Blog Archives
Broken Revelations: When Heaven Sundered
When Heaven Sundered tells the story of Heaven before the fall, framed as a recovered record of what really happened when angels, demons, and gods collided. It follows Helel, later known as Lucifer, and his twin Michael as they grow from devoted sons into leaders on opposite sides of a divine civil war. Through shifting viewpoints, the story explores creation, rebellion, exile, and the slow breaking of a family that was never as loving as it claimed to be.
What struck me first was the ambition. The author swings big and does not flinch. The mythology blends biblical names with fresh lore, and it feels confident in doing so. I liked how personal the conflicts felt. These were not distant gods throwing lightning for fun. They were siblings arguing, hurting, loving, and resenting each other. That made the fall feel tragic instead of flashy. I felt sympathy for Lucifer even when I disagreed with him. I also felt frustration with the father figure, who came across as cold and stubborn. That emotional push and pull kept me invested even when the cast grew large.
The writing itself is earnest, and I mean that in a good way. Some scenes move fast and hit hard, especially moments of betrayal and loss. Others linger longer than needed. Still, there is heart on every page. The dialogue often feels raw and blunt, which fits the story. It sometimes reads like people speaking instead of characters performing. I appreciated that. The ideas about freedom, obedience, and love felt sincere. I found myself annoyed, sad, and even a little angry at times. That reaction mattered to me more than polish.
This book reminded me of Paradise Lost, but with less poetic distance and far more emotional immediacy. Where Milton feels grand and formal, Broken Revelations feels raw and personal, like you are standing inside the family fight instead of watching it from afar. It also echoes Good Omens in how it humanizes angels, though it trades humor for anger and heartbreak.
I would recommend this book to readers who enjoy myth retellings, angel lore, and morally gray characters. It is a good fit for anyone who likes big ideas wrapped in family drama. If you want something messy, emotional, and bold, this book is worth your time.
Pages: 174 | ASIN: B0GBTJJHT7
Beneath The Rings
The Doha 2040 Summer Olympics promise spectacle and grandeur. That illusion shatters fast. Twelve Lebanese and Israeli athletes vanish, seized by a shadowy organization known as the Obsidian Hand. Their demand lands like a thunderclap: a ransom of $500 billion. Veteran journalist Nova Mendelsohn steps into the chaos, and the stakes spike with every passing hour. The Olympic Village becomes her launching point, yet the real peril lurks beyond its perimeter. The desert holds secrets. Vengeance brews. Lives hang by a thread. Unless Nova unearths the truth, the kidnapped athletes will not survive.
Beneath the Rings, by Joe Battaglia, evokes echoes of Argo while carving out its own identity. Set in a near-future landscape that feels disturbingly plausible, the novel imagines a world only a few steps removed from our present timeline.
At its center stands Nova Mendelsohn. Once the narrative machinery locks into place, the spotlight rarely shifts from her. Intelligent, relentless, and remarkably resourceful, she becomes the ideal guide through this pressure cooker of danger. Readers may catch glimmers of Dan Brown’s puzzle-laced adventures or the high-velocity grit of the Jason Bourne films, yet Battaglia builds a narrative ecosystem all his own, one defined by crisp storytelling and an inventive delivery of essential clues.
Momentum never lags. Once the plot kicks into gear, it drives forward with remarkable speed. The mystery elements hook the reader early, while the dialogue sharpens the tension. Mini cliffhangers pepper the chapters, each one engineered to tug the reader deeper into the story. Putting the book down becomes a challenge.
The Obsidian Hand also stands apart from typical thriller antagonists. As their identity and purpose come into focus, their motives, while extreme, gain a faint, unsettling logic. This complexity grants the novel an unexpected emotional undercurrent, prompting readers to consider where justice ends and fanaticism begins.
The result is a high-stakes thriller with international scope and literary ambition, a potboiler elevated by thoughtful execution. Battaglia delivers a gripping ride, and further stories featuring Nova Mendelsohn would be more than welcome.
The Marvelous Adventures of Lucas Bard
In a world where the lines between reality and fantasy blur, an imaginative boy named Lucas faces more than the usual middle school dilemmas. His life takes a wild turn when he inherits his late grandfather’s enchanted monocle. The lens is capable of opening gateways to a fantastical realm. Thrust into a bizarre dimension with enigmatic automatons, Lucas discovers all kinds of mysterious happenings. Dive into a tale of adventure, friendship, and self-discovery, where every moment is a step into the unknown, and each moment a test of courage and wit.
The Accelerates: Forty Days to Dust
The Accelerates: Forty Days to Dust is a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel about a world collapsing under the weight of a genetic disaster. It follows Ethan, a teenager trying to protect his rapidly aging baby brother Leo, whose accelerated growth is part of a larger outbreak created by GeneCorp. As society unravels, the story weaves through multiple characters and timelines to show how the world ended and what tiny, flickering pieces of hope might still remain.
The writing is intense, sometimes brutal, but always meant to push you deeper into the emotional core of the story. I kept feeling pulled along by Ethan’s quiet determination and the surreal horror of watching children become both victims and agents of destruction. The author leans hard into sensory detail, and while some moments feel almost overwhelming, they also give the story its heartbeat. Scenes like the hospital sequence with Clara and her daughter are vivid enough that I had to pause and breathe before moving on.
The shifting viewpoints create a mosaic of grief, fear, and stubborn love, and even though the world is crumbling, the relationships feel grounded. I was especially struck by how the book treats childhood. The accelerated children aren’t simple monsters. They’re mirrors held up to human ambition, or maybe human negligence, and that choice keeps the story from slipping into a standard “virus apocalypse” plot. There are moments that feel almost mythic, especially later in the book as characters begin to understand what Leo represents, and those moments give the bleakness a strange, luminous edge.
This is a heavy story, but it’s also a hopeful one in its own quiet way. I’d recommend The Accelerates: Forty Days to Dust to readers who enjoy emotionally driven science fiction with dystopian and horror elements. If you like stories that explore both the collapse of a world and the fierce love that refuses to disappear with it, this one will speak to you.
Pages: 325 | ASIN : B0F6HMC3SW
Promise of Mercy
Promise of Mercy pushes the Dreamscape Warriors saga into darker, sharper territory as the long-idle Utopian Founders wake after six centuries and move to seize power by force. Their plot spirals outward fast. Liam O’Connor is kidnapped and flung through an ancient portal into the unknown, the Temple priestesses are drugged and held hostage, and the O’Connor children are thrust into a frantic rescue operation that tears across worlds. The book mixes political upheaval, telepathic warfare, and tight family bonds in a story that never stops moving.
While reading, I found myself pulled in by the heart of the book, which is not the action, but the relationships. Springs writes family moments with a warmth that caught me off guard. A quiet conversation between Liam and Deirdre over pastries feels as gripping as any firefight. Even scenes of chaos keep circling back to loyalty, fear, duty, and love. I liked how the story makes room for softness inside a hard universe. The writing itself is straightforward, sometimes almost plain, but the plainness works. It lets the emotions land without dressing them up.
I also caught myself getting fired up during the more intense chapters. The Founders’ arrogance, their cold talk of “genetic purity,” and their plan to eliminate Liam or “correct” his children stirred real anger in me. On the flip side, the fight inside the Temple hooked me completely. Seeing Bayvin take a hit, Aisling and Deirdre charging in, Celinia steadying herself even while drugged, and the arch priestess trying to hold everything together made the stakes feel personal. The author writes these scenes with a quick rhythm that kept me flipping pages and muttering under my breath. The book might lean heavily on lore sometimes, but even then, I didn’t mind. It felt like being swept into a world that genuinely believes in its own history.
By the end, I walked away feeling surprisingly moved. This is a story where the characters’ courage matters more than their weapons, and where mercy is treated as a kind of power. The book would be a great fit for readers who enjoy sci-fi adventures with real heart, for fans of military space opera with family drama baked in, and for anyone who likes telepaths, portals, and rebellions, all mixed with warmth and humor. If that sounds like your style, Promise of Mercy delivers.
Pages: 446 | ASIN : B0DBBBNN5P
Too Complex: It’s a (Enter Difficulty Setting Here) Life
Cody Redbond lives to game. Addiction defines him. His fixation centers on Fantasy Estate, an online battle royale that consumes his days and erases everything else. Hours disappear. Priorities collapse. The game becomes his only reality, while the world beyond his screen loses all appeal. Employment slips away. Social skills erode. Eventually, eviction follows. Even then, Cody refuses to move on. He is too deeply embedded in the digital realm to disengage on his own.
Enter leasing agent Mavirna Holmes and property manager Corey Dwellen. Their task is simple in theory and nightmarish in practice: reach Cody and reclaim the apartment. Doing so requires navigating a living space that has deteriorated into absolute chaos, a physical manifestation of Cody’s inward retreat.
Too Complex: It’s a (Enter Difficulty Setting Here) Life, by Anthony Moffett, is a compact and sharply comic work that blends prose with illustrations. It occupies a space somewhere between novella and graphic novel, using visuals to punctuate its humor and heighten its absurdity.
At its core, the book is an absurdist adventure tailored to video game enthusiasts, but its reach extends further. It functions as a satire of modern adulthood, skewering burnout, disconnection, and the quiet despair that drives escapism. As Cody’s story unfolds, sympathy becomes inevitable. He has not merely abandoned reality; he has replaced it with something brighter, louder, and more responsive. Ironically, the so-called real world offers little incentive to return. It appears dull, unforgiving, and deeply uninspiring by comparison.
This contrast captures the enduring appeal of video games. They promise immersion without consequence, excitement without monotony. When everyday life feels hollow or exhausting, fantasy becomes irresistible. Mavirna and Corey, the unfortunate duo assigned to retrieve Cody, find themselves on a quest of their own, one that mirrors the very games Cody adores. The ultimate irony lies in the aftermath of his obsession. The artificial world he clung to has reshaped reality itself, transforming his apartment into a grotesque, pest-ridden dungeon.
The result is a book that is unabashedly fun. It is silly, unhinged, and gleefully excessive. Beneath the humor, however, lies a pointed warning. Too Complex entertains first, but it also lingers, offering a sharp and thoughtful reflection on escapism, avoidance, and the cost of choosing fantasy over life. I highly recommend this humorous and highly relatable tale to gamers and non-gamers alike.
Pages: 73 | ASIN : B0BR4J3L9Y
The False Princess
The False Princess is a fantasy novel that blends court politics, young love, and an undercurrent of danger as Princess Sitnalta prepares for her future role as queen. The story opens with old secrets resurfacing, threats stirring in the shadows, and multiple characters navigating loyalty, family, and identity. What begins as an engagement celebration quickly fractures when Sitnalta becomes the target of a calculated assault, and the emotional fallout sends her, her loved ones, and the kingdom into far more complicated territory.
Reading it felt like slipping back into a classic fantasy world where kingdoms matter, alliances matter, and every gesture carries weight. What pulled me in most wasn’t the magic or intrigue, but the relationships. Sitnalta’s bond with Navor is warm and earnest, and the moments between Sitnalta and Aud feel tender in a way that makes the palace feel like an actual home instead of a backdrop. Gwendolyn and Ipsinki add another thread about love, choice, and the quiet pressure of tradition.
The writing itself is straightforward and emotional. Sometimes a little dramatic, sometimes soft, but always sincere. And when the darker moment arrives on the balcony, the tone drops hard and fast, which honestly worked. It’s jarring in the way those moments are supposed to be. The author gives Sitnalta space to feel shaken, ashamed, angry, and ultimately supported, and those scenes were some of the strongest in the book.
As I read, I kept noticing how much attention the author gives to interior feelings. Characters think, hesitate, second-guess, explain themselves, and comfort one another. The pacing stretches at times because of this, but in a story that centers on identity and stepping into power, I didn’t mind lingering in people’s heads. What surprised me most is how grounded the emotional beats feel inside a fairy tale–like setting. There are silk gowns and royal balls, but also conversations about consent, reputation, and the burden of leadership. Even the villain, Sparrow, isn’t painted with subtle strokes, yet his cruelty serves as a sharp contrast to the compassion in the rest of the cast. The book keeps circling back to the idea that strength isn’t loud. Sometimes it’s in telling the truth. Sometimes it’s in letting others help you.
The False Princess is a good fit for readers who enjoy character-driven fantasy, especially those who like royal intrigue mixed with heartfelt relationships and themes of resilience. It’s very much a fantasy novel at its core, but one that leans into emotional honesty more than magic or battles. If you appreciate stories about young women finding their voice within demanding worlds, this one will speak to you.
Pages: 184 | ISBN : 978-1945502750
Engineering the Puzzle
The Asset Within follows a CIA case officer who receives life-altering intelligence from an Iranian defector during a routine debrief, resulting in her alignment with a team that includes the man who once broke her heart. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’m a Black woman and a former CIA officer, and I wanted to write a thriller that felt emotionally true to that world. The seed of the story came from what it felt like to be the only Black graduate in my training class. I carried both pride and pressure at the same time, and constantly navigated the unspoken dynamics that come with being “the only.”
From there, I wanted to explore a kind of love story I don’t see often enough: the complicated patriotism many Black Americans live with—serving a country you believe in, even when you’ve also been asked to endure its blind spots. The Iranian defector and the intelligence drop are the spark, but the heart of the setup is what happens when duty collides with history…and Andy is forced back into close orbit with the man who once broke her heart.
What do you find to be the most challenging aspect of writing a thriller? The most rewarding?
The hardest part is engineering the puzzle aspect of a thriller. I’m not a natural outliner, so I draft by instinct first, and then I have to go back and make sure every twist is earned, the clues are seeded, and the pacing stays tight without cheating the reader. Continuity is the invisible work in thrillers.
The most rewarding part is immersing myself in the story. When it’s clicking, I feel like I’m inside the scene with the characters. My heart races, I feel what it’s like to make impossible decisions, and when readers tell me they couldn’t put it down or were shocked about twists and turns they didn’t see coming – that is the best feeling.
What was the inspiration for the love story and the connection the characters have?
The love story came from watching what this kind of work does to people. Espionage isn’t just dangerous—it’s isolating. It demands secrecy, long absences, and a level of emotional compartmentalization that can strain even the strongest relationships. And yet I’ve seen couples make it, but the bond has to be more than chemistry. It has to be trust under pressure.
Andy and Cameron’s connection is rooted in history and in shared understanding: they both know what it costs to serve, and they both carry scars from how that service shaped them. Their story is also personal for me. It’s inspired by a relationship from my own life—one that didn’t last—but I used that emotional truth to write the version of the love story that could survive in this world.
I find a problem in well-written stories, in that I always want there to be another book to keep the story going. Is there a second book planned?
Absolutely. Book Two in the Global Security Series is planned for Spring 2026, and it takes Andy and Cameron into an even bigger operation—higher stakes, deeper consequences, and a relationship that has to hold under real pressure. They’ll get one more book to complete their arc, and then Theo gets his moment. His story kicks off with a teaser at the end of Book Two, and I can’t wait for readers to meet him in a bigger way.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
CIA Officer Andy Lynam returns home after an intelligence operation goes horribly wrong. When she becomes the target of the insidious international terrorist network Solaris, one with the power to manipulate fractures within her own agency, she realizes her badge alone can’t protect her.
To survive, Andy aligns herself with a covert team of global security officers to expose corruption at the highest levels and bring the terrorist organization down.
But when that team includes her ex-boyfriend, GSO Cameron Landry, old flames reignite. This romantic spy thriller is packed with second chances, forced proximity, workplace tension, and soul-deep romance.
LITERARY TITAN 