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The stalker is much more personal.
Plans follows a widowed cybersecurity professor and her daughters whose long-awaited trip to Israel becomes a fight for survival against a violent stalker and an international conspiracy. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I have worked in a bank related business for more than ten years. There are many stories of people’s lives affected or even crushed by scams and identity theft, including my own. When I started this series more than fourteen years ago, the goal was to quickly turn the story into a historical novel. As ideas matured in my writing, it became clear that using a current issue would be a good hook for the first story. I turned to the business articles I had read on the issue of scams and to my sister-in-law, who worked in banking. These ideas became Aggie Haterius’ career.
The stalker is much more personal. Family history and a boss who was too eager for me to visit his home became Dr. Robert Sterling. The international conspiracy came from the business articles reporting that many scammers tie back to a few Asian countries. Also, my interest in procedural crime dramas influenced me.
The relationships among Aggie, Kae, Domi, and Claudia are central to the novel. How did you develop each family member’s distinct personality and point of view?
I am one of twenty-five cousins on my mother’s side of the family. I grew up close to most of them. Aggie is a combination of my mother, my aunts, and, of course, me. I created Kae, Domi, and Claudia from cousins, co-workers, and a little from my children. I gave each of them their own point of view to make it realistic. Parents and children don’t see the world the same. This will be explored more in the second book, “NO PLANS”.
Claudia’s desert excursion gives her an opportunity to step out of her sisters’ shadows. Why was that moment important to her character arc?
When the story opens, Claudia seems almost childlike, still playing pretend and having tantrums. During the course of the book, she realizes the European trip belongs exclusively to her sisters. This leaves her unanchored and open to belittlement by her sisters. We have all lived with moments where we don’t belong or are on the outside of a group looking in. Claudia represents all of us at one moment or another. The desert excursion gave her a sense of belonging and some importance; a way to show her sisters that imagination and reality can build together. The older sisters have forgotten that imagination is important for building and creating.
In the long term, the desert excursion will give Claudia another much deeper arc, learning how to forgive yourself when the unexpected happens.
Also, these stories began because I challenged a child to do their homework for English class, and I would write a fiction story to match the required page count. I just kept writing after reaching the goal. Then the fun began. I had to tell them what I had written that week and what ideas were coming. It’s great when a teenager asks their parent to tell them about a story being written!
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Their trip starts well; however, an unwelcome person shows up, causing many unexpected events and causing trauma for Aggie and her daughters, who witness one of the attacks on their mother. How will Aggie handle the derailment of their life?
Loyalty Becomes Something Dangerous
Vanished Twin follows a Tampa detective as he investigates a ritualistic serial killer whose gruesome crimes reveal dark secrets of childhood abuse, family trauma, and twisted sibling loyalty. What inspired you to write the second Detective Alex Archer novel?
When I started writing Vanished Twin, I wanted to challenge Detective Alex Archer with a case that was darker, more personal, and emotionally comlex than anything he had faced before. I was inspired by true crime stories that reveal how deeply childhood experiences can influence adult behavior. The concept of ritualistic murders connected to long-buried family trauma gave me an opportunity to create a mystery that was not only suspenseful but also psychologically layered. At its heart, the novel asks how far someone might go to protect the people they love and what happens when loyalty becomes something dangerous.
What did you want to do differently in this book compared with the first Alex Archer novel?
One of my biggest goals with Vanished Twin was to make the story darker and more emotionally complex than the first Alex Archer novel. While the first book, The Devil ‘s Snow, focused primarily on solving a crime, this novel dives deeper into the psychological motivations behind violence and the lasting impact of childhood trauma. I wanted the mystery to be more than a hunt for a killer. I wanted it to become an exploration of family bonds, buried secrets, and the ways people are shaped by their past. I also wanted to challenge Alex Archer on a more personal level. In Vanished Twin, the investigation forces him to confront difficult moral questions and navigate the emotional fallout experienced by victims, families, and even perpetrators. The result is a story that balances suspense and action with a deper examination of human relationships and the consequences of long-hidden wounds.
Why did you choose Catholic imagery and Satanism as elements of the killer’s ritual?
I chose Catholic imaagery and Satanism because they provided a powerful way to explore the novel’s themes of faith, corruption, and trauma. The killer twists religious symbols to reflect his damaged worldview, turning what should represent hope and redemption into something dark and terrifying. It also gave Alex Archer a deeper mystery to unravel beyond the murders themselves.
What did writing this second installment teach you that you did not know while writing the first?
Writing Vanished Twin taught me that the most compelling mysteries are driven by character as much as plot. While writing the first Alex Archer novel, The Devil’s Snow, I focused on the investigation itself, In the second book, I learned how much more powerful a story becomes when the emotional journeys of the detective, victims, and even the killer are woven into the mystery. That deeper character focus made the suspense more meaningful and the stakes more personal.
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Trying to rebuild his life, Archer joins the Tampa Police Department, where his instincts quickly reawaken. A relentless investigator willing to bend protocol when necessary, Archer soon becomes the department’s go-to detective for high-risk cases.
What begins as a series of gun-store robberies soon uncovers a far more dangerous threat: the activation of a Taliban sleeper cell determined to unleash terror on American soil. As the investigation deepens, Archer becomes the personal target of Saif Abdulla, an Afghan national haunted by his own trauma after losing his village during Operation Enduring Freedom.
As disturbing personalized clues draw Archer deeper into the conspiracy, the terror cell launches escalating attacks designed to spread fear and chaos across the country—all leading toward a catastrophic event promising devastation far beyond 9/11.
Fast-paced, gritty, and emotionally charged, The Devil’s Snow blends police procedural realism with psychological suspense and post-9/11 terrorism thriller intensity.
Vanished Twin
Vanished Twin, the second book in the Detective Alex Archer series, is a crime thriller centered on Tampa detective Alex Archer and a serial killer dubbed Satan on the Hillsborough River. The killer’s ritual blends Catholic imagery, Satanism, freezing, and dismemberment, giving the investigation a grotesque signature that’s hard to forget. Hoffman reveals the apparent murderer early, so the suspense comes from watching Archer and his team assemble the evidence while the full meaning of the title remains hidden. The eventual explanation adds a second layer involving childhood abuse, family trauma, and a deeply distorted idea of sibling loyalty.
Archer gives the book most of its personality. He’s sarcastic, stubborn, emotionally bruised, and frequently funny, even when the humor gets crude. His exchanges with Vazquez, Reyes, Sarconie, and Sergeant Karr make the detectives feel like colleagues who’ve spent years learning exactly how to annoy one another. Those lighter scenes also counter the novel’s extreme violence, though the transitions between comedy and horror can be abrupt. Archer’s relationship with Giana brings welcome emotional weight, especially as his drinking, memories of 9/11, and instinct to push away anyone who loves him begin to catch up with him.
The novel shares some DNA with Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon. Both stories combine a police procedural with an intimate look at a killer whose identity has fractured under severe trauma. Like Harris, Hoffman is interested in the mechanics of an investigation, the psychology behind ritualized violence, and the personal cost paid by the investigator. Hoffman’s approach is more direct and talkative, with characters frequently explaining medical conditions, forensic procedures, police technology, and occult symbolism in considerable detail. That information gives the story a researched quality, although some scenes read more like briefings than natural conversations.
Vanished Twin is about damaged people trying to divide themselves into acceptable and unacceptable halves. The religious imagery, covered mirrors, contrasting red and white rooms, and multiple sibling revelations all reinforce that idea. Its strongest moments arrive when the case and Archer’s private life reflect each other: the killer hides behind invented identities, while Archer hides his grief behind alcohol and jokes. The closing scene wisely leaves Archer’s emotional struggle unresolved, ending the investigation while showing that his more personal reckoning has only begun.
Pages: 260
Bootlegger’s Apprentice
Ben Broeren’s Bootlegger’s Apprentice drops the reader into Chicago during Prohibition and follows twenty-one-year-old Aiden McCarthy as he moves deeper into the world of bootlegging under North Side Gang boss Dean O’Banion. Aiden starts out with the confidence of a young man who thinks he understands the game, selling liquor, arranging flowers at Schofield’s, and enjoying the access his work gives him to speakeasies and jazz clubs. That confidence gets tested quickly. Hijackings, political intimidation, crooked law enforcement, and the growing hostility between O’Banion and Al Capone turn what feels like an exciting racket into something much more dangerous. Broeren makes good use of actual people and events from 1920s Chicago, weaving figures such as Capone, Johnny Torrio, Louis Armstrong, and O’Banion into Aiden’s fictional story without losing sight of Aiden as the book’s emotional center.
One of the book’s strongest qualities is the way it treats organized crime as part of a much larger city. Bootlegging overlaps with politics, race, religion, music, family life, labor, and ordinary business. Aiden’s visits to the Sunset Cafe in Bronzeville, his involvement in Cicero’s violent election, and O’Banion’s combination of flower sales and criminal negotiations all give the novel a Chicago that feels busy and interconnected. The historical details are everywhere, from streetcars and newspapers to slang, food, firearms, music, and neighborhood tensions. Broeren’s prose has an energetic, descriptive style that often mirrors Aiden himself. It likes a joke, a colorful comparison, and a period expression. That gives the book personality, while the frequent shifts to O’Banion, Capone, Margaret McCarthy, and other characters broaden the story beyond a simple gangster adventure.
The book becomes most interesting when Aiden realizes that surviving the criminal world isn’t the same thing as building a life. His relationship with Sophia Golino gives that conflict real weight. As their romance develops into an engagement, pregnancy, and eventually marriage and parenthood, his decisions stop affecting only him. His increasing discomfort with killing feels especially important because the novel doesn’t suddenly turn him into a saint. He’s capable of violence, he knows how to bargain, and he can think like a gangster when someone threatens his family. Yet he gradually understands what continuing in O’Banion’s world will cost. The confrontation with Capone at the Golino home brings that tension to a satisfying peak. Aiden has the opportunity to kill Capone but chooses a bargain that lets him escape with Sophia and Celia. By the final chapter, his life in Berwyn with Sophia and their son Pietro gives the story a surprisingly domestic conclusion. Fatherhood, steady work, faith, and family become Aiden’s new measures of success.
A useful comparison is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, another novel shaped by the money, ambition, and illegal liquor of the Prohibition era. Fitzgerald looks at the period through wealth, image, and social status, while Bootlegger’s Apprentice spends more time inside the machinery that helped make that world possible. Aiden sees the violence, political corruption, and personal compromises behind the glamour of speakeasies and easy money. Like Gatsby, he’s drawn toward a life that promises excitement and opportunity, but his story ultimately becomes less about chasing status and more about deciding what kind of future is worth having. That gives Broeren’s novel a grounded coming-of-age quality beneath its gangsters, gunfights, and historical detail, and it makes Aiden’s final turn toward family and stability feel like the natural conclusion to everything he’s learned.
Pages: 350 | ISBN: 0997776129
Phantom Ranch
Scott Wells’s Phantom Ranch is a psychological survival thriller built around two kinds of danger: the physical threat of the Grand Canyon and the damage people carry into it. The novel follows Ben Brady as he undertakes a Christmas hike with his estranged brother Todd and close friends Robert and Christy, fulfilling his late father Sonny’s wish that the brothers make the trip together. Running alongside their journey is the story of a violent fugitive who calls himself Mark, a predator hiding deep in the canyon and gradually moving into their path. Wells establishes early that the landscape will do more than provide scenery. The canyon watches, conceals, echoes, and preserves secrets, giving the book an almost supernatural sense of menace even when the danger is entirely human. That combination gives Phantom Ranch its identity: part wilderness thriller, part family drama, and part story about what people do with the things that have hurt them.
The emotional center is Ben, and his complicated relationship with Todd gives the suspense more weight than a straightforward stalk-and-survive story would have. Their history includes cruelty, homophobia, violence, and childhood trauma, so the hike carries years of unresolved anger down the trail with them. Sonny’s death gives them a reason to be together, but the canyon becomes the place where they’re finally forced to see one another without the familiar family roles surrounding them. One of the book’s strongest choices is allowing that change to happen through small experiences as well as dramatic ones: a near fall, shared memories of their father, jokes that only brothers understand, and the scattering of Sonny’s ashes over the canyon. By the time Todd begins to recognize that Ben has never asked him to change his beliefs, only to treat him with the same dignity Todd expects for himself, the trip has become as much about emotional survival as physical survival. That makes Todd’s arc the novel’s boldest element because Wells asks readers to hold the seriousness of his past behavior alongside his capacity to change.
There are echoes here of Stephen King, particularly The Shining, in the way Wells uses an isolated place to put pressure on damaged relationships. King’s Overlook Hotel seems to absorb and amplify what a family brings into it, and Wells gives the Grand Canyon a similar presence. The difference in setting produces a very different kind of energy. Here, exposure replaces confinement: cliffs, ice, darkness, distance, exhaustion, and the knowledge that help may be hours away. Wells also embraces a broader tonal mix than pure horror. There are turkey chases, road-trip insults, Christmas presents, crude jokes, friendship, sex, grief, family memories, and sudden eruptions of graphic violence. That range makes the characters feel as though they had lives before the thriller machinery reached them. Mark, meanwhile, becomes increasingly disturbing through his fixation on condors, stalking, trophies, and control. His obsession eventually turns the bird imagery back on him in a particularly fitting piece of narrative symmetry when the creatures he admires become the ones that find what remains of him.
What I liked most wasn’t the serial-killer plot by itself, but the way Wells connects survival to belonging. Ben enters the canyon carrying grief, fear, memories of abuse, and a lifetime of having parts of himself judged by people he loves. He leaves having survived something almost unimaginably violent, but the book keeps going long enough to show why surviving matters. The final family gathering and Ben and Kent’s wedding give the story a destination beyond escape, with Todd standing beside his brother as best man and Sonny represented by a photograph saved for the ceremony. Wells makes his purpose especially clear in the author’s note, where he describes the story as growing from his own journey through silence, shame, acceptance, and survival. That personal investment comes through on the page. Phantom Ranch is a raw and cinematic thriller with a surprisingly earnest heart, one that treats the climb out of the canyon as both a feat of endurance and a metaphor for finally finding your way home.
Pages: 280 | ASIN: B0H46SVRV3
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Fiction
The Literary Titan Book Award honors books that exhibit exceptional storytelling and creativity. This award celebrates novelists who craft compelling narratives, create memorable characters, and weave stories that captivate readers. The recipients are writers who excel in their ability to blend imagination with literary skill, creating worlds that enchant and narratives that linger long after the final page is turned.
Award Recipients
The Voice of Cuba by Amarilys Rassler
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Literary Titan Silver Book Award
Celebrating the brilliance of outstanding authors who have captivated us with their skillful prose, engaging narratives, and compelling real and imagined characters. We recognize books that stand out for their innovative storytelling and insightful exploration of truth and fiction. Join us in honoring the dedication and skill of these remarkable authors as we celebrate the diverse and rich worlds they’ve brought to life, whether through the realm of imagination or the lens of reality.
Award Recipients
ȚEPEȘ: VLAD III DRACULA by Sebastian Valerius
Out of the Water by K Browning
The Galaxy of Kon-Ki: Waking on Earth by Colin Nimer
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
