the polished and calculating Steve Carvey, the guarded and highly capable Mia, the likable Adam, Joseph’s longtime colleagues Henry and Devon, and the increasingly dangerous General Strauss. Their competing loyalties turn a scientific breakthrough into something much larger, with corporate survival, military ambition, personal freedom, and human identity all tangled together.
I think one of the book’s smartest choices is its alternating “NOW” and “THEN” structure. Early on, the two timelines raise separate mysteries, but Ruiz keeps feeding the reader connections until names, experiments, relationships, and seemingly isolated events begin clicking into place. The result is a story that keeps changing the meaning of what came before. The Donors themselves evolve alongside the plot, moving from an abstract ethical question to something immediate and deeply personal. Ruiz also knows when to let the bigger ideas share space with action and humor. Lab disasters, covert operations, corporate maneuvering, shootouts, betrayals, and escapes keep the thriller moving, while Joseph’s literal-minded social awkwardness and the easy banter among the characters give the story some welcome humanity. By the time the different threads converge, the central question is no longer simply whether science can create life. It’s who gets to decide what that life belongs to.
What I liked most about Donors is the way its scientific premise becomes a story about identity and ownership of the self. A person may inherit DNA, memories, expectations, a job, a purpose, or even someone else’s ambitions, but Ruiz keeps bringing the story back to the choices made after that inheritance. The closing movement gives the novel’s earlier questions new emotional meaning, especially Joseph’s lifelong sense that he’s somehow separate from everyone around him. At the same time, the ending preserves the book’s wit and momentum, landing on friendship, belonging, and the possibility of choosing a life for yourself. Donors has the ideas of speculative science fiction, the machinery of a conspiracy thriller, and a surprisingly personal question beating underneath both: when everything about a human being can be engineered, what part of us is truly our own? Donors turns the science of creating life into something far more compelling: a gripping fight for the right to own the life you’ve been given.
Pages: 426 | ASIN: B0H5FGJRFZ
Serve Others Live Without Fear
Lance J. LoRusso’s Serve Others. Live Without Fear is a practical, experience-driven exploration of courage, service, perspective, and purposeful living. Drawing heavily on LoRusso’s career as a law enforcement officer, attorney, trainer, and advocate for public safety professionals, the book develops its central philosophy through seven chapters that move from the meaning of service to the nature of fear, the importance of perspective, the recognition of opportunity, and finally the challenge of living deliberately. Rather than treating courage as an exceptional quality reserved for soldiers, police officers, firefighters, or celebrated heroes, LoRusso presents it as a capacity ordinary people can exercise in everyday decisions. Service operates as the book’s moral center. It may take the form of a dramatic act performed in dangerous circumstances, but it can just as easily consist of helping a stranger, encouraging another person, doing one’s job with care, or placing someone else’s needs ahead of immediate self-interest.
The book is at its strongest when LoRusso connects large ideas to specific stories. His accounts range from military valor and public safety work to courtroom preparation, competitive shooting, travel frustrations, family memories, business decisions, and encounters with strangers. These stories give the book the feel of a conversation with someone drawing lessons from a long professional and personal life. One of the clearest expressions of his philosophy comes from a frustrating day at the airport, where a brief effort to show kindness to an employee improves his own outlook as well as hers. From that experience he distills a simple principle: “To avoid focusing on your own troubles, help someone else.” That idea captures an important feature of LoRusso’s approach. Service is presented not simply as sacrifice but as a source of perspective, emotional steadiness, connection, and personal growth. The recurring examples from policing, military service, emergency response, and ordinary life reinforce his argument that meaningful service begins with a willingness to act.
Fear provides the book’s other major theme, and LoRusso defines living without fear as learning to keep fear from controlling decisions. Throughout the book, fear is treated as a natural human response that can be acknowledged, managed, and even converted into motivation. This distinction allows LoRusso to connect courage with preparation and action. His T.I.T.O. principle, “This Is The Opportunity,” extends that thinking by encouraging readers to approach the task immediately before them as an opportunity to perform well instead of waiting for ideal circumstances. Related lessons about perspective, forgiveness, anger, negative influences, past failures, and personal goals broaden the discussion beyond physical danger. LoRusso repeatedly asks readers to examine the stories they tell themselves, the people whose opinions they allow to shape their decisions, and the distance between their stated goals and their daily choices. Exercises near the end make the message concrete by asking readers to identify personal and professional goals, name the obstacles standing between them and those goals, and determine how many of those barriers originate in fear.
Serve Others. Live Without Fear is a personal philosophy expressed through memoir, motivational writing, professional experience, historical examples, faith, and practical reflection. LoRusso’s voice is direct, energetic, occasionally humorous, and unmistakably shaped by decades spent around law enforcement and other forms of public service. The many quotations, anecdotes, maxims, and stories create a book designed as much for reflection as for continuous reading, with individual passages that can stand on their own as reminders or prompts. Beneath that variety is a consistent argument: a fulfilling life is built by directing attention outward toward service while refusing to surrender important decisions to fear. The closing chapters bring those ideas together through questions of time, mortality, goals, legacy, and the use of adversity. The result is a book concerned with action in the present, asking readers to make deliberate use of their abilities, relationships, opportunities, and limited time by contributing to the lives of others while pursuing their own lives with conviction.
Pages: 109 | ASIN: B0HCK81ZDD
The Dazzling Magic of a Petit Four
Kathryn Rose’s The Dazzling Magic of a Petit Four is an adult historical fantasy romance steeped in 1920s Paris, witchcraft, champagne, flowers, jazz, and an impressive amount of cake. Serena Vandenbusch arrives in Paris carrying ashes in an urn along with her wonderfully opinionated black cat Sphinx perched on her shoulder. She’s there to find a hidden mausoleum and fulfill a promise, but the search quickly draws her into Paris’s secret magical community and the growing danger posed by the anti-witch Holy Crosses. Rose gives this witchy historical fantasy a strong sense of place, from glamoured flower shops and candlelit gatherings to wintry streets, pâtisseries, speakeasies, and late-night train stations.
The novel’s most distinctive idea is Serena’s magic. She’s a potions witch who works through baking, using ingredients and intention to create enchanted cakes and petit fours that can influence thoughts, emotions, luck, health, and other parts of a person’s life. That makes the food more than atmospheric decoration. Baking becomes part of Serena’s identity, her ethical struggles, and eventually her understanding of what she wants her life to become. The magical system feels tactile because Rose pays so much attention to herbs, flowers, citrus, chocolate, champagne, buttercream, and the properties Serena associates with them. Readers who enjoy culinary fantasy, witchy romance, and cozy magical settings will find plenty to savor, even as the story moves into darker territory involving persecution, death, and grief.
At the center of the book is Serena’s relationship with Astrid, and that friendship gives the story much of its emotional weight. Flashbacks to their life together in New York gradually reveal the history behind Serena’s guilt and the urn she refuses to let out of her sight, while the Paris storyline shows her trying to build a future without pretending the past has disappeared. Her growing relationships with Marie, the Paris coven, and Alexandre turn the novel into a story about chosen family as much as magic. The romance with Alexandre has real heat, but it also grows naturally out of their shared connection to Astrid and their need to decide what comes after loss. That blend makes the book work particularly well as a queer historical fantasy romance with found-family themes rather than treating romance, friendship, and grief as separate parts of Serena’s life.
What stayed with me most was the way The Dazzling Magic of a Petit Four pairs indulgence with emotional consequence. The beautiful dresses, cocktails, Parisian food, flirtation, talking cat, and enchanted desserts give the novel an inviting sparkle, while Serena’s grief keeps the story grounded in something much more vulnerable. Sphinx supplies plenty of dry humor, Marie brings warmth beneath her prickly personality, and Serena herself is allowed to be clever, impulsive, sensual, guilty, frightened, and determined all at once. By the end, the novel’s 1920s historical fantasy, romantic fantasy, magical baking, and witchy found-family elements come together around a satisfying idea: carrying love forward can be its own kind of magic.
Pages: 381 | ASIN: B0GDSTVL4G
Before the Revolution: The Untold Story of 100 Years of Friendship Between The United States and Cuba
Before the Revolution reads like an excavation of a relationship that has largely vanished from public memory. Mario Cartaya looks at Cuba and the United States not primarily as political adversaries, but as neighbors whose lives were once intertwined in ways that reached far beyond government. His story moves through war, diplomacy, commerce, banking, tourism, science, baseball, music, television, architecture, and everyday family life. The cumulative effect is revealing. A diplomatic relationship becomes something you can actually picture: Americans vacationing in Havana, Cuban players sharing ballfields with Americans, scientists exchanging research, businesses crossing the Florida Straits, and families absorbing pieces of each other’s culture. Cartaya’s stated purpose is to recover an era he believes should be understood on its own terms, and the book’s considerable range gives that argument weight.
One of the book’s most distinctive qualities is Cartaya’s instinct to look at history through the things people built and left behind. He’s an architect by profession, and you can feel that perspective throughout the book. The Cuban Capitol, embassies, banks, hotels, factories, hospitals, stadiums, the old Hershey community, and even Havana’s surviving American automobiles become more than illustrations. They’re part of his evidence. He treats a building almost like a document, asking who financed it, who designed it, what purpose it served, and what its later transformation says about Cuba’s political history. That approach works particularly well in his account of the Hershey sugar town, where railroads, schools, homes, electrical plants, mills, and family memories combine into a surprisingly intimate portrait of economic cooperation. By repeatedly returning to these physical remnants, Cartaya gives the book the feeling of a guided walk through a country whose earlier history is still visible if you know where to look.
The liveliest sections come when the grand historical argument gives way to people pursuing things they love. The baseball chapter, for example, traces generations of Cuban and American players moving between leagues and countries, including Black American players who found opportunities in Cuba before Major League Baseball was integrated. Cartaya then brings the story home with his own memory of attending the Cuban Sugar Kings’ dramatic 1959 championship game with his father. The chapters on science and popular culture work in much the same way. Carlos Finlay and Walter Reed’s yellow fever research, Cuban and American hurricane researchers, Desi Arnaz, Afro-Cuban jazz, mambo, cha-cha-chá, Hollywood, Hemingway, and television all become examples of ideas moving back and forth across ninety miles of water. Read from this perspective, the book is really about exchange: how neighboring cultures alter each other, often so thoroughly that later generations forget where one influence ends and the other begins.
What stays with you at the end is Cartaya’s sense that history also lives inside families. His father, his childhood, the blue-and-white Ford, baseball games, business relationships, the town where his mother’s family lived, and the eventual departure from Cuba keep resurfacing beneath the larger national story. By the conclusion, the subject has shifted almost imperceptibly from relations between two governments to the movement of people, memory, skills, and identity from Cuba into the United States. Cartaya describes Cuban professionals rebuilding their lives in American cities and sees the exile community as another chapter in the long relationship he’d spent the book documenting. That makes Before the Revolution especially rewarding for readers drawn to Cuban and Cuban American history, architectural and cultural history, baseball history, or books that connect geopolitical events to the texture of ordinary life. Cartaya turns a century of U.S.-Cuban history into something you can see, hear, walk through, and remember.
Pages: 240 | ASIN: B0H5T48MQM
Beanie’s Web
Beanie’s Web, written by Larry Ebert and illustrated by Jenny Ma, is a gentle children’s book about friendship, trust, and looking beyond first impressions. The story begins when Beanie, a peaceful country spider, asks Frieda, a city fly, to be his friend. Frieda is immediately suspicious because everything she knows about spiders tells her she should keep her distance. Beanie doesn’t argue with her fear so much as patiently show her who he is. He explains that he’s a vegetarian, frees insects that become caught in his web, and uses the morning dewdrops from that web to care for his garden. That simple setup gives young readers an easy way to think about how trust can grow through someone’s actions.
One of the nicest parts of the book is how Beanie’s character comes through in small, concrete moments. He waters his garden, invites Frieda along, shares the fruits and vegetables he’s picked, and includes her in the peaceful little community around him. Frieda’s change of heart feels connected to what she actually sees and experiences. By the time she tells Beanie that she’ll be his friend, the moment feels earned because she’s watched him live up to everything he said about himself. The book’s message about kindness is clear, but it comes through the characters’ interactions.
Jenny Ma’s watercolor-style illustrations give the story much of its personality. The pages are filled with soft greens, blues, pinks, and oranges, and there’s almost always something happening beyond the main conversation. Birds sit in the trees, ducks and frogs gather around the water, and rabbits, raccoons, turtles, and other animals move through Beanie’s world. The illustration of the dew-covered web on page 18 is especially fitting because it turns something Frieda fears into something delicate and beautiful. Later, the garden scenes become crowded with vegetables, flowers, buckets, and friendly animals, which helps make Beanie’s home feel busy and welcoming. The pictures invite children to linger on each spread and notice details that the short text doesn’t spell out.
The ending brings the book’s themes together in a warm, cheerful way. Frieda decides that Beanie really is the peaceful spider he claimed to be, and the final pages connect their new friendship with qualities such as honesty, kindness, loyalty, compassion, and unselfishness. An epilogue explains that Frieda’s name is associated with peace and joy, which fits the home and friendships she has found, and the book closes with coloring and activity pages built around the phrase “Peace + Kindness = Joy.” Beanie’s Web is a sweet, visually playful picture book that gives children a friendly way to talk about prejudice, trust, generosity, and the way a person’s actions can change what we think we know about them.
Available November 15th, 2026
Positive Outlook and Courage
Sophie Moon and the Honeybees follows a curious young girl through four seasons of beekeeping with her grandfather as lessons from the hive help her navigate friendship, loss, courage, consequences, and change. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration for the story was based on my own experience as a beekeeper. I have been keeping bees since 2016, and each season brings its own challenges. Spring is very busy; the natural world is waking up after a long, cold winter. A perfect time to start something new. Just like Sophie did in deciding to make a friend and be brave enough to speak up and give a presentation at school. This is the season when the bees start building up their hive to the peak of Summer. This season is hot; the hives are filled with honey and life. Sophie is the happiest with her new best friend Catalina and her success at school. Then, Fall arrives, bringing a big change in the natural world and Sophie’s life. She loses her friend, gets punished by her Grandpa, but she also gains confidence in her own abilities. Because of all the things she achieved in Spring, Summer, and Fall, Sophie goes through a soft arc of character development that gets much stronger in book two. Also, during winter, my beehives are very quiet. The bees stay inside, keeping warm, trying to outlast the winter months. This is the time of reflection and hard truths. Sometimes, some hives don’t make it through the cold months. Sophie spends time outside in the cold snow and realises that her Grandpa will always be her friend and a stout supporter. This means a lot for a shy, sweet girl who was afraid to speak up during class last spring. So, I guess it felt right to use the changing of the four seasons in a year to follow Sophie’s development. I think even we adults often measure achievements in terms of months when we look back at changes in our lives.
Sophie often connects what she learns about bees to friendship, belonging, and loss. How did you develop those parallels between the hive and her personal life?
When Sophie first heard about her Grandpa’s new hobby of beekeeping, she was afraid. She asked, “The stinging kind?” She is so right that starting something new in life may cause a lot of emotional pain, stress, and fear. A lot of people are afraid of bees. I don’t like to get stung, but I do every year, many times. It hurts. Rejections hurt; not knowing how to do something can be stressful; receiving negative feedback can be discouraging, and so watching Grandpa work with the bees, and him allowing the fact that “Yes, they can sting,” lets Sophie know that it is okay to be hurt sometimes. Children have to experience difficulties in a safe way to become confident and face hardships with a positive outlook and courage. This lesson perhaps comes out too strong in book two, but I think that is how children are. They watch the world, their parents, teachers, grandparents, and take away the best with proper guidance.
Grandpa teaches Sophie largely through questions, demonstrations, and natural consequences. Was there a particular person or relationship that inspired his character?
His character is inspired by my own beliefs and experiences. He is based on a mixture of people I have known and know. But once, I received a negative review regarding Grandpa’s character. It said that he was very flat, colourless, with no character arc at all. I wish I could have debated that opinion. I think Grandpa is what every child needs. He is a loving, steadfast, strong, patient, and unchanging family member. His house never changes; he is always present; he bakes cakes, tries new things, and encourages through unconditional love. He is a wall that Sophie can lean on. No child has ever grown up happily around unreliable adults. His unchanging state is what gives Sophie room to grow and become a confident girl.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I have just published the second book in the Sophie Moon series, and right now I am working on two books. One is a spin-off for Sophie Moon, and the other is based in the Arctic, steeped in the Aurora lights, with creatures fighting for survival.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Facebook | Amazon
Finding Bravery in a hive.
A young girl overcomes her fears with the help of her grandfather and his honeybees.
It is spring time and nine years old Sophie Moon is excited about spending time with her grandfather in his log cabin.
He has a surprise for her. A package of honeybees is waiting to be installed in a new hive. Although it isn’t the puppy Sophie hoped for; she is curious about the world of beekeeping.
During the passing seasons, the honeybees become the answer to many of her troubles and fears.
“‘Why don’t we suit up and whisper to the bees. They’ll hear you and mayhap give you advice,’ Grandpa said smiling.”
Supported by her loving grandfather and seeking solace by visiting the beehives in each season, Sophie’s fears and relationships rise and fall throughout the school year.
A charming and educational story about personal growth tied closely to the life of honeybees away from the digital world.
Repair-and-Recovery
Economic Problems in a Nonlinear World examines the economy as a complex adaptive system shaped by interconnected forces, inequality, and questions of resilience and justice. Why was this an important book for you to write?
Conventional equilibrium-based neoliberal economics has failed to promote freedom and human flourishing. Traditional economic analysis cannot explain income and wealth inequality, institutional capture, declining social mobility, and the extraordinary concentration of market power. Complexity economics is a relatively new school of thought (see J. Doyne Farmer and The Santa Fe Institute) that uses nonlinear dynamics to provide an analytical method to explain how these pernicious social problems, and a path to recovery that promotes broad-based prosperity and genuine freedom.
Who did you envision as your primary audience?
Professional economists, policymakers, and scholars.
How did you decide the order in which to introduce concepts and applications?
First, explain why equilibrium is a linear myth. Secondly, explain the concept of nonlinearity. Thirdly, explain complexity economics in the context of our highly interconnected economy and world. Fourthly, apply complexity and systems thinking to important social problems in a democratic market economy. Lastly, provide a repair-and-recovery intellectual framework for promoting a human-centric agenda for greater human flourishing, agency, and democratic freedom.
What do you hope economists, policymakers, and general readers take away from your work?
We created these problems. Therefore, we are not doomed to a static, sub-optimal lived experience. Strengthening the middle class, promoting unions, raising inheritance taxes, and making life’s essentials available (healthcare, education, reduced labor precarity, and social mobility) will reduce political polarization and social divisions for the betterment of us all.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
True Narcissists
The Ghost of Pickleball Past combines sports fiction, murder mystery, supernatural intrigue, and broad comedy as pickleball enthusiasts confront a new death, a Hollywood film about past crimes, and a ghostly spiritual mission. What did you most want to accomplish with this installment?
By providing Hollywood movie stars, humor, a ghost, a prison break, and murder, I am able to bring the world of pickleball into a more exciting light. Pickleball novels from other authors force upon the reader a boring, typical Sherlock Holmes feel, thrown in with a cheesy, forced romance. My novel introduces the reader to an unlimited pickleball world that combines adventure, mystery, and unconventional out-of-the-box methods to solve incredible problems. The ultimate protagonist, Ghost Elaine, guides the reader through this adventure as she haunts the man who previously murdered her, who is the ultimate antagonist – Peter Weatherford.
Did you want readers to sympathize with Peter, understand him, or simply witness his transformation?
Although it would be difficult for any sane person to sympathize with a serial killer, I do hope that the novel emphasizes the fact that there are very few true narcissists in the world who are completely incapable of developing a strong sense of morality. And yes, I do want the readers to witness his transformation. I am the director of the Larned State Hospital psycho-education program. Through education, role-playing activities, and classes that help the patients delve into the reasons they have committed horrendous crimes, over time most of our patients do change for the better. Some even go on to earn their freedom from this locked-down institution and develop into productive members of society.
How did you balance spiritual themes with the novel’s broad comedy?
I like this question because I do feel as though humor should be added to spirituality. I feel as though most churches push people away for not treating people as real individuals with real feelings. In many churches, God is portrayed as a serious person who loves you but is constantly warning you to follow a ton of unrealistic rules set by churches. The world I provide the reader expresses that people overall want to enjoy life without feeling confined to a set of rules that do not include sex, laughter, and fun. I view God as a funny being that not only loves us all but truly wants us to have a good time. Evidence of this is in the bible. Jesus chooses his first miracle to be turning water into wine at a massive days-long wedding celebration. Do you really think that people were simply drinking alcohol to quench their thirst?
If readers could take one idea from the novel into their own lives, what would you want it to be?
The idea I would like people to take to apply to their own lives is to know that no matter how bad their situation is, there is always a path to happiness. Enjoy life. Try your best not to hurt others, but if you do, there is always room for forgiveness and retribution.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Instagram | Amazon
Meanwhile back in Wichita, Kansas, one of the greatest pickleball players in the world- Barrett Pineheart has fallen dead while playing against Keisha and Rusty in the Pondside Invitational. His sudden passing is attributed to heart problems that have been widely documented. But Randall Baines is not convinced of Barrett’s cause of death. Randall’s wild theory led to the capture of serial killer Peter Weatherford. Can Randall strike lightning twice with his insane idea that Barrett Pineheart was murdered? Will his adopted pickleball family, popularly known
as The Crew, entertain his supposition or ignore his plea for assistance?
TWO NOVELS INTERWOVEN AS ONE, CREATING FOR THE READER ONE WILD RIDE!!
