Blog Archives
Getting It Right: A Psychological Thriller
Karen E. Osborne’s Getting It Right: A Psychological Thriller is a psychological thriller about buried family secrets, childhood trauma, and the difficult work of building a life that isn’t controlled by the past. The novel follows Kara, a Bronx teacher who survived horrific abuse in foster care, and Alex, the privileged daughter of a prominent attorney. When Alex’s father suffers a heart attack, he asks her to find Kara, the daughter he abandoned decades earlier. Their connection gradually pulls both women into a tense story involving betrayal, financial crime, stalking, and violence. The opening line, “Jim Smyth died young, but not soon enough,” immediately establishes the novel’s blunt emotional honesty.
Kara is the heart of the book. She’s caring, intelligent, and deeply committed to her students, but she’s also vulnerable to people who make her feel valued. Osborne captures that weakness in the simple observation, “Being needed was magic dust.” That sentence explains much of Kara’s relationship with Zach, a married financier who uses affection and promises to draw her into his secret dealings. Her choices can be frustrating, but they remain believable because the book shows how closely her desire to help others is tied to her fear of being unwanted. Kara’s foster siblings, Tuesday and Flyer, add even more emotional weight, since their bond carries love, guilt, anger, and a shared history none of them can easily put into words.
Alex’s storyline gives the novel a different kind of pressure. She’s spent her life managing her volatile parents, protecting her sisters, and accepting every new crisis as her responsibility. Searching for Kara forces her to reconsider the father she adores and the family story she’s been taught to believe. The contrast between Alex’s wealthy Westchester upbringing and Kara’s childhood in the foster-care system sharpens the novel’s questions about race, class, privilege, and accountability. Their growing relationship doesn’t develop too neatly. Curiosity, resentment, shame, and genuine affection all compete for space, which makes their scenes together feel emotionally credible.
The suspense comes from several connected threats, and Osborne keeps the story moving through short chapters and alternating viewpoints. Kara’s involvement in Zach’s financial scheme places her under federal scrutiny, while a series of frightening encounters creates the sense that she’s being watched from several directions at once. At the same time, the crisis surrounding the group home brings the book’s concern for neglected children into the main action. Some plot developments arrive quickly, but the most effective tension comes from character. Kara repeatedly has to decide whom to trust, while Alex has to determine whether repairing her father’s damage is an act of love, obedience, or something she’s doing for herself.
Getting It Right: A Psychological Thriller is a story about people trying to face harm without allowing it to define every relationship that follows. Forgiveness matters here, but Osborne treats it as a slow and uneven process. The ending respects that idea. Kara’s life hasn’t suddenly become simple, and her relationships still require patience, honesty, and repair, yet she’s beginning to act from confidence instead of fear. The final reflection, “The past hadn’t loosened its grip. Not completely. But she had,” gives the novel a fitting sense of earned hope.
Pages: 335 | ASIN : B0H6C5WT5Q
CLASS REUNION: Keep Your FRIENDS Closer
Gail Ward Olmsted’s Class Reunion follows Lennon Gallagher, a sharp, guarded Connecticut attorney whose carefully ordered life is interrupted when Erin Cooper, a former law school friend who once betrayed and saved her, resurfaces after being arrested for domestic violence. What begins as an uneasy favor spirals into a murder case, forcing Lennon to confront old wounds, professional risk, romantic strain, and the unnerving question of whether someone from the past can ever be fully known.
I enjoyed how the novel refuses to let Lennon remain comfortable for long. She is competent, funny, prickly, and deeply human, the kind of narrator whose sarcasm feels less like decoration than armor. Olmsted gives her a life beyond the case, Nick, wedding plans, family complications, friendships, work pressures, and that fullness makes the legal drama feel personal rather than procedural. The story’s best tension comes from Lennon’s divided instincts: she wants to believe in justice, but she also knows how easily charm can masquerade as innocence.
What stayed with me most was the book’s attention to friendship as a dangerous, shifting terrain. Erin is not simply a villainous presence or a wounded innocent; she is a provocation, a reminder that loyalty can be both noble and foolish. The pacing is brisk, with courtroom scenes, emotional reckonings, and sudden turns arriving in quick succession, yet the novel still leaves room for humor, tenderness, and those small domestic details, cake, coffee, dogs, and family dinners that make the danger feel more intimate. I found the result engaging, occasionally sly, and satisfyingly volatile.
Readers who enjoy legal thrillers, suspense, women’s fiction, romantic suspense, and courtroom drama will find plenty to admire here, especially if they like strong female protagonists whose private lives are as compelling as the case file. Fans of Lisa Scottoline may recognize a similar pleasure in the blend of legal peril, emotional candor, and female-centered storytelling, though Olmsted gives Lennon a distinctly tart, self-protective voice of her own. Class Reunion is a brisk, twisty reminder that I easily recommend.
Pages: 264 | ASIN : B0GX5Z7KJY
Get Involved However You Can
Worth of a Girl centers around an eight-year-old girl from Uganda whose young life is altered forever when she is forced into a trafficking ring disguised as a trade school. Why did you choose to tell the story through eight-year-old Bibi’s perspective?
I chose a young girl’s point of view to show perspective. The innocence of a child who trusts adults to do right by them and to help, not hurt, them provides a stark contrast. It reveals truth versus the ugly evil of the world. A child tells the story much better than an adult.
How did you approach writing trauma in a way that is honest but not overwhelming or exploitative?
My books are about children and the evils they face, whether it addresses abandonment, exploitation, or abuse and loneliness. Because the plot is meant to be inspirational, I want to give the reader a sense of the trauma without actually telling it with explicit words. Grueling words, swearing, or foul language are not necessary if the author can show the action. One’s imagination can play a bigger role if the reader is told what to think. It’s been proven: ‘you’re more afraid of what you can’t see. ‘They’ll understand and see it, feel it, if it’s written honestly and plainly without a lot of detail.
The contrast between promise (school, clothing, opportunity) and reality (exploitation) is powerful. How did you develop that tension?
First, and foremost, I pray and ask God to help me write words that convey reality and tug on readers’ heartstrings. Then, I put myself in the main character’s head as much as possible. Although I’ve never faced these terrible conditions, I can imagine what it must feel like. I’m probably not even close. I do know, however, what failed promises feel like and the disappointment that follows. Extensive research (over three years) went into this book from interviews with African missionaries to documentaries and other reading. I learned what many girls had to do and endure to survive. Many of the incidents in the book were derived from real testimonies.
What kind of conversations do you hope this book starts among readers, churches, or communities?
The goal of this book is awareness of child exploitation. The awful plight of innocent children who are taken and abused, tortured, and sometimes killed needs to be known. It doesn’t just happen overseas. It’s close to home; it might even be happening down the block from where you live. Who would know? I hope readers will get a sense of urgency to help these children in some way, even if it’s through their church in helping children, fostering kids, or opening their hearts to volunteer. Not everyone can donate money. Many communities have groups that minister to children in some way. I sew dresses for girls overseas. It is known that if they have a new dress, especially with a label on it, it means they are being watched — thus, less likely to be taken by a predator. If I’ve helped just one girl in that way, my mission and goal have been fulfilled. I hope others get involved in any way possible.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website
When Bibi faces challenges beyond her control, her bold, unshakable faith guides her with courage and strength. But how will she endure her fate? What will it take to save her?
When the new missions doctor, Dr. Steve Warden, arrives in Uganda, he suspects something nefarious is going on at the trade school. He never expected to unearth the dark underbelly of Evil directly beneath those who vowed to help the children. With righteous indignation ignited, he determines to seek justice for the children and rescue Bibi, even if it means taking down his own colleague and well-known people of the community.
Worth of a Girl
Worth of a Girl is a faith-centered suspense novel that follows eight-year-old Bibi, a Ugandan girl who thinks she is being sent to school, only to be drawn into a trafficking operation disguised as a trade school. From there, the story becomes a survival narrative about deception, cruelty, rescue, and the long road back to dignity. It’s fiction, but the book makes clear that it is rooted in real patterns of child trafficking, and that real-world grounding gives the novel its weight.
I enjoyed how plainly C.A. Simonson tells this story. The writing is direct, accessible, and emotionally clear. There is no fancy distance between the reader and the pain here. We experience so much through Bibi’s innocence, and that choice gives the early chapters a hard kind of irony because I understood the danger long before she did. That made the book unsettling in an effective way. I also thought Simonson handled contrast well. The false promises of dresses, schooling, and food sit right beside the reality of exploitation, and that gap becomes the whole engine of the novel. The dialogue and character lines felt pointed at times, but in this case, I could see why. This is the kind of book that wants to tell a story and sound an alarm at the same time.
I found myself responding just as much to the author’s moral choices as to the plot. This is not a morally gray book. It is openly interested in evil, faith, protection, and restoration, and it leans fully into a Christian framework where prayer, providence, and courage shape the way forward. That will work well for some readers. For me, it mostly worked because the book’s strongest thread is not abstraction but worth itself, the insistence that children who are treated like property are still fully human, still precious, still deserving of safety and a future. I appreciated that the ending does not stop at rescue. It keeps moving toward rebuilding, education, work, community, and leadership, especially in Bibi’s later life, which gave the novel a sense of earned hope instead of quick relief.
I would recommend Worth of a Girl most strongly to readers of Christian fiction, issue-driven suspense, and redemptive drama, especially those who want a novel that is emotionally straightforward and grounded in a real social crisis. It’s not a subtle book, and I don’t think it wants to be. It wants to witness, to warn, and to restore some sense of hope. I respected that. Readers who want a heartfelt, faith-shaped novel about survival, rescue, and human dignity will likely find a lot to appreciate here.
Pages: 314 | ASIN : B0G6KNFMNB
Remaining True to Oneself
Carnage in D Minor follows an RN from her days as a piano prodigy to a military veteran with PTSD, who goes on a quest to discover a new, and ethically questionable, treatment for mental illness. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The story came to me during a time when my brother, an Army war veteran, was dealing with severe depression—intensified by chronic pain from an injury he received in Iraq. His struggle inspired me to write about determination and perseverance in the face of soul-crushing obstacles. The frustration he experienced attempting to get anyone to listen to him about his chronic health issues—the direct result of his service to this country—was excruciating to listen to. The time it took for him to ultimately get treatment was a burning thread for me. During the long waits between phone calls, referrals, and appointments, he resorted to self-medicating with alcohol and prescription drugs. I was worried that he would become a forgotten statistic. But he persevered, and I’m beyond happy he’s still with us today. After a successful surgery, his pain is manageable, and he has quit drinking. Fun fact: his wife is also a career Army veteran. They are both huge inspirations to me.
Leeza’s story is one that readers can relate to or find pieces of themselves in, making it easier to connect to her character and become invested in her story. Were you able to achieve everything you wanted with Leeza’s character in the novel?
Yes. Carnage in D minor is an adaptation of a screenplay. In the original screenplay, the protagonist was a white male. As a writer, I had an urge to change that character to a Black female for the book because, over the years, I have had so many friends from underrepresented minority cultures, genders, sexual orientations, etc. I jumped in with both feet and wrote her character without holding back. I wanted her successes to rise to the level of a superhero. Judging by many of the reviews I’ve read, I think I came quite close.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
The core themes I explored were the absolute refusal to give in or give up, and remaining true to oneself even when others have given up on you. Self-doubt is a major roadblock for so many.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
The Last Lily of Savannah – a novel. Late Summer, 2026. The story delves into a successful New York businesswoman’s seemingly perfect life. But beneath the carefully cultivated facade, she is tortured by the fact that she was adopted, and that the truth surrounding her biological family’s past has been hidden from her all her life. This story explores the primal need for adopted individuals to understand their origins. Unfortunately for our protagonist, sometimes it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.
Incidentally, I am also writing a screenplay for a production company in L.A. It is a horror flick set in a war zone. Fingers crossed—it may be in a theater near you soon.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Leeza followed in her mother’s footsteps as a nurse, relying on Army ROTC for her education. During her early career as an RN and a commissioned officer, she endured a deployment in a war zone that left her with severe PTSD and a battle with addiction.
Twenty years later, Leeza is a married mother of two and a successful neurosurgical nurse practitioner. She is also a passionate activist. Driven by her own mental challenges and a deep desire to help others, she embarks on a desperate, ethically questionable quest to discover a revolutionary treatment for mental illness. Her goal: “mental conflict remission” and a global shift to destigmatize mental illness.
Though the journey is fraught with danger and illegality, Leeza’s passion and strength ultimately carry her though, culminating in a powerful story of global triumph.
Born on Monday
Born on Monday tells the story of Billy Stevens and Jessica Michaud, two people tethered by shared history and unfinished feelings in the small town of Augusta, Maine. It’s a story about trauma, redemption, and how the past has a way of catching up even when we think we’ve buried it. The novel opens with a reunion that feels innocent at first, a meeting in a bar between ex-lovers, but it quickly widens into something much darker. Their lives, already scarred by heartbreak and regret, begin to tangle again through loss, addiction, and violence. Becker’s writing threads together memory and immediacy with quiet dread, pulling the reader through a story that feels both intimate and cinematic.
I couldn’t help but feel pulled under by Becker’s prose. It’s sharp but unpretentious. The way he writes about small towns feels dead-on, that claustrophobic mix of nostalgia and rot. His characters are flawed, all cracked open in ways that feel real, not performative. Billy’s grief feels worn and honest, and Jessica’s shame and self-doubt are haunting. I liked how Becker avoids grand speeches or easy answers. Every conversation carries an undercurrent, like everyone is speaking through layers of history. The pacing is deliberate, but it gives space for emotion to breathe. I found myself pausing often, not because the plot slowed, but because I needed to sit with the weight of what had just happened.
There’s something raw about the ideas Becker plays with, survival, masculinity, and cycles of trauma. Some scenes hit harder than I expected. The quiet domestic pain, the strange kindness between people who are barely holding on, the way memories echo through time. Becker writes people who keep trying, even when they shouldn’t. The story feels true in a way that most “redemption arcs” don’t.
By the end, I wasn’t sure if I felt heartbroken or hopeful. Maybe both. Born on Monday isn’t for readers who want neat resolutions or tidy morals. It’s for those who don’t mind sitting in the mess, who understand that healing isn’t about closure, it’s about survival. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes character-driven fiction that deals with real scars, not storybook wounds. Fans of small-town dramas like Sharp Objects or Winter’s Bone will find something familiar here, but Becker’s voice is his own.
Pages: 352 | ASIN : B0FSSN8XXZ
Last of the Autumn Rain
Diana Louise Webb’s Last of the Autumn Rain is an emotionally charged novel that weaves together trauma, tragedy, and mental health through the voice of a haunted narrator named Julie. The story opens with a deadly accident at a nightclub that kills Julie’s best friend and spirals into a psychological journey touching on abuse, betrayal, obsession, and revenge. As Julie revisits past experiences from her childhood in New Jersey to a near-fatal spring break trip to Mexico, she reflects on the forces that shape identity, morality, and the thin line between sanity and madness. With fictionalized events that feel brutally real, Webb holds nothing back in her mission to spotlight the stigma and neglect surrounding mental health.
The writing is sharp, vivid, and unsparing. Webb’s prose can be poetic in one moment and violently raw in the next. Her scenes of abuse and trauma are gut-wrenching without being gratuitous. I often found myself re-reading lines, not just for their emotional weight but because they caught me off guard in how directly they confronted the reader. There’s a beautiful messiness in the storytelling. Fractured timelines, flashbacks, inner monologues, and haunting hallucinations that all blend into Julie’s spiraling mental state. At times, the chaos felt overwhelming, but it always felt deliberate. It’s like the author doesn’t want you to read this passively, she wants you to feel every drop of blood, guilt, and silence.
I found myself torn over the narrator. Julie is not a reliable or particularly likable character. She is violent, self-serving, and damaged. But that’s kind of the point. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Webb was daring me to judge her. One moment, Julie is saving someone from abuse; the next, she’s casually describing a childhood act of horror with a twisted sense of pride. I didn’t always agree with the choices she made. The novel sometimes seemed to blur the line between victim and perpetrator, and I admired Webb’s courage in forcing us to sit with those contradictions. It’s rare to see a female protagonist written with this much moral ambiguity and rage. And it’s even rarer for a book to make me feel that conflicted and still want to keep reading.
Last of the Autumn Rain is not a light or easy read. It’s intense, messy, and emotionally exhausting, but in the best way. This book is for readers who crave raw truth over tidy resolution. It’s for those who have battled demons or known someone who has. I would especially recommend it to fans of Gillian Flynn or Alice Sebold, readers who don’t mind going into the darker corners of the human mind. Webb has something important to say about pain, silence, and survival, and she says it with brutal, unforgettable honesty.
Pages: 235 | ASIN : B0FGQMMC27
One Bad Decision
The Wife’s New Maid follows a woman who marries a wealthy man to create her perfectly crafted life, which begins to fall apart when her new maid, desperate to escape a violent boyfriend, enters their lives. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
It’s a story about how one bad decision can change everything in a person’s life journey. How chasing the wrong dream can turn one’s life upside down.
The main character, Linley, ignored the warning signs in her rush to escape the grind of corporate life and marry the man who promised her a fairy tale life in the suburbs. But the dream soon turned into a nightmare. Her instincts whispered truths she didn’t want to hear, because she was dazzled by the prospect of marrying a rich, handsome man, ignoring red flags by drowning out reason. By the time her husband’s true nature came to light, she was already trapped. To protect her family, she made choices she’d never imagined—morally questionable actions that felt justified only because her husband’s betrayal had forced her into a dark corner.
What were some of the emotional and moral guidelines you followed when developing your characters?
I made sure that each character’s choices, even the questionable ones, were rooted in believable desperation and a longing for survival. That love and survival often force people into making morally gray decisions and how people, especially when pushed into a corner, rarely make clean choices.
I wanted to show how loyalty, betrayal, and the hunger for freedom can twist even the best intentions. My intention when developing the characters(except for Ana’s abusive boyfriend, Hector) was to avoid painting someone as purely good or evil but defined by their circumstances and desires.
I wanted the characters’ moral dilemmas to feel personal, raw, and inevitable. And how every major choice must cost the character something emotionally, so the stakes always felt real.
Do you think there’s a single moment in everyone’s life, perhaps not as traumatic, that’s life-changing?
Sure. Here are a few that come to mind(I’m sure there are plenty more!)
There’s falling in love and the visceral sensations that come with feeling that powerful connection with another human being. Or heartbreak, which can have devastating consequences and cause a profound form of depression that is hard to shift. Or feeling profoundly humiliated in a way you never forget. A medical diagnosis that forces a big career change. Moving home. A major act of courage. Meeting someone who helps you see things in a new light. A spiritual awakening through art or nature. Realizing you’ve been chasing the wrong dream all along, which was Linley’s epiphany.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
Though The Wife’s New Maid is a stand-alone, I’m writing a sequel called, The Maid’s New Husband. Hopefully, it will be out around October this year.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebok | Website
Linley had crafted the perfect life— a dazzling home, an elite social circle, and a wealthy, handsome husband who promised her everything.
Marrying Dorian Gunn should have been a dream.
But not all fairy tales end well…
Three years in, Linley’s marriage is a hollow shell reduced to icy silences and a cruel prenup demanding an heir she can’t seem to produce. Then comes the new maid—young, beautiful, and with dreams of her own.
And she’s not only there to clean. She’s here to survive.
Desperate to escape a violent boyfriend, the maid sets her sights on the one man who can save her—the rich husband—and she’ll do whatever it takes to claim him. After all, morality is a luxury she can’t afford.
In this house of whispered betrayals, no one’s hands are clean. Everyone is hiding something, and when the truth finally comes out… someone won’t make it out alive.
A Stand-alone Domestic Thriller
