Blog Archives
In the Heart of the Beast
Everybody has a plan for a better life in Jack Rife’s In the Heart of the Beast, and nearly every plan comes with a price someone else may have to pay. Set in Texas during the Christmas season of 1976, this sprawling work of literary historical fiction follows a circle of former radicals whose drug business becomes entangled with an arms deal and revolutionary politics. A murder unsettles Austin’s underground economy, while an inheritance dispute exposes another network of money and influence. The combination gives this political thriller plenty of danger, but its strongest pull comes from watching people explain their choices to themselves. Rife is especially sharp about how easily a cherished principle can become permission to use somebody else.
The characters give those questions their weight. Michael Duval’s inherited privilege sits uneasily beside his revolutionary sympathies, and his confidence makes him both persuasive and deeply frustrating. His friend John Detleptsen brings skepticism, exhaustion, and the precarious perspective of a recovering addict to their shared enterprise. W. P. O’Duggan, a veteran with a wife and children, measures loyalty through obligations that become increasingly difficult to reconcile. Allie Beth Kauffman’s practical intelligence and complicated attachment to Michael add another kind of pressure, while Helen Jameson’s hopes for love and ordinary happiness keep the human cost in view. Their conversations can be funny, cutting, and painful within a few lines. You get to know these people through the distance between what they say they value and what their actions ask of others.
Rife’s Texas has texture you can almost feel on your clothes: damp river bottoms, cold marble, smoky dance halls, battered upholstery, and the relentless discomfort of winter travel. Austin’s changing skyline and expanding property market make the setting part of the book’s argument about wealth, belonging, and displacement. The writing moves between earthy dialogue and elaborate, image-heavy sentences, often following a character into a memory while a conversation continues around them. That layered approach gives this character-driven crime fiction considerable emotional depth. It also makes for a demanding read. Political speeches and philosophical discussions occupy substantial stretches, and repeated arguments sometimes slow the momentum. The frequent racial slurs, explicit sexual material, and graphic brutality make the atmosphere abrasive; some sweeping claims about women and men feel heavy-handed.
I think what makes In the Heart of the Beast compelling is how persistently its questions reach into private life. Arguments about capitalism, revolution, and freedom become arguments about who gets protected, who does the dangerous work, and whose dreams deserve everyone else’s sacrifice. The same scrutiny reaches family ambition, romantic attachment, and friendship, giving the novel a reach that suits its substantial length. I found it most affecting when a small gesture or an awkward exchange carried the weight of those larger concerns. Readers drawn to Texas historical fiction, morally complicated characters, and political suspense will find plenty to engage with here. It’s a thorny, ambitious novel whose strongest passages make ideology feel personal, particularly when the people speaking most confidently have the greatest difficulty seeing themselves clearly.
Pages: 819 | ASIN : B0HHR7BLKD
Good Intentions
Frederick Groya’s Good Intentions is an intimate, historically grounded novel about the distance between the life a person is taught to want and the life that ultimately proves authentic. Beginning with Tom Rudnik at a personal low point on New Year’s Eve 1990, the novel reaches backward to trace the choices that brought him there, from law school and marriage to fatherhood, professional ambition, sexual secrecy, and divorce. Tom’s struggle is shaped by three powerful forces: his desire for his father’s approval, the Catholic moral framework of his upbringing, and his attraction to men. Groya establishes that structure early with the line, “Tom Rudnik had three secrets, and in a few minutes, he would admit to one of them.” What follows is less a story of sudden revelation than a long examination of how secrecy, expectation, and sincere intentions can accumulate into consequences that no one originally intended.
One of the novel’s strongest qualities is the attention it gives to both Tom and his wife, Amelia. Amelia enters the marriage carrying her own history of poverty, family instability, artistic ambition, and determination to construct a better life. Her desire for a beautiful home, professional recognition, and control over her surroundings grows from experiences that make those needs psychologically convincing. Tom, meanwhile, genuinely loves Amelia and their son, Nicky, even as he divides himself between incompatible versions of his identity. The alternating perspectives give the deterioration of their marriage unusual depth because the same conflicts can look entirely different from opposite sides. Neither character experiences the marriage as a simple contest between right and wrong. Nicky becomes the emotional center of the book, particularly for Tom, whose commitment to being a good father eventually proves more enduring than his ambitions for wealth, status, or conventional respectability.
Groya also gives the novel a strong sense of time and place. Kansas City, Washington, Rehoboth Beach, and Provincetown aren’t merely settings; they mark different stages in Tom’s understanding of himself. The AIDS crisis runs through the narrative as a source of fear, grief, caution, and historical pressure, while the professional culture of 1980s and early 1990s Washington adds another realm in which appearances carry consequences. Domestic details, renovations, office politics, church services, music, restaurants, and changing social attitudes build a densely observed period world. The novel’s recurring images of roads, doors, darkness, houses, and divided spaces reinforce Tom’s habit of compartmentalizing his existence. At one of his lowest points, he recognizes that “He was two halves of a person, and the two halves didn’t quite make a whole.” The book’s explicit sexual scenes serve that same psychological purpose, charting the progression from suppressed desire to compulsive gratification and, eventually, to an understanding that physical freedom alone can’t provide intimacy.
By the end, Good Intentions develops into a novel about accountability as much as self-acceptance. Tom’s eventual relationship with Jason gives him the possibility of joining love, sexuality, fatherhood, and ordinary domestic life within a single identity, while Amelia begins building a more stable life of her own. Yet Groya doesn’t treat personal authenticity as an eraser of earlier harm. Tom’s growth requires him to recognize what his secrecy cost Amelia and Bill, just as Amelia comes to acknowledge the part her anger and unhappiness played in the collapse of the marriage. That emphasis gives the title its significance: good intentions matter, but they don’t absolve people from examining what their choices have done to others. The final scene, in which Tom prepares to tell Amelia the truth he has withheld, ends the novel at an apt point of moral completion. Good Intentions is a thoughtful family and identity novel about becoming honest enough to live as one person, and responsible enough to accept the full history of how that person came to be.
Pages: 327 | ASIN : B0HD9VXYPR
A Highlight Reel
Sugar Sand Land is a romance novel in which a famous influencer and a scandal-shadowed country star fall in love and must choose between the stories the world tells about them and their private truths. What drew you to writing a romance about people whose lives are shaped by public image?
I’m both a sociologist and a romance novelist, and I think that dual perspective shapes the stories I tell. In the age of social media, just about everyone has a public image, whether you’re famous or not—a curated image—and I’m fascinated with how that impacts our lives. I’ve always been interested in the gap between appearance and reality. That gap is heightened in a world ruled by Instagram images, TikTok reels, mass media stories, and the whims of “influencers.” But how do you get at the gap between appearance and reality, and identity more broadly? I’m obsessed with romance, and so a love story was my way into the topic. By creating a love story between celebrities, I was able to show the reality of their lives and include media stories and public commentary in the form of social media posts. That allowed me to explore the gap between what people think is true and what actually is true. At the end of the day, relationships are always central to my novels, so I very much see this as a romance first and foremost. But it’s also about identity in today’s society.
How did you balance the glamorous, high-profile elements of celebrity culture with the deeper themes of grief, loneliness, and emotional healing?
I’ve always thought about writing a romance novel like baking a soufflé. You want the light, airy bits, but when you dig your spoon in further, it’s rich and decadent. So in this novel I really tried to create balance between the fun celebrity elements and the deeper themes. I was able to do this by keeping the love story at the center. The romance between Emerson and Renn is genuine and deep. They spark. It’s sexy, but it’s also tender. By staying focused on their relationship, I was able to balance the different elements and emotions in the book.
Emerson and Renn feel like opposites in their relationship to fame. Was that contrast the starting point for the novel, or did it emerge as you wrote?
It was the starting point. I always begin with characters. I created Emerson Blue first—reality star, influencer, and basically the most famous person on the planet who has used social media masterfully to create her persona. The world thinks she’s an open book, but Emerson has secrets. As a counterpoint, I created Renn Walker, a fallen star who lives in seclusion and is so uninterested in social media he doesn’t even own a computer. The whole world has made assumptions about him despite his silence, but assumptions aren’t always right. To me, the contrast felt integral to both their love story and how they change each other, but also to exploring the larger topic of identity and what’s public and what’s private in contemporary culture.
What did you hope readers would take away from this story about love surviving both public myth and private pain?
We all need to think about what to make public and what to keep private in our lives. We should never compare ourselves to people on social media. It’s a highlight reel. It’s like comparing your insides to someone’s airbrushed outsides. People don’t always share their pain publicly. Many people carry invisible scars. There’s no number of “likes” on social media that serves as a substitute for real love. Above all, it’s a story about authenticity and love. Love helps us become more of ourselves, not less. Our real selves.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Simon & Schuster | Website | Amazon
Twenty-eight-year-old beauty Emerson Blue is the second most followed celebrity on social media. A self-proclaimed “living piece of art” who rose to fame as a reality star and then parlayed her celebrity into a megabucks career as an influencer, she seems to have everything.
Forty-eight-year-old Grammy winner Renn Walker is a fallen country music star. Years ago, he was canceled following allegations of sexual misconduct, and he has lived in seclusion ever since. Once a beloved figure, he seems to have lost it all.
When Emerson and Renn meet, sparks fly. Against all odds, a star obsessed with popularity and a recluse shunned by the world fall in love. Everyone in the public and media has an opinion and thinks they know Emerson and Renn. But in a world dominated by social media—a world that blurs the lines between what’s public and private, what’s real and what’s illusion—do we ever really know anyone?
Impactful Small Decisions
What We Found Last Summer follows a group of friends whose summer turns into one filled with danger when they discover a bag of money tied to the mob. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Childhood experiences and shared cultural memory: shooting off fireworks, building tree forts in the woods, and riding bikes with my friends. Everything we were doing while unsupervised in the 1980s, when the adults weren’t paying attention, which was most of the time. But it’s also influenced by movies like Stand by Me and, for the suburban crime element, TV shows like The Sopranos.
Derek’s bravado and Calvin’s caution create a strong tension. What interested you about writing that kind of friendship dynamic?
I just love that dynamic—the one friend who pushes the other toward the thing he really wants to do but is afraid to—or knows he shouldn’t. Derek is the catalyst, and Calvin is the conscience. Sometimes we need that friend because they push us to experience life. And sometimes that friend gets us into trouble.
The tone shifts between humor and real danger very quickly. How did you manage that balance without losing momentum?
There’s a lot of character work early in the book, and that’s where most of the humor lives. A fair amount of commentary from the characters about each other and their relationships. But when you’re running for your life, you only have time to react, not reflect. I tried to capture that shift as the stakes rise in the book.
If the characters could look back on this summer as adults, what do you think would stay with them the most?
How impactful small decisions are. How final some consequences can be. And how much simpler life felt when you were just playing with your friends.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
But you just don’t know it yet.
When twelve-year-olds Calvin and Derek venture out to an abandoned treehouse at the edge of the woods, they stumble across something they were never meant to see.
What begins as another carefree day—when friendship still feels permanent and summer was meant for fun—quickly turns into something far more serious as the boys realize they’ve brushed up against a world of crime, danger, and secrets that don’t belong to kids.
Some summers you never forget.
Others change you forever.
Roscoe
Andrew J. Gregor’s Roscoe is a work of contemporary literary fiction that follows one day in the life of Roscoe Follman, a sixty-two-year-old unhoused man living on the streets of San Francisco with his small dog, Geppetto. The story moves through roughly twelve hours as Roscoe wakes in a doorway, wanders the city, reflects on the life he once had, helps a man after a serious accident, and suddenly finds himself noticed by the very society that usually looks through him. It’s a compact story in terms of time, but emotionally it feels much larger.
What struck me first was the voice. Roscoe is sharp, profane, funny, wounded, and often exhausting in a human way. He can move from a joke about a dog or a bad pair of shoes into a cutting thought about capitalism, colonialism, death, class, or dignity before you have time to settle in. That could have become too much, but Gregor gives the narration enough texture to keep it alive. Roscoe doesn’t sound like a symbol. He sounds like a man thinking out loud because silence has become too heavy. I liked that. I also liked that the book doesn’t sand him down to make him easy to admire. He’s tender, vain, angry, lonely, observant, and sometimes unfair. In other words, he feels real.
Gregor’s main choice, keeping the story so tightly focused on one man’s day, gives the novel its power. There’s not a lot of plot in the traditional sense, but there is constant movement inside Roscoe’s mind. The city becomes more than a setting. San Francisco feels damp, expensive, crowded, beautiful, cruel, and weirdly generous in flashes. The book asks readers to look at homelessness without turning Roscoe into either a lesson or a charity case, and I appreciated that restraint. Roscoe’s digressions can feel long, and some readers may find the political and philosophical asides blunt. Still, those asides are part of the point. This is a man trying to keep hold of his dignity by thinking, naming, remembering, and arguing with the world.
I would recommend Roscoe to readers who appreciate literary fiction with a strong social conscience, especially stories centered on voice, interior life, and moral discomfort rather than fast plotting. It’ll appeal to people who like character-driven novels that make them pause and reconsider the lives they pass by every day. It’s candid, rough-edged, and sad, but also unexpectedly funny. Most of all, it’s a reminder that being seen can be both a gift and a burden.
Pages: 191 | ASIN : B0GX3771MT
Nothing Left to Lose
Nothing Left to Lose, by Len Joy, is a literary family drama about Tawni Carter, a prominent anti-abortion activist whose public convictions collide painfully with her private life. After she tries to take legal control of her pregnant daughter, Charlotte, Tawni loses more than a court case. She loses trust, family, and the story she has told herself about who she is. The novel moves between 2018, the 1960s, and the early days of COVID, building a layered portrait of mothers, daughters, regret, survival, and the hard work of letting go.
I liked how willing Joy is to sit with complicated people. Tawni could have been written as a symbol, but she isn’t. She’s proud, sharp, manipulative, wounded, funny, selfish, and capable of real tenderness. That makes her frustrating in the way real people can be frustrating. I didn’t always like her. I was not always meant to. But I kept wanting to understand her, and that is where the book earns its emotional weight. The shifts into Clover’s past also give the novel a wider shape, moving it beyond one family crisis into a story about inheritance, not just money or blood, but belief, grief, stubbornness, and love passed from one generation to the next.
Joy’s writing is clean and direct, with dialogue that often carries the charge of a courtroom argument or a family fight at the worst possible moment. The book takes on big issues, abortion, faith, political identity, addiction, aging, illness, and the pandemic, but it works best when those ideas are pressed through intimate scenes. A hospital room. A phone call. A daughter at the door. Those moments feel authentic. I did sometimes feel the novel was juggling a lot, especially as it stretches across decades and social conflicts, but the emotional line stays clear. This is a book about a woman who has built a life around certainty and then has to survive the collapse of that certainty.
I would recommend Nothing Left to Lose to readers who enjoy character-driven literary fiction with the sweep of a family saga and the tension of contemporary social drama. It will especially appeal to readers who like morally messy protagonists, intergenerational stories, and novels that ask hard questions without pretending the answers are easy. It is not a light read, but it is a thoughtful one, and by the end, I felt the title land with force.
Pages: 217 | ASIN : B0GXLJRYWF
What We Found Last Summer
What We Found Last Summer is a compact, propulsive coming-of-age thriller built around a very 1980s kid-adventure setup: bikes, woods, fireworks, treehouses, comics, neighborhood rivalries, and parents who are just far enough away for trouble to bloom. The hook is simple and effective: Calvin and Derek find a bag of mob money in an abandoned treehouse, and their summer suddenly becomes much bigger than scraped knees and boyhood dares. The book knows exactly what it’s playing with when it invokes “Kids on bikes,” but it gives that familiar shape a sharper adult edge.
What makes the story work is that it isn’t just nostalgia dressed up as danger. Author Javier De Lucia fills the neighborhood with specific, lived-in relationships: Calvin and his brother Ryan, Calvin and Ravi’s strained friendship, Derek’s restless bravado, Rochelle’s divided loyalty, Lolo’s quiet vigilance, and the uneasy presence of adults whose choices are spilling into the kids’ world. The mob plot gives the novel momentum, but the real texture comes from the way every kid is trying to understand power, loyalty, fear, and belonging with only a twelve-year-old’s emotional toolkit.
The tone is probably the book’s strongest asset. It’s funny in a blunt, profane, very character-driven way, and then it can turn tense fast without feeling like it has changed books. Agent Baker’s line, “We follow the money,” could’ve been pulled from a straight crime novel, but here it sits beside comic-book arguments, treehouse engineering, and kids making decisions they’re nowhere near ready to make. That mix gives the novel its personality: half suburban adventure, half crime story, with the two halves rubbing against each other in interesting ways.
I also liked how the book lets the kids be messy without sanding them down into symbols. Calvin is cautious but tempted, Derek is bold but scared, Ravi is annoying because he’s often right, and Rochelle sees more than the adults realize. Lolo, meanwhile, becomes one of the book’s most memorable presences because he understands the danger before the kids fully do. The story has a real affection for childhood imagination, but it’s also honest about how quickly imagination can collapse when actual violence enters the frame.
By the end, What We Found Last Summer feels like a memory that’s been sharpened into a pulp adventure, then complicated by an adult narrator who knows memory and fiction don’t always sit in separate rooms. The afterword’s idea that “Everything counts” fits the book nicely, because this is a story about the way childhood incidents can become myths, wounds, jokes, and origin stories all at once. It’s a fast read, but it has more going on than its premise suggests, and its best moments come from how confidently it treats a neighborhood summer as something big enough to change everyone who lived through it.
Pages: 105 | ASIN : B0GT26H2ZM
Immortal Beings
A Tale for the Shadows follows a murdered woman who is reborn as a ghost and finds unexpected love and purpose alongside a hunted vampire in a world where death is only the beginning. What drew you to combining ghost lore with vampire mythology in the same narrative?
The simplest answer is that I love stories about ghosts, and I love stories about vampires, so I combined them for my own entertainment. I knew that I wanted to write a novel that I would love to read.
A longer answer would include a recognition that the lore around ghosts and vampires is deep, centuries of material. Those stories are also ingrained in our societal consciousness. We tend to view ghosts as fearful entities in most European traditions, but in so many cultures, they’re welcomed, revered. Vampires are feared because they are alpha predators of human beings. In the Victorian novels (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example), vampires are symbolic of a frightening force of sexuality. I think the fear of ghosts and vampires also rises from a fear of death, our own and that of those we love. My idea was to turn this fear on its head, at least to some degree. No group of humanity is monolithic. That includes the dead and undead. Could there not be kind ghosts, wise vampires? We know that, for those who live on, love lingers after death. What would happen if love were a force for those who have died?
And, finally, I was intrigued by how a friendship might develop between a ghost and a vampire, two supernatural beings. And from there, how love might develop. From that rose the promise of an eternity together, as two immortal beings. How cool would that be?
Senka’s story begins in trauma but grows into something more complex. How did you shape her emotional evolution?
A lot of my shaping of Senka’s character was instinctual, based on my own experiences. Life, not just mine but everyone’s, is a process of accumulating anniversaries—of births, marriages, deaths, significant events. When I was in high school, my father died suddenly. My grandmother, mother, and life partner all died in the space of a year. My son’s fianceé died about a year after he was in a devastating car accident that left him paralyzed from the collarbones down. I watched him recover and learned a lot about forgiveness from him. Senka’s losses and her eventual choices about how to heal come from my own beliefs about the value of life and the extraordinary healing power of forgiveness and compassion.
The novel explores love after betrayal. Do you see the story as more about love, survival, or transformation?
Hmmm. I see those three as inextricably intertwined. Each supports the others; each makes the others possible. In Shadows, there are obviously several different kinds of love: Finn’s for his mom, hers for him; Senka and Silas for Luna, his for them; Mrs. Wang for her husband; Jeremy for his parents; Sarah/Senka’s for Stanley; and, of course, Senka and Silas for each other. There are also several kinds of transformation: from living to dead, from apparently good husband to … not so good husband, from smoke to monster, from revenge-focused to justice-focused. There’s even a shape-shifter. If Senka hadn’t transformed from the self-absorbed, willfully blind actress she was into the compassionate, caring, introspective ghost she became, she wouldn’t have been capable of finding the love with Silas that she finds. At the same time, if Silas hadn’t found the love he has with Senka, he wouldn’t have been interested in continued survival.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
It’s 1972. When Poppy is forced to move to Monterey, California, just before her senior year in high school, she’s furious and powerless to stop it. Then she discovers a mysterious journal that answers her anger with something irresistible: every wish she writes becomes real. At first, it feels like freedom, like finally taking control. But the magic has a cost, and someone else always pays. As the consequences grow darker, Poppy realizes she must give up the magic and develop the strength to shape her life without it. It’s a coming-of-age story with a dollop of Twilight Zone. I’m hoping it will be in bookstores by October 2026.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
She was murdered by the man she loved. Now she’s a ghost bound to the cabin where she died—until a wounded vampire, an ancient enemy, and a mysterious cat change everything.
Senka was once a rising television star. Now, she’s a restless spirit, trapped in the site of her betrayal. But everything shifts the night Silas appears—an ageless Native American vampire fleeing a ruthless Maker determined to erase him from existence. When a violent confrontation leaves the cabin in flames, Senka is finally freed, and an unlikely partnership is born.
As Senka and Silas forge a path through shadows and centuries-old grudges, they begin to pursue justice—not just for Senka’s murder but for the other lives shattered along the way. Guided by ghosts who’ve chosen to remain in the world of the living and aided by Luna the twenty-third, a clever feline with a talent for love and loyalty, they face vengeful vampires, unravel hidden truths, and awaken powers Senka never imagined.
But love in the afterlife is complicated. Haunted by the past and hesitant to trust again, Senka must confront the choices that led her here—and decide if an eternity with Silas is worth risking her heart one more time.
Lush, lyrical, and darkly romantic, A Tale for the Shadows is a supernatural fantasy that blends ghost stories and vampire lore with emotional depth, wit, and resilience. Perfect for fans of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, The Dead Romantics, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this is a tale of second chances, found family, and the quiet power of choosing love—even after death.
