Category Archives: Five Stars
Fang, Bang and the Midnight Mouse: The Christmas Call
The Christmas Call, the latest installment in J-J Murray’s Fang, Bang, and the Midnight Mouse series, is tailor-made for cozy holiday read-alouds shared with family. Illustrated by Katie Tayler, the story opens on a snug Christmas Eve with the Jollie family, where cat detectives Fang and Bang are reveling in their favorite season. The warmth doesn’t last long. Trouble strikes at the Hill Inn when a prized wheel of Stilton cheese disappears without a trace. Summoned to investigate, the two feline sleuths follow a tantalising trail of crumbs far from home, all the way to Cambridge, where they come face to face with Midnight Mouse and her mischievous crew. What follows is a brisk, festive mystery packed with sharp twists, seasonal mayhem, and more than a few cat-astrophes.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is how naturally it weaves together humor, intrigue, and genuine warmth. The pace is swift and confident, keeping young readers absorbed as Fang and Bang pursue clues through snowy streets, bustling museums, and even a Christmas carol service. The language remains light and approachable, sprinkled generously with cat puns that will prompt giggles from children and knowing smiles from adults. At times, the narrator speaks directly to the reader, posing questions and inviting them to think alongside the detectives, which adds a playful, interactive dimension to the story.
Katie Tayler’s illustrations brim with energy and charm. Every page feels alive with movement and warmth, allowing Fang and Bang’s distinct personalities to shine. The festive settings are richly imagined, and the artwork supports the text beautifully, guiding young readers through the action while deepening the cozy Christmas atmosphere.
Beneath the mystery lies a thoughtful message about generosity and empathy, particularly fitting for the holiday season. Midnight Mouse is not portrayed as a simple villain. Her motivations are handled with surprising tenderness, offering children a nuanced understanding that mistakes do not define a character’s worth. A brief section at the end exploring the history of Stilton cheese adds an unexpected educational touch, enhancing the story without interrupting its momentum.
Overall, this is a delightful choice for families seeking a festive tale that balances entertainment with heart. The Christmas Call is witty, inventive, and warmly inclusive, an excellent pick for young readers who enjoy mysteries, animal heroes, and Christmas adventures wrapped in charm.
Pages: 32 | ASIN : B0FXNP9YC4
Crossfire
Crossfire follows Moirin Garrett, a high-powered executive juggling corporate pressure, family expectations, and the uneasy beginnings of an environmental partnership that forces her into the political, personal, and ethical “crossfire” she’s spent a career avoiding. From the first chapters, the story grounds us in her world of boardrooms, complicated family brunches, and the shimmering social circles where everyone wants something from her. As the plot widens, the book becomes a layered look at ambition, reinvention, and the messy overlaps between public responsibility and private longing.
Reading this in first person, I found myself rooting for Moirin even when she frustrated me. She’s sharp, driven, polished on the outside, and quietly unraveling beneath the surface. The writing makes room for that contradiction. The scenes move with a steady rhythm, sometimes clipped and tense, sometimes opening up into softer, more reflective moments that show how lonely success can feel. I liked how Herman lets small details do the emotional lifting: the staleness of office coffee, the weight of a family legacy, the flicker of discomfort when Moirin realizes she’s being sized up not just as an executive but as a woman in a room full of men with agendas.
What stood out most was the author’s choice to frame the story’s tension around both career stakes and personal awakening. The environmental study storyline sets up a believable moral tangle, especially as shady players circle around Moirin’s work. At the same time, the book gives her space to question what she actually wants beyond the next professional milestone. Moments with her friends feel warm and real, and her slow steps toward vulnerability make the corporate drama feel more human, not just high-stakes business maneuvering. The writing stays simple, grounded, and clear, letting the emotional beats land without theatrics.
The book feels like a story about a woman stepping out of a life she mastered and into one she’s still learning how to want. It’s women’s fiction with corporate intrigue woven in, built for readers who enjoy character-driven arcs, workplace complexity, and the slow burn of personal transformation. If you like stories about strong women navigating reinvention in midlife, or if you enjoy fiction set at the intersection of power, family, and identity, Crossfire will hit the mark.
Pages: 365 | ASIN : B0FTDX5MML
Reservations: A Samantha Wright Crime Series
Reservations follows FBI profiler Samantha Wright as she’s pushed back into the hunt for a serial killer after the sudden death of her mentor and closest friend, Dr. Edmond Sampson. The story opens with grief, then moves fast into danger as Sam takes over the RESERVATIONS case, a string of murders involving young boys on reservations across the American West. Her past traumas, messy romantic entanglement with Special Agent Charlie Falken, and deep loyalty to Dr. Sampson color every choice she makes. The book blends crime, trauma, culture, and romance in a way that feels raw and intimate, almost like sitting beside Sam as she thinks her way through every dark corner of the investigation.
I liked how emotional the writing feels. The author doesn’t rush through Sam’s pain. She lets it sit there, real and jagged. Sam grieves her mentor with this quiet, private sorrow that feels heavy and familiar. At the same time, the pacing snaps between slow internal moments and sudden shocks. The memories of the BAKER’S DOZEN case are especially rough. The writing keeps things personal. It doesn’t pretend Sam is made of steel. She’s brilliant, but she’s tired, haunted, and sometimes unsure, and I liked her more because of that.
The mix of genres also surprised me in a good way. The romantic scenes with Charlie are blunt, sweaty, flawed, and full of emotional landmines. They’re not polished or dreamy. They feel like two people clinging to each other because they don’t know what else to do with their hurt. Then the story swings into investigative mode with sharp detail and a steady buildup of dread. The casework feels grounded and tense, especially when Sam revisits crime scenes or pieces together old trauma with new evidence. The writing is vivid.
I’d recommend Reservations to readers who enjoy crime fiction with strong emotional depth and a protagonist who feels human in all the best and hardest ways. It’s especially fitting for people who like stories that dive into trauma, culture, identity, and the complicated ties we form with the people who shape us. If you want a thriller with heart and heat, something that grips you and makes you feel a little raw by the end, this book will get you there.
Pages: 332 | ASIN : B0FHYLFVBZ
Desperate Souls
Desperate Souls follows several lives caught in moments of fear, loss, and fragile hope. The story opens with young Joseph watching his world collapse in a violent attack on his family’s mission, then shifts to Grace, a talented ballet instructor whose body begins to betray her just as her future seems set, and to Nathan, a new father fighting to keep his wife alive. Each thread builds toward a picture of people pushed to the edge of what they can endure and reaching for faith, purpose, or simple survival. The writing leans heavily into emotion, and the pacing keeps the reader on alert as tragedies unfold without warning.
This book pulled me in fast. The emotional punches land hard, and I found myself bracing during several scenes. The details of Joseph’s escape, Grace’s slow unraveling, and Nathan’s desperation created a steady tension that made me keep turning pages. The writing is clear and direct, and it leaves room for the reader to feel the weight of each character’s fear. At times, I wanted a moment to breathe, yet the speed of the story felt true to what these characters were living through. Their worlds were breaking apart.
I also enjoyed how the story handles faith and suffering. It does not drift into heavy explanations, and it avoids preaching. Instead, it shows characters trying to cling to what they believe while everything they trust falls away. Some moments really resonated with me. Grace trying to keep her life together while hiding her symptoms felt painfully real. Nathan stumbling through fear with a baby in his arms made me tense in my seat. I felt frustrated with these characters sometimes, and I felt protective of them too. That mix made the story stick with me.
Desperate Souls will appeal to readers who enjoy character-driven drama with high emotional stakes. It is well-suited for people who like stories about ordinary lives facing sudden upheaval and who appreciate a blend of suspense, faith, and personal struggle. If you want a book that makes you feel something deep and keeps you thinking after you close it, this one will do exactly that.
Pages: 414 | ASIN : B0FHQKDM88
the quiet calendar
The Quiet Calendar feels like a month of someone’s inner world laid bare. It traces day by day how a woman crawls out of a long, damaging entanglement and slowly learns to hear her own voice again. The book moves through grief, shock, anger, clarity, and finally something like peace. Each poem marks a moment in time. Some are sharp. Others feel like exhaling after holding your breath. The drawings scattered through the book soften the blows a bit. They echo the mood of the poems and give everything a floating, ghostly feel. The whole collection reads like a journal.
As I moved through the pages, I felt myself pulled into her emotional rhythm. The writing is simple on the surface, but it hits hard because of that simplicity. Some lines shocked me with how plainly they revealed the manipulation she endured. Other lines made me root for her like a friend who keeps getting stronger each day without realizing it. The pacing is tight. The shift from longing to clarity feels natural. It never rushes.
I also loved the way the book explores self-return. Many poems break open the idea that healing is not one big moment. It is a series of tiny decisions that build you back up. I felt myself smiling at her small victories. A cup of coffee alone. A morning without checking the phone. A song that once hurt now simply playing in the background. These little moments felt huge and real and made me weirdly proud of her. The writing carries a lot of tenderness, even when it stings, and I kept thinking about how many people will see bits of their own story in hers. The art deepened that feeling. The cracked hourglass. The key with wings. The feather.
The book is honest about the messy parts of leaving someone who should never have been held so tightly. It is gentle about the slow return to a life that was waiting the whole time. I would recommend The Quiet Calendar to anyone who is coming out of a breakup that left them confused, guilty, or hollow. It is soft, real, and full of small truths.
Pages: 112 | ISBN: 9798218838591
Payback
Payback by Molly D. Shepard and Peter J. Dean is a workplace thriller that follows Samantha, a high-performing banker who spends years navigating a toxic, sexist culture and the predatory attention of an executive named Archer Dunne. The story moves between Samantha’s point of view, Archer’s warped inner monologue, and the perspectives of allies and bystanders as the bank’s abuses pile up, push her out, and eventually circle back when Archer, now ill and diabetic, is admitted to the upscale nursing home Samantha runs. There, she seriously considers killing him by quietly increasing his insulin, only for fate to intervene when he dies after a fall, leaving her to grapple with what justice really looks like and how to live with a rage that never fully disappears.
The opening prologue drops you right into Samantha’s mind as she calmly admits she is planning “the perfect murder,” and it is both chilling and deeply believable once you see what she has survived. The early scenes at the bank feel painfully real: the drunken company party, the alleyway assault where she escapes only to realize the attacker is her own Executive Vice President, Archer. The authors lean into clarity more than subtlety, and sometimes the villains are almost grotesquely obvious, but in a workplace thriller like this, that bluntness works. It feels less like a puzzle and more like a long, angry debrief of “this is exactly how they get away with it,” which I found strangely cathartic.
What stayed with me most was how much of the book is about the slow grind rather than just the headline traumas. Samantha’s first boss Margie, who bullies her daily for minor mistakes until she quits, the constant body shaming from her parents, the impostor syndrome that keeps replaying in her head even as she racks up wins at the bank. Her friendships with Inga and Josephine become the emotional center of the story. Inga is a top pharma rep whose numbers are excellent but who keeps getting passed over because she is out of sight, out of mind in the Midwest, and Josephine is a Black consultant who writes speeches for her CEO yet cannot break past a certain rank because of bias in her firm. Their late night strategy sessions at the Barrister Bar feel like war councils and group therapy at the same time, and the book keeps circling back to how women have to quietly train each other to survive systems that were not built for them. That coaching tone does poke through sometimes, and a few passages read like a leadership manual folded into a novel, but I did not mind it. It gave the story a grounded, “here is what actually happens in these rooms” quality.
I also appreciated the choices the authors made around Archer and the men who are not monsters. Seeing scenes from his perspective is uncomfortable in the best way. You watch him stalk Samantha in that alley, brag to his young male “minions” about using women for sex while blocking their promotions, and later seek out the nursing home she runs because he wants one last chance to torment her and even ogle her teenage daughter. When he exposes himself to a vulnerable resident at The Fairfield and Samantha finally has the power to kick him out, her fury practically hums off the page. At the same time, the book gives us Lance, the new CEO who discovers Samantha’s detailed notes about the bank’s abuses and decides to tear out the culture by the roots, and Todd, the thoughtful carpenter who becomes her husband and steady base. That balance keeps the story from sliding into pure despair.
I see Payback as a feminist workplace thriller that also works as social commentary about harassment, bullying, and the cost of keeping quiet. It is not subtle, and it does not try to be. The language is clear, the emotions are right on the surface, and the plot keeps you turning pages to see whether Samantha will cross that final line. If you have lived through a toxic office, care about gender equity at work, or just want a tense, emotionally honest story about a woman who refuses to stay a victim, I think this novel will hit hard in a good way.
Pages: 240 | ASIN : B0FX3FV52H
Miracles Beyond The Crowd
Miracles Beyond the Crowd is a heartfelt call to push past spiritual passivity and step into a faith that moves, reaches, climbs, and refuses to settle. Author Nico Smit weaves together vivid Gospel narratives with pastoral insight, showing how people who pursued Jesus with grit and hunger were the ones who encountered breakthrough. The book traces stories like the woman with the issue of blood, Bartimaeus, the paralytic lowered through the roof, and the Canaanite woman, and shows how each miracle came to someone who would not stay in the safety of the crowd. The message is simple and clear, yet full of fire. Faith walks. Faith presses in. Faith does not back down. Smit invites readers to become people who step toward Jesus even when blocked, ignored, or discouraged.
I was surprised by how personal the writing felt. The tone is warm and direct. It almost reads like a conversation with a pastor who refuses to let you drift into complacency. I felt challenged in ways that caught me off guard. Certain lines made me nod along, and others made me stop and stare because they hit something inside me. The stories are familiar, yet Smit retells them with a kind of urgency that made me feel the tension in each moment. When he describes the woman crawling through the crowd or the friends ripping open a roof to get to Jesus, I could almost feel the dust and desperation. The writing moves quickly and stays clear, and it stirred up old questions for me about what I have quietly stopped believing God for.
I also appreciated how honest the book is about resistance. Smit does not pretend that faith is polished or pretty. He talks about faith that crawls, shouts, stumbles, and keeps going anyway. I felt a kind of relief reading that. It made space for the days when hope feels thin, and the crowd feels loud. The tone is bold and I could feel it pushing me to examine the ways I settle for proximity to Jesus without actually pursuing Him. There were moments I felt encouraged, and others where I felt exposed in the best possible way. The writing carries a strong emotional pull. It made me want to stand up and believe again for things I had quietly filed away.
Miracles Beyond the Crowd is a passionate and stirring read. I would recommend it to anyone who feels stuck, weary, or spiritually dull, and especially to those who believe in Jesus but have lost the fire to chase after Him. It is a great fit for people who love practical faith stories, people who enjoy devotional style encouragement, and anyone longing for fresh hope.
Pages: 122 | ASIN : B0FX5ZH62M
Shero Entrepreneurs
SHERO Entrepreneurs is a collection of powerful personal stories from women who built businesses out of grit, heartbreak, courage, and hope. The book brings together interviews, reflections, and affirmations that walk the reader through the heart and hustle of ten entrepreneurs who turned adversity into purpose. As I moved through each chapter, I saw the common thread that ties them together. Every woman rose from something heavy and shaped a new life with her own hands. The book blends guidance, real struggle, and bright flashes of triumph in a way that feels honest and warm.
Reading it stirred something in me. I found myself pulled into the raw moments, the kind that sit in your chest for a while. The writing felt direct and personal. I could almost hear the voices of the women as they shared the reasons they stepped out on their own, the nights they questioned themselves, and the quiet victories they earned in the dark. The stories of illness, financial loss, and reinvention felt especially moving. Monica Chagolla’s journey back to meaningful work after serious illness captured the fragile mix of doubt and determination. Carolina Missett’s story of grief becoming a place of creation made me pause. Veronica Bahn’s reflections on visibility, loss, and legacy felt layered with both pain and fire. The writing does not hide real emotion. It offers it openly, and that openness gave the book its strength.
I also found myself smiling through several chapters. There is a down-to-earth charm in the way these women talk about building something from almost nothing. Patti Stoltz starting with three hundred dollars when it felt like three hundred thousand, Angela Barney juggling daycare, real estate, and Tupperware to keep her family steady, and so many others building piece by piece while learning on the go. Their stories brought a mix of admiration and comfort. I kept thinking how refreshing it was to hear success discussed without perfection. The ideas in the book are simple in the best way. Work hard. Stay kind. Learn fast. Lift others. Trust yourself. These messages land because they come from lived experience, not theory.
By the final pages, I felt a genuine sense of connection to the women in this collection. The affirmations sprinkled throughout added a gentle rhythm that reminded me to check in with my own path. I walked away from the book feeling both grounded and energized. It left me with a fuller sense of what resilience looks like in real life.
SHERO Entrepreneurs is a book I would recommend to women who are starting something new, women who feel stuck, and women who need proof that ordinary beginnings can still lead to extraordinary places. It is also a meaningful read for anyone who wants to understand the emotional landscape of entrepreneurship.
Pages: 253 | ASIN : B0FTPZFGNZ
LITERARY TITAN 