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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
Blame the Devil by Joe Colicchio
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Gallows Humor
The Devil’s Snow centers around a battered detective and former NYD cop and his new partner as they are drawn into a case that turns Tampa into a pressure cooker of grief and violence. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration for The Devil’s Snow comes directly from the asphalt. I’m a retired NYPD detective with over 20 years of service, having worked some of the city’s most crime-ridden sectors during the volatile decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Alex Archer is loosely based on my own trajectory from a uniform officer to a detective. When you spend two decades seeing the absolute worst—and occasionally the best—of humanity, those experiences don’t just leave you; they shape how you view the world. Dropping a character with that heavy New York baggage into a pressure cooker like Tampa allowed me to explore how a seasoned cop handles a completely different brand of chaos.
Archer often uses humor and sarcasm in dark situations. Why was that an important part of his character?
For a street cop or a detective, sarcasm isn’t just a personality trait—it’s a survival mechanism. When you’re constantly walking into crime scenes, dealing with violence, and seeing the rawest parts of human tragedy, you can’t carry that weight around with a straight face 24/7. Your mind would snap. Gallows humor is the armor cops wear to keep the darkness at bay; it’s a way to process the unprocessable with your peers so you can get back to the job. I wanted Alex Archer to have that exact defense mechanism because without it, he wouldn’t feel like a real cop. It grounds his humanity and gives him a shield to hide behind when the job gets personal.
How did you approach writing about the long-term effects of September 11th?
Writing about September 11th isn’t just a plot point for me; it’s deeply personal. As an NYPD officer during that era, I lived through the immediate devastation and the heavy, lingering shadow it cast over the city and the department for years afterward. In the book, I wanted to move past the immediate headlines and look at the slow-burning, long-term psychological toll. Cops are expected to be unbreakable, but events of that magnitude reshape your DNA. By filtering that trauma through Alex Archer, I wanted to show the quiet, exhausting burden of carrying that history with you, even when you try to leave the city behind.
Do you see Alex Archer returning in future stories?
Absolutely. Alex Archer will be back in a sequel titled Vanished Twin. It’s a psychological crime thriller that pushes Archer and his team into much darker, more twisted territory. They find themselves tracking a series of ritualistic murders tied to occult symbolism and a suspect suffering from severe dissociative illness. As they dig deeper, they discover the suspect believes he is controlled by a twin who vanished before birth. The investigation uncovers a history of abuse, cult manipulation, and fractured identity, leading to a shocking revelation: the twin might not be a delusion at all, but an equally dangerous presence hiding in plain sight. It’s going to force Archer to question everything he thinks he knows about a crime scene.
Author Links: Website | Instagram
The Devil’s Snow
The Devil’s Snow, by Lawrence Hoffman, follows Alex Archer, a battered Tampa detective and former NYPD cop whose life is still scorched by September 11th. When a string of gun thefts, murders, coded threats, and terrorist activity begins converging on a public Fourth of July baseball celebration, Archer and his new partner, Maria Vazquez, are pulled into a case that is both national in scale and brutally personal. The story moves between Archer’s trauma, Saif Abdualla’s path toward vengeance, and a widening investigation that turns Tampa into a pressure cooker of grief, violence, and imminent catastrophe.
I was most drawn to Archer as a character because he is not polished into a heroic statue. He is sarcastic, damaged, reckless, funny at the wrong times, and often one bad decision away from becoming his own crime scene. His voice gives the novel its grit, and the banter between him and Vazquez keeps the darker material from becoming airless. The book has a hard-boiled rhythm, but beneath the profanity and gun smoke, there is a real ache: Archer is not simply chasing a terrorist; he is being dragged back through the ash of the day that broke him.
The novel works best when it lets action and emotion collide. The hostage scene, the gas station revelations, the stadium threat, and Archer’s return to the World Trade Center all carry a serrated urgency. The story leans on procedural explanation and direct exposition, but its momentum rarely stalls for long. I appreciated that the book does not treat trauma as decorative backstory. Archer’s pain is active, volatile, and sometimes inconvenient, which makes his eventual confrontation with memory feel earned rather than ornamental.
Hoffman’s novel is best suited for readers who enjoy crime thrillers, police procedurals, and terrorism suspense fiction with bruising dialogue and a cinematic pace. Fans of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels will recognize the appeal of a stubborn, wounded detective who trusts instinct more than bureaucracy, though this story pushes harder into explosive action-thriller territory. The Devil’s Snow is a raw and fast-moving thriller about old wounds, new threats, and the terrible cost of surviving history.
Pages: 234
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 Corridor by William Klenk
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
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Bait – A Harper Jones Novel
Bait, by Jeffrey Butler, is a crime thriller with strong espionage and action-thriller elements, centered on Detective Harper Jones as a local car bombing in Wolf Hollow pulls him back into the violent shadow of his past. What begins as a police investigation soon opens into something larger, more personal, and far more dangerous, involving old missions, buried guilt, international crime, and people Harper thought he had lost forever.
I liked how the book starts fast and keeps widening its scope. At first, I thought I was settling into a coastal detective story, with local politics, old grudges, and Harper’s sharp, often sarcastic voice guiding the way. Then the novel shifts gears. The stakes stretch from Wolf Hollow to Washington and then overseas, and the story becomes less about solving one crime and more about confronting the kind of past that refuses to stay buried. It gives the thriller a sense of forward motion, but also an emotional undertow.
Butler’s writing is direct, energetic, and plot-driven. The action scenes have a hard, tactical feel, and Harper’s narration gives the book its personality. He can be funny, wounded, reckless, and stubborn, sometimes all in the same scene. The story leans into big reveals, violent confrontations, and high-stakes twists. I appreciated that the book doesn’t treat Harper as untouchable. His choices cost him. His past matters. The title, Bait, is fitting because nearly everyone in the story is being used to draw someone else into danger.
What stayed with me most was the tension between duty and personal loyalty. Harper isn’t just chasing villains. He’s trying to make sense of guilt, love, fatherhood, and the damage left behind by secret wars. That gives the book more weight than a standard action thriller. I would recommend Bait to readers who enjoy fast-paced crime thrillers with military and spy-fiction edges, especially fans of damaged protagonists, layered conspiracies, and stories where the personal stakes hit as hard as the explosions.
Pages: 519 | ISBN : 979-8995267300
Unusual Demands
Pedaling East follows two suspended FBI agents on a cross-country bicycle journey who discover that a human-trafficking cartel and a white nationalist militia are following them coast to coast with unfinished business. Was the route planned first, or did the story shape the geography?
The route was roughly planned and had to be West Coast to East Coast, since the book was a follow-up to Pedaling West, published in 2023. Since the bike trip represented a reunion of sorts of the cast from Pedaling West, but still part of the Butnari and Hill Crime Thriller series, my challenge was to find a way that two FBI agents could afford the two months off from work required for a coast-to-coast bicycle excursion. The untimely suspension resulting from a territorial dispute between ICE and the FBI solved the dilemma.
Marina and Doug begin the story suspended by the FBI after confronting corruption connected to trafficking and militias. Were you interested in exploring the frustration of people trying to do the right thing inside compromised systems?
Not really. I was simply taking advantage of a plausible scenario for a dispute between two federal enforcement agencies based on current events. The enthusiasm for immigration control by the current administration has placed unusual demands on the agency charged with handling it. To quickly increase their ranks, ICE has resorted to programs like the 287(g) initiative described in Pedaling East, and critics have complained that the vetting process for admitting new agents has suffered. Whether the accusation is accurate or not, the publicity allows the scenario in my book to resonate.
Found-family stories work best when the bonds feel earned rather than assumed. How do you build that sense of chosen belonging across a fast-moving plot?
As one reviewer noted, I deliberately slowed the plot-action down in places to include short scenes where the six primary characters interact on a personal basis. Despite the different environments each character comes from and the groups’ unusual mix of race, gender, professional avocations, and even sexual preferences, they find common ground in the important areas that establish essential human bonds. Their shared perils on the journey strengthen those bonds and make the story as much about the importance of teamwork as a fight for survival.
I hope the series continues in other books. If so, where will the story take readers?
Since Full Count, published in 2019, a consistent cast of my characters has intermingled across my seven published novels. Not all appear in all books, but they float in and out of the stories as the different plots for each story allow. Only Tom Burns has appeared in all seven novels, and I suspect that future books will feature the same characters. The “story” will determine where they (and the readers) go, and like life, we can’t predict what the next “story” might be.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
When the FBI unfairly suspends Special Agents Marina Butnari and Doug Hill, they plan an epic West Coast to East Coast bicycle journey with friends. In their profession, they’re accustomed to following trouble, but this time it follows them across the country as a dangerous human trafficking cartel teams with a white nationalist militia group to eliminate them.
Danger lurks around every bend in the road for the bikers in an adventure as explosive as Old Faithful and as intense as Niagara Falls. The trip, which starts in Oregon, will end in Boston, but how?
EVOLVED PUBLISHING PRESENTS a crime fiction adventure celebrating the strength of friendship, the resilience of partnership, and the power of teamwork in a novel featuring beloved characters from some of the other multiple award-winning books by E. A. Coe.
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
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
