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A Tree, Mistletoe & A Sunset
Sophie Bartow’s A Tree, Mistletoe & A Sunset is a warm and playful holiday romance set in Swan Harbor, a town where Christmas traditions, family connections, local mysteries, and a touch of the unexplained are all woven into everyday life. Professor Harper Taylor returns to the holidays carrying some hard-earned caution about love, while fellow professor Aiden Jones has his own reasons for keeping parts of himself guarded. Their relationship develops alongside a wonderfully odd mystery involving stolen underwear, Swan Harbor’s history, and the town’s habit of making the improbable feel strangely normal. The result is a story that feels busy in a good way, with romance at its center and a whole community moving around it.
Harper and Aiden are especially enjoyable together because their attraction grows through small moments. Their teasing, nervousness, misread signals, and repeated almost-kisses give the romance an easy sense of anticipation. Aiden’s habit of calling Harper “Angel,” Harper’s uncertainty about trusting what she feels, and their increasingly obvious pull toward each other make the relationship satisfying because the emotional groundwork is laid out instead of a quick whirlwind romance.
Swan Harbor itself gives the book much of its personality. Harper and Aiden are surrounded by parents, siblings, cousins, friends, newlyweds, grandparents, investigators, pets, and townspeople who seem to know that everybody’s business eventually becomes community business. The mystery of the stolen underwear continues throughout the story, giving readers a look at Swan Harbor’s unusual history and local legends while adding a touch of comedy. Bartow moves freely among members of the larger cast, so the book feels less like an isolated romance and more like another chapter in the town’s ongoing life. Those scenes also give the story its particular mix of silliness, sentiment, family affection, and local legend.
I recommend A Tree, Mistletoe & A Sunset most to readers who enjoy small-town romance with a large recurring cast and who like their Christmas stories sweet, funny, lightly mysterious, and a little magical. It’s especially suited to someone who enjoys watching two cautious adults gradually recognize that the person they’ve been looking for may already be standing right in front of them. More than anything, this is a story about listening when your heart finally becomes difficult to ignore, surrounded by the kind of eccentric, affectionate community that makes Swan Harbor feel lived in.
Pages: 276 | ASIN : B08NHTPB27
Strong Women
Bootlegger’s Apprentice follows a young bootlegger through the violence and glamour of Prohibition-era Chicago as he discovers that escaping the criminal underworld may be the only way to protect his family. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I fostered an interest in Irish American organized crime from on-screen stories such as The Departed and Boardwalk Empire, through histories of Prohibition Chicago, and fiction such as Don Winslow’s City on Fire trilogy and Mary Miley’s Spirits and Smoke. My family is heavily influenced by my Irish American Grandma Margaret Miller (nee McCarthy), and I combined that with my own experience growing up Catholic (I am now Agnostic) surrounded by strong women to create Aiden McCarthy.
How did you balance real figures and events with Aiden’s fictional journey?
Figures like Louis Armstrong and Mezz Mezzrow, along with real clubs, allow me to really explore Aiden’s interaction with the jazz scene, intoxication, and the experience of African Americans. Much like my own growth from a predominantly white childhood to encountering folks of all different skin colors, Aiden finds beauty in those with different backgrounds. I wrote Aiden’s story to respect and be real about history and race. His friendship with William Crutchfield, Dean O’Banion’s actual porter, is written as a nod to my own experience. I aim to give the story more flavor.
Aiden grows from being bootlegging muscle to club negotiator to having to kill in self-defense. I textured his moral journey with actual events in Dean O’Banion’s history where O’Banion’s hubris eventually gets the best of him. Aiden comes to terms with life-and-death decisions as O’Banion makes a fatal mistake.
The novel writes O’Banion with a certain degree of charity, but he really was rather open-minded for his day on African Americans and homosexuals. “They can’t help how they are” is a direct quote from an O’Banion biography.
Al Capone, Johnny Torrio, and various politicians and police who encounter Aiden and O’Banion allow me to inject a certain amount of authenticity into how I imagine Jazz Age Chicago. I enjoy figures such as crusading journalist Robert St. John, who formed an uneasy defiance to Capone and is interesting to me because of my background in journalism. The corruption really existed as portrayed, but I did take quite a bit of liberty to make one of O’Banion’s antagonists into a juicy character.
The novel handles Al Capone as a human who cares for his family, his partially deaf son, and his older brother mainly. He is also a thug driven by an inability to cope with sorrow (no spoilers) and his place in the mob hierarchy.
At what point in developing the novel did you know that Aiden would spare Capone and bargain for his family’s safety instead?
Al Capone has to live, but I want Aiden to really challenge his morality when it comes to using lethal force. Aiden has a certain ethical code, sees the logic in his decisions, and is supported by strong women to make better choices. I don’t want to give away any spoilers.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I have started a prequel to my Ron & Carey series. The series is about an Army veteran, Ron McCallister, who charms adversaries and his lover alike while outmaneuvering crooked politicians and bloodthirsty thugs from 2008 to 2009. I want to explore Ron’s return from Iraq around 2005 and run-ins with the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club and corrupt authorities as he reconciles his new reality and eventual introduction to a stripper with a heart of gold. While Ron broods and kicks ass, his Aunt Peggy serves up homespun spitfire, much like my Grandma Margaret and Great Aunt Ethel.
I’ll maybe publish it in about five or so years. Good stories take time!
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Chicago, 1924. Prohibition has made criminals rich, politicians dangerous, and loyalty a currency all its own.
Aiden McCarthy is a young Irish American drawn toward a life far more dangerous than arranging bouquets.
Working under notorious gangster and florist Dean O’Banion, Aiden is drawn deeper into a world where bootleg whiskey, political corruption, and organized crime collide, and where men like Johnny Torrio and Al Capone are reshaping Chicago from the shadows.
Yet amid the violence and intrigue, Aiden has something worth protecting. His relationship with Sophia Golino offers the promise of a life separate from the dangerous men who increasingly depend upon him.
Around them, the clubs and speakeasies of Jazz Age Chicago pulse with music, temptation, and shifting social boundaries.
As rival gangs maneuver for power and a bitter political struggle threatens to turn deadly, Aiden must learn quickly whom to trust, when to fight, and just how much of himself he is willing to sacrifice to survive.
A richly imagined historical crime novel of gangsters, romance, jazz, family, faith, and ambition, set against one of Chicago’s most notorious eras.
Step into Prohibition-era Chicago, where love, loyalty, and one wrong choice can cost everything.
Winter Kill
R. J. Norgard’s Winter Kill, a Sidney Reed novel, is a crime thriller rooted in private investigation, political corruption, and unresolved grief. The story begins one year after the death of Sidney’s wife, Molly, whose apparent suicide still governs much of his life. When an anonymous note appears with the words “I know what happened,” Sidney has the reason he needs to reconsider everything he thought he knew about her final days. What follows develops along two connected tracks: Sidney’s investigation into Molly’s hidden activities and a larger conflict involving Harden Oil, environmental activism, corporate security, and people willing to use violence to protect their interests. Norgard handles these strands as parts of the same mystery, allowing a personal question about one woman’s death to expand naturally into a much larger investigation.
Sidney is the novel’s center of gravity, and his first-person narration gives the book much of its character. He’s experienced and observant, but he’s also physically damaged, dependent on alcohol and pain medication, and prone to hiding serious emotions behind sarcasm. His investigation therefore becomes more than a search for a culprit. It forces him to confront how little he understood Molly during their marriage and how selectively grief has preserved his memory of her. His repeated question, “Who are you, Molly Reed?” captures the deeper mystery driving the novel. Gwen Archer’s emergence as an important figure in Molly’s life adds emotional difficulty, while Sidney’s relationship with reporter Maria Maldonado gives him a living relationship against which to measure his attachment to the past. These relationships make the investigation consequential even when no immediate physical danger is present.
Alaska is equally important to the book’s identity. Anchorage, the Matanuska Valley, frozen lakes, mountain roads, oil facilities, and prolonged winter darkness provide more than scenery. The cold repeatedly affects what the characters can do, and Sidney’s frostbite injuries make the environment a continuing physical presence in the investigation. Against that landscape, Norgard builds a conspiracy involving the proposed K-3 oil project, whistleblowers, environmental groups, hired security operatives, and political influence. The novel favors direct movement, investigative legwork, confrontations, and sharply drawn dialogue. Its humor is frequently dark, particularly in Sidney’s exchanges with Maria, Lois, Rachel, and other recurring characters, and that humor prevents his grief from making the narrative uniformly bleak. The result is a detective story with the procedural energy of a private-eye novel and the broader stakes of an environmental and political thriller.
What gives Winter Kill its lasting weight for me is the way its mysteries lead Sidney toward a more complicated understanding of Molly. The answers he uncovers involve love, secrecy, courage, betrayal, depression, corporate wrongdoing, and the limits of his own perception. Even after violence resolves the most immediate dangers, the novel keeps its attention on the emotional consequences of learning the truth. Sidney finishes the story with losses he can’t undo, but also with a renewed commitment to his work and to Maria, suggesting that investigation has become a means of returning to life. Winter Kill succeeds as a hard-edged Alaska mystery because its criminal investigation and its portrait of bereavement are ultimately pursuing the same question: how a person moves forward once the comforting version of the past has been replaced by a fuller, more difficult truth.
Pages: 360 | ASIN : B0H8M6G43L
The Story In My Head
The Debt follows an 18-year-old martial artist who is blamed for the death of his best friend and sent to prison, where he develops a dangerous friendship that tests the boundaries between gratitude, loyalty, and moral responsibility. What was the inspiration for your novel?
There were various inspirations I drew from while writing The Debt. A few of my favorite authors are David Morrell and J. Michael Straczynski, who have a way of telling stories I could connect with and draw meaning from. Well-told fiction can offer experiences never possible in the real world by appealing to our imagination, our intellect, and our own sense of humanity. While there are plenty of capable writers who are best fit to tell their stories, no one envisioned the same story in my head so it was up to me to see it through and offer it to the readers.
Michael begins the novel with a very different future ahead of him. What interested you about exploring how one event could alter both the direction of his life and his understanding of himself?
I’ve been through experiences that had me question my own life’s path, including if I wanted to be a villain or a good man of my own choosing. In the course of most people’s lives, profound experiences can challenge their views on how not only how the real world actually works, but who they are in themselves. Doing the right thing, especially when consequences could be involved, is often easier said than done. These trials life puts us through matter; a lot.
The Debt can be a dark story, but it also has moments of comedy, reflection, and moments of (I’m trying not to sound corny here!) a light shining through the darkness. A full length novel was a chance at presenting a fictional case of what can bring out what’s inside of us when pushed to the limit, yet what can also guide it back to it’s natural, authentic state.
The idea of “debt” takes on several meanings throughout the novel. How did that concept shape the story as you developed it?
Yes Michael felt a debt of gratitude and protection toward Ijal, but equally as important his father Jeff introduced him to ideas around karmic debt. There’s several ways I could break down the theme of debts, but it ultimately comes down to how complex and full of gray areas any given motive or action can come from. There are external, visible debts such as supporting Ijal after their release, but there’s also invisible ones that steer him to what leads him toward or away from his own conscience, his relationship to society, or how to integrate his once positive intentions into the hostile world he found himself entangled in. While there are no direct references in the book, it eventually eludes to a saying around “first establish in being, then perform in action.” There’s disharmony between Michael’s actions and his being, but late into the story things start to shift….
Do you see The Debt as the beginning of a larger story, or did you conceive Michael’s journey primarily as a standalone novel?
The Debt has always been a standalone story.
Michael Kramer, an eighteen-year-old talented martial artist, is blamed for the accidental death of his best friend James Basset.
Sentenced to five years for involuntary manslaughter, Michael is forced to navigate a prison system where race dictates every opportunity and every threat.
In this harsh world, trusting someone like Ijal, a drug mogul from a different background, is a risk. Yet when Ijal intervenes to stop a violent attack, Michael discovers that loyalty can outweigh the rigid hierarchy, and he will forever be indebted to the inmate for saving his life.
Upon his release, Michael returns to his hometown and reconnects with Ijal, only to be pulled into the dangerous criminal world that he and his cousin Cory inhabit.
Michael tries to rebuild his life, build a relationship with his father and return to his martial arts path. But prison has changed him in ways he can’t ignore.
Loyalty becomes its own kind of cage. To repay his debt, Michael crosses lines he once believed he never could, sinking deeper into violence.
Bound by murder, Michael and Ijal flee – because the next time they’re caught, there will not be any second chances.
Chris Young lives in New Zealand. The Debt is his first novel.
The Climb
Javier Forrester’s The Climb, the first book in The Climb Book Series, is an ensemble adventure thriller that follows a multinational missionary group traveling from Suriname into the fictional South American nation of Santiago. Narrated by Trinidadian attorney Mark Crosby, the novel begins as a mission trip to the remote village of Puerto Palermo and steadily develops into a journey defined by political instability, dangerous roads, suspicious strangers, organized crime, and human trafficking. Forrester builds the story through accumulation. Details that initially seem incidental, including an unusual passenger on a ferry, Santiago’s troubled political history, stories of past kidnappings, and a stranger watching the group, gradually become part of a larger threat. Mark’s legal mindset makes him an effective narrator for this structure. When circumstances grow increasingly suspicious, his remark, “I’m just building the case,” neatly captures both his personality and the novel’s investigative approach.
A major strength of The Climb is the breadth of its fictional world and the variety within its cast. The missionaries and volunteers come from Trinidad, Nepal, Jordan, Suriname, the United States, and Santiago, and their different histories shape how they react to danger, faith, displacement, and one another. Forrester gives considerable attention to the characters’ personal backgrounds, particularly Aalayah and Hafeez Shabool, Mia Rojas, Fareeda Annan, and Brother O’Keefe. Their histories involving orphanhood, migration, military service, missionary work, and personal loss give the group a sense of accumulated experience before the central crisis fully emerges. Santiago is similarly constructed through layers of geography, language, politics, poverty, oil wealth, military power, and criminal activity. The result is a setting that functions as more than scenery. Rivers, border crossings, abandoned communities, mountain roads, and isolated settlements continually influence the choices the characters can make, while the use of Caribbean, Spanish, Arabic, and regional expressions gives the dialogue a distinctly international texture.
Faith provides the novel’s thematic center. The missionary framework allows Forrester to examine belief under physical and psychological pressure rather than simply through religious discussion. The group prays, argues, questions leadership, loses confidence, regains it, and confronts circumstances that demand practical action alongside spiritual conviction. Brother O’Keefe embodies much of this tension. He is an experienced missionary carrying memories of earlier tragedy, yet he remains responsible for keeping an increasingly frightened group together. His statement that “Sometimes, God means for us to walk through the hard parts” expresses one of the book’s clearest ideas: endurance is presented as an active passage through difficulty rather than an escape from it. That idea also gives the title greater significance as the story progresses. The “climb” becomes physical, emotional, and spiritual, encompassing the group’s struggle up literal slopes as well as the more demanding work of maintaining courage, responsibility, and trust when the journey begins to unravel.
Forrester writes the novel with the expansiveness of a large-scale adventure, combining suspense with humor, political discussion, religious reflection, character history, and detailed explanations of the surrounding world. The conversational scenes establish strong distinctions among the characters, with Aalayah’s curiosity, Hafeez’s volatility, Calvin’s humor, Mark’s analytical habits, and O’Keefe’s authority creating a lively group dynamic. At times, the density of historical, geopolitical, and biographical explanation slows the immediate momentum, particularly when substantial background information arrives during periods of rising tension. Yet that same density reflects the book’s ambition to make Santiago and its travelers feel embedded in histories larger than the crisis of a single night. The final confrontation with Irish brings the earlier suspicions about trafficking, surveillance, and deliberate sabotage sharply into focus, while the group’s escape leaves the larger journey unresolved in a way that suits the novel’s position as the opening volume of a series. The Climb ultimately works as a faith-centered survival thriller with an unusually international cast, a carefully developed fictional setting, and a plot that transforms a missionary journey into the beginning of a much larger confrontation.
Pages: 256 | ASIN : B0CWD7W2ZK
The Debt
Chris Young’s The Debt is a dark crime novel built around the idea that one terrible moment can keep collecting consequences long after the moment itself has passed. Michael Kramer begins the story as a recent high school graduate with an engineering future ahead of him, a close relationship with martial arts, and a family already under strain. Then an accidental shooting kills his best friend, James, and Michael’s life changes almost immediately. He accepts a plea bargain, serves time for involuntary manslaughter, and comes out of prison carrying habits, fears, and instincts that don’t fit easily into ordinary life. What makes the setup effective is how much of the novel follows the consequences. Prison, employment, family, friendship, violence, and Michael’s own sense of identity all become part of the debt he’s trying to understand.
Michael’s transformation is the most interesting part of the book. After prison, he genuinely tries to rebuild. He finds work, returns to martial arts, reconnects with his father, and searches for some version of the person he used to be. At the same time, prison has taught him to treat danger as something that has to be anticipated and controlled. That mindset pulls him closer to Ijal, a former inmate who once protected him and later gives him a place to land. Michael feels a real obligation toward Ijal, even describing his desire to help as a way of becoming “even” after everything Ijal has done for him. Their friendship gives the story much of its moral tension because loyalty gradually connects Michael to gang conflicts, drug dealing, revenge, and increasingly serious violence. By the later chapters, the young man trying to recover his old life has become someone capable of making decisions that his earlier self probably couldn’t have imagined.
That focus on guilt and moral consequence reminded me of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, although Young approaches the subject through a much more contemporary crime-thriller structure. Dostoevsky spends enormous amounts of time inside Raskolnikov’s mind, while The Debt expresses Michael’s psychological decline through prisons, fights, scars, hostile streets, strained relationships, and repeated decisions under pressure. The title eventually takes on a spiritual meaning when Michael’s father, Jeff, explains karmic debt as a cycle in which mistakes require learning, changed behavior, reconciliation, and forgiveness. That conversation gives the novel a useful framework because Michael keeps approaching opportunities to break his cycle while also making choices that deepen it. Young’s prose can be highly detailed, especially with physical actions, surroundings, and Michael’s moment-to-moment thoughts, so the book has a deliberate, lived-in quality. The strongest passages are the ones where those details reveal how thoroughly Michael’s idea of safety has changed.
By the later part of the novel, The Debt becomes increasingly focused on the question of whether Michael can separate himself from the consequences that have shaped him. His relationships, his martial arts background, his experiences in prison, and his growing awareness of cause and effect all come together around the book’s central idea of debt, both literal and moral. What stayed with me most is the way Young treats Michael as someone constantly negotiating between survival and conscience. The story has the tension and violence of a crime thriller, but underneath that is a more reflective novel about identity, responsibility, loyalty, and the possibility of changing course. That combination gives The Debt more emotional and philosophical weight than its action-heavy surface might suggest.
Pages: 330 | ASIN : B0GH1DS336
Fallible and Not Bulletproof
Jack Spetza – Flawed follows a fashion designer who uncovers her mother’s ancient secret and is pulled into a dangerous conspiracy involving lost history, time travel, advanced technology, and a mysterious soldier-author with hidden motives. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I wrote every day for a few hours just putting down ideas, and when Jack was born, the rate of words and scenarios increased exponentially.
Jack Spetza is a hero who is charming, flawed, dangerous, and unpredictable. What interested you about writing a protagonist who doesn’t fit the traditional heroic mold?
I just felt comfortable with having Jack be fallible and not bulletproof, because otherwise it wouldn’t be realistic, and with all of his experience, he could usually handle himself and most situations he ended up being in.
The novel balances action, humor, romance, science fiction, and historical mystery. Was maintaining that balance challenging, and how did you decide when to lean into each genre element?
I wrote every chapter like a short story, then as I got closer to the end of the book, I started putting each chapter in the place I thought made the most sense.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
Jack Spetza will ride again in the second and third books, with the second becoming available next year.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Drawn into a war that stretches across time itself, Jack is thrown together with Setrina La Touche, the woman he never truly got over and the heir to her mother’s research into an ancient tribe that mysteriously disappeared centuries ago.
From Parisian alleyways to hidden Moroccan caves, betrayal is constant, trust is rare, and every move sends ripples through past and future. Time doesn’t forgive, and there’s no clean way to get your hands dirty.
Jack Spetza – Flawed will keep you on the edge of your seat.
CLEAN HANDS: A GUS ROURKE NOVEL, Book One of the Calder County Novels
David H. Tolly’s Clean Hands is a conspiracy-tinged crime novel built around a sharp premise: philanthropist Eleanor Grant is murdered during a gala at her own estate, while two hundred influential guests are close enough to witness everything and somehow see nothing. Detective Gus Rourke quickly recognizes that the apparent burglary is a carefully staged story, and the investigation leads from a missing manuscript and a hidden memory card to a century-old network that turns dirty money, political influence, and violence into respectable philanthropy. The financial trail is unusually important here. Charities, trusts, consulting payments, leases, and donor-advised funds aren’t just background details. They’re the machinery of the mystery, and Tolly explains them clearly enough that the reader can follow the money without feeling trapped in an accounting seminar.
Rourke is the novel’s strongest anchor. He’s a colorblind detective who trusts shapes more than colors, paper more than screens, and patient observation more than an easy explanation. His numbered rules at the beginning of each chapter give the book a sturdy procedural rhythm while revealing the personal losses behind his methods. He’s joined by an appealing team, especially his tech-minded partner Olivia Hayes, financial investigator June “Sparrow” Okafor, medical examiner Eliza Martin, and his journalist daughter, Casey. Their different skills keep the investigation moving, but their personal connections to the case give it weight. The most affecting parts often involve parents and children, including Eleanor and her estranged daughter Lily, Rourke and Casey, and the frightened mother who becomes a weapon in someone else’s plan.
Readers of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels will recognize the appeal of a stubborn investigator following evidence into rooms where powerful people expect obedience. Like Bosch, Rourke is guided by a private moral code and has little patience for institutions that value calm appearances over inconvenient truth. Tolly’s novel, though, is more openly focused on financial systems and inherited influence. Its villain is larger than a single murderer. The real adversary is a culture in which respectable people pass responsibility downward until nobody at the top appears to have touched the crime. That gives Clean Hands some of the institutional sweep of a John Grisham thriller, while its crime-scene work and damaged detective place it firmly in the police procedural tradition.
The novel moves quickly through short chapters, shifting viewpoints and frequent discoveries, and Tolly has a knack for ending scenes on lines that pull the reader forward. The book delivers a satisfying resolution to Eleanor’s murder while leaving the wider conflict alive. Clean Hands works as a complete mystery, but its final pages also make Gus Rourke’s next investigation feel like a natural continuation of a fight he’s only begun to understand.
Pages: 210 | ASIN : B0H7FTJHS5
