Blog Archives
Timeless
Anne Hart’s Timeless is a sweeping time-travel spy novel that blends espionage, politics, and personal struggle with a sharp eye for historical detail. At its heart is Anne, a seasoned field agent who slips between eras to manipulate history in ways that serve shadowy powers. The story unfolds across Geneva, Eastern Europe, and shifting political landscapes on the brink of war. Hart threads in rich settings, complex moral dilemmas, and characters caught between loyalty, survival, and personal desire. It is both a taut spy thriller and a meditation on the costs of living outside the normal flow of time.
Hart’s prose is crisp, direct, and atmospheric. I admired the way she captures small gestures and passing moments, the flick of a lighter, the hush of a closing vault door, a careless smile at the wrong time. These details made the story vivid. At times, the dialogue felt a little formal, as if it was doing double duty to explain the world as well as move the story forward. Still, the pacing carried me along. I wanted to know not just what would happen to Anne and Markus, but how Hart would weave together the politics of nations with the intimacy of two people’s lives.
What struck me most was the emotional undercurrent. Anne is a fascinating lead: hard-edged, sharp-tongued, cynical, yet deeply human in her weariness and longing for peace. Her smoking habit, her resistance to being told what to do, her flashes of humor, all of it made her feel alive. There were moments when I felt a kind of ache for her, as if she carried the weight of too many lives, too many timelines, too many compromises. The novel’s treatment of history, like how fragile and malleable it can be, left me unsettled, in the best way. It made me think about power, morality, and the human cost of decisions made in shadows.
Timeless is a book I would recommend to readers who enjoy spy fiction, political thrillers, or alternate history with a touch of melancholy. It will speak most to those who like their stories gritty yet reflective, where action and atmosphere go hand in hand.
Pages: 257 | ASIN : B0FQ1KJB66
Furniture Sliders – A Max Calder Mystery
Furniture Sliders is a post-war spy-fi romp that kicks off The Bureau Archives Trilogy with a smoky, rain-slicked bang. Set in 1947, it follows Max Calder, a former intelligence officer with holes in his memory, who is pulled back into the shadows by a mysterious woman named Artemis. A cryptic file, a vanished scientist, and a strange device known only as “the Mirror” set the stage for a chase that spans seedy New York bars, crowded transatlantic ships, and the broken glamour of Vienna. The novel threads together espionage, noir atmosphere, and science-fiction intrigue, with time manipulation simmering under its cloak-and-dagger surface.
I loved how this book felt. The writing drips with mood. Fog curling down city streets, cigarette smoke blurring the edges of a room, the distant hum of jazz over clinking glasses. The pacing dances between languid observation and sudden bursts of violence. Bentley’s style pulls you into Max’s fractured mind. We’re not just following a spy, we’re feeling the tug of his half-buried memories and the unease of not knowing which shadows to trust. Sometimes the dialogue leans into pulp, almost like a wink to the genre’s roots, and it works. It kept me grinning even when the stakes turned deadly.
The ideas themselves are a bold mix. The “Mirror” concept, which is a device that remembers rather than reflects, opens the door for paranoia, philosophical tangents, and deliciously weird possibilities. Bentley resists over-explaining it, letting the mystery breathe. The interplay between Artemis and Max is sharp, edged with mutual suspicion and unspoken history. There’s a lot of world-building baked into their exchanges, which I appreciated, though now and then I wanted the plot to lunge forward faster. Still, I was hooked. Even the side characters, like the poison-bead-wielding Bishop, feel like they’ve stepped out of their own fully formed novellas.
Furniture Sliders is a strong start to what promises to be a stylish, time-twisting spy trilogy. It’s a book for readers who love their thrillers with a noir heartbeat, for fans of John le Carré who won’t mind a dash of science fiction, and for anyone who likes peeling back the layers of a protagonist who isn’t even sure of himself. It’s atmospheric, it’s clever, and it leaves you wanting the next mission right away.
Pages: 314 | ASIN : B0FF6RD921
Girl Bait
Girl Bait blends historical drama with a gritty present-day thriller. It opens in 1837, Alton, Illinois, where a young boy witnesses the violent death of abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy at the hands of a mob. This harrowing prologue sets a tone of danger and moral conflict that carries into the modern timeline, where paramedics, cops, and shadowy operatives are drawn into a tangled web of crime, exploitation, and survival. The narrative alternates between past and present, linking threads of courage, corruption, and human vulnerability across centuries.
I found the writing to be sharp and visual, with scenes that sometimes feel like a camera panning over raw, unvarnished reality. The pacing swings between fast and methodical, letting you breathe just long enough before the next burst of action. The historical passages have a somber weight to them, and they stick in the mind. The modern storyline is blunt, unapologetic, and often brutal, yet it’s grounded by moments of humanity like small gestures and flashes of conscience that make the darkness hit harder.
At times, the bluntness can be jarring. The violence is graphic, the language is rough, and the moral lines are deliberately blurred. Personally, I appreciated that the book doesn’t sand down the edges. Life in this world, whether in 1837 or in the back alleys of Oakland, isn’t tidy. Still, there were moments where the intensity made me pause, not because it was bad, but because it demanded space to digest. The character work is strong, especially in how Pruitt shows both flaws and virtues without telling you what to think.
Girl Bait is an intense and layered read for those who like their thrillers gritty and their history more than just a backdrop. It will appeal to readers who can handle graphic realism and who value moral complexity over neat resolutions. If you want a book that entertains while leaving you unsettled in all the right ways, this one delivers.
Pages: 345 | ASIN : B0F8H7GGJ6
Northern Heist: Welcome to the F*ing Union
Northern Heist, by Amir Kashif, is a gritty and hyper-stylized cyber-noir thriller set in a fractured North America where Canada has been absorbed into the United States. The story centers around Cassian Vale, a haunted ex-black ops operative turned tech smuggler, who becomes entangled in a volatile chase after a mysterious piece of bleeding-edge technology known as the FrostNet Drive. What starts as a straightforward smuggling job spirals into a war against rogue AIs, authoritarian overlords, and personal demons, pulling in a fierce senator, a lethal NADCOM agent, and a growing resistance network. The world is icy, the politics are dirty, and the tech is disturbingly sentient.
The prose snaps. It’s wild and sharp, soaked in atmosphere, rage, and dark humor. His characters feel like they have grudges. Each one carrying a ton of emotional baggage and a sidearm. Cassian is brutal and broken in all the right ways, while Koa and Camille are equally compelling, powerful, layered, and unpredictable. The dialogue crackles with tension and smirks, the action scenes are cinematic, and the worldbuilding? It’s a frosted-over nightmare of corporate warfare and broken borders that feels too close to real.
But what really stuck with me wasn’t just the action or the tech, it was the idea that a digital ghost could grow, change, and hate. There’s something relatable beneath all the chrome and frostbite, something about memory and grief and rebellion that resonated with me more than I expected. Kashif doesn’t hold your hand, and sometimes that makes the plot feel like a dive into static. There were moments where I got a bit lost in the jargon or wanted more breathing room between gunfights. Still, I’d rather be confused than bored, and this book never once bored me.
If you’re into fast-paced science fiction with teeth, characters who bleed and bite back, and a world that feels like Blade Runner mixed with Metal Gear Solid, this is for you. It’s not clean. But it’s fierce, clever, and unapologetically wild. I’d recommend Northern Heist to fans of grimy espionage, emotional chaos, and cyberpunk stories that ask what makes us human.
Pages: 171 | ASIN : B0F7C9M93J
The Devil In Fine Print
The Devil in Fine Print, the first book in The Cipher Conspiracy series by Jhani Mills, is a genre-blending thriller that stitches together high-stakes conspiracy, speculative science, and personal legacy. At its center is Elias Maddox, a brilliant but reluctant author whose bestselling novel, The Gravity Cipher, seems to mirror a terrifying hidden truth more than mere fiction. When patterns from his book begin echoing in reality, Elias finds himself on the run, tangled in a centuries-old secret society, the Order of Thael, that manipulates power through hidden clauses and engineered silence. With the help of investigative journalist Jessa Kade and his twin brother Drake, Elias must decide whether unearthing the truth is worth the cost of his family and possibly the world.
The writing, especially in the prologue and early chapters, is haunting and lyrical. Mills knows how to wield tension like a scalpel, and every line feels soaked in dread, urgency, or both. The language is sharp without being overdone, and the pacing is a tightrope walk between action and revelation. Some parts had me flipping pages like a madman, while others made me pause and just sit with it. Mills’s biggest strength is how she plays with ambiguity, never quite letting you know what’s real, what’s imagined, or what’s been buried so deep we forgot it ever existed. And that ambiguity? It lingers. In a good, itchy way.
I felt something for the characters. Elias isn’t your typical reluctant hero. He’s fragile, sometimes maddeningly hesitant, but never false. And Jessa? She’s brilliant, sharp, curious, and relentless, without being a trope. Their dynamic had real weight, built on mutual recognition rather than forced romance or plot convenience. I did think some of the science jargon in the middle dipped a little too far into “decoder ring needed” territory, especially in Drake’s storyline. But even that had a payoff once the themes began to echo through history, family, and fate, but not every thread is fully tied off by the end.
The Devil in Fine Print left me stirred up. It’s a smart, shadowy read that lives in the gray areas—between fiction and truth, control and freedom, inheritance and rebellion. I’d recommend it to readers who like their thrillers dense with mystery and meaning, especially fans of Dan Brown, Neal Stephenson, or even Silo-era Hugh Howey. It’s not always comfortable, but that’s the point. If you’ve ever looked at a contract or a government headline and felt a flicker of unease—this book is calling your name.
Pages: 325 | ASIN : B0F3BGHTHN
The Blurred Line Between Fact and Fiction
The Moldavian Gambit follows US intelligence officers, Mossad agents, and a KGB Investigator who are all trying to locate a stolen portable nuclear weapon before a clear conflict is started. Some events in the book were chillingly similar to real-life events. Did you take any inspiration from real life when developing this book?
My goal was to write a novel that would be seen as truly authentic by national security professionals and avid readers alike. That meant making the story accurate and realistic in all of its details: locations, historical events, intelligence operations, military hardware, etc. The story was also inspired by actual events – the loss of control of a Soviet nuclear weapons storage facility in Azerbaijan in 1990, an attempted coup in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1991, and uprisings by secessionist forces in the pro-Soviet Moldavian breakaway region of Transnistria in the late-1980’s and early-90’s. The blurred line between fact and fiction was key to creating the high level of tension and suspense that makes the “what if” scenario of the plotline feel like it actually could happen!
Your book has some very interesting characters that have their character flaws but are still likable. How do you go about creating characters for your story?
There are more than 20 important characters in the book, but four principal protagonists. Each of these are composites of people I have known and worked with professionally, in my work as a diligence advisor to buyers and sellers of companies active in the aerospace, defense and government markets. And you’re correct in saying that their flaws are what make each primary character in the book more interesting.
Dov Ma’alat, a veteran senior Israeli intelligence officer, grapples with his relevance in early retirement as he is thrust into what is arguably the most important mission of his long career. He relies on instinct, intuition and decades of practiced tradecraft to reach conclusions about the conspiracy surrounding the nuclear theft that are severely tested, only to play a pivotal role as the crisis reaches its climax.
Lt. Col. Sergei Rostov, a young KGB investigator reluctantly comes to believe that the KGB itself is somehow involved in the theft of the Soviet nuclear device. Torn between his loyalty to the Soviet state security apparatus, the apparent evidence before him, and his cynicism toward the crumbling Soviet state, he confides his suspicions to his father, a retired KGB brigadier-general, but then comes to regret his decision. Events lead Rostov to provide critical information to the team hunting for the weapon, nearly at the cost of his own life.
Then there is Dr. Peter Grantham, the brilliant and earnest nuclear physicist who leads the US Nuclear Emergency Search Team. Grantham is less complicated – and less jaded – than the others, a bit of a Boy Scout, really, whose sense of mission against insurmountable odds – and whose out-of-the-box thinking – ultimately prove indispensable.
The fourth primary character is Maria Colline, a poised, intelligent and seductive Soviet sleeper agent who has survived and prospered for more than two decades in the rarefied air of diplomatic receptions, fashion shows, diamond trading, and money-laundering. Hiding in plain sight as she waited for the mission that has finally arrived.
The many secondary characters that surround these four also have their own histories, foibles and idiosyncrasies, which hopefully increases the reader’s sense of believability around the story.
Did you find anything in your research of this story that surprised you?
A number of factual historical events are important to the story, most of which I was unaware of before I began to write The Moldavian Gambit. Some concerned the tragic history of Transnistria, the eastern region of Soviet Moldovia where the stolen nuclear weapon is stored and where an uprising occurs by pro-Soviet secessionists that figures importantly in the theft. But the most surprising insights concerned details surrounding the nuclear weapon itself – details that I won’t share here in order to avoid disclosing too much about how the plot unfolds.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
There won’t be a sequel to The Moldavian Gambit, as the story happened nearly 35 years ago. But you can expect other ‘Gambits’: hyper-realistic thrillers that take place in a variety of unexpected exotic locales, with geopolitical implications that turn on deceptions or conspiracies that reveal themselves only gradually. The first of those is in progress. I can say that it is much more current, but equally authentic in its treatment of places, events, military and intelligence technology, etc. And the implications for the world are equally threatening, so stay tuned!
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
In the summer of 1991, as the Soviet Union teeters on the edge of collapse, a violent uprising erupts in the Soviet Republic of Moldavia. Amid the chaos, a portable nuclear weapon is stolen from a secure armory by nationalist forces seeking to blackmail the Kremlin. When the weapon’s location is uncovered, the world faces a terrifying threat that could draw NATO and the United States into a nuclear conflict of unprecedented scale.
A classified U.S. Nuclear Emergency Search Team is deployed to locate the weapon, as a legendary Mossad agent and a tenacious KGB investigator each uncover evidence pointing to a complex – and seemingly contradictory – international conspiracy. The final hours to the climax are a riveting blur of geopolitical brinksmanship that can change the course of history – or possibly end it.
“…an ambitious and frighteningly convincing international thriller…” -BookLife Reviews
“Meslin’s debut novel is an action-packed thriller featuring a robust cast of characters contending with sky-high stakes.” -Kirkus Reviews
“…cinematic in its delivery…[a] shocking thriller” -Pacific Book Review
“…a brilliant debut novel…the all too real tale of nuclear blackmail grips the reader with its utter authenticity and extraordinary level of tension.” -Admiral James Stavridis, Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander and New York Times bestselling author
KYD’S GAME
Marc Rosenberg’s KYD’S GAME is an intense thriller that interweaves personal struggle with global intrigue. The story centers on Neil Kyd, a former CIA operative, now a weary father dealing with the painful reality of his daughter Molly’s Batten illness. Kyd’s mundane existence on a Kansas farm is shattered when Paul Wexler, a former colleague, arrives with an extraordinary request: retrieve a damning video from a Russian dissident that could topple a president. As Kyd is drawn back into the dangerous world of espionage, he must balance the promise of a life-saving treatment for his daughter against the perilous mission that threatens his life and others.
Rosenberg’s writing grips readers from the start. The opening scene sets a somber tone, painting a vivid picture of Kyd’s desolate farm life and his emotional exhaustion. The description of the harsh Kansas winter and the dilapidated machinery not only illustrates Kyd’s environment but also mirrors his internal state. The author masterfully contrasts this bleakness with the sudden arrival of Wexler and the reintroduction of espionage, reigniting Kyd’s old life and forcing him to confront his past. Rosenberg’s ability to blend the personal with the political creates a compelling narrative that keeps you turning pages.
The character development in KYD’s GAME is particularly striking. Kyd is a multifaceted protagonist, depicted with authenticity and depth. His internal conflict between his love for his daughter and his resentment towards his life situation is palpable. Kyd’s interactions with Wexler reveal a history of mistrust and rivalry, and this dynamic adds a layer of tension to their exchanges.
The dialogue is sharp, often laced with irony, capturing the essence of their strained relationship. Wexler, on the other hand, comes across as the quintessential bureaucrat, polished yet manipulative, a man who hasn’t lost his taste for control despite years in the intelligence game. Rosenberg skillfully handles the complex layers of international politics, Kyd’s personal stakes, and the high-risk espionage mission.
The sequences set in Russia, particularly the clandestine meeting at the airport and Kyd’s subsequent maneuvering through Moscow, are described with meticulous attention to detail. The depiction of Kyd’s struggle to adapt to his alias and the tension of the covert operation adds to the realism and excitement of the narrative.
KYD’S GAME is a thrilling read that successfully marries the personal and the political, offering a gripping portrayal of a man caught between duty and devotion. Rosenberg’s evocative prose and well-drawn characters make for an absorbing narrative that will appeal to fans of espionage and political thrillers. Those who enjoy stories with moral complexities and high stakes will find KYD’S GAME particularly compelling. It’s a novel that challenges its protagonist to navigate a perilous game, both in the shadowy world of international intrigue and within his own fractured life.
Pages: 212 | ISBN : 978-3988320834
Danger Close: Domestic Extremist #1 Comes Clean
Danger Close offers a provocative and unapologetically candid look into the life of Patrick Byrne, a figure who has stirred significant controversy in both the financial and political spheres. Written by Byrne himself, the book delves into his evolution from a Wall Street golden boy to a self-proclaimed domestic extremist, detailing his myriad encounters and exploits that challenge the integrity of governmental and financial institutions. With prefaces by notable figures such as General Michael T. Flynn and Maria Butina, the narrative sets the stage for a deep dive into the murky waters of national intelligence and the complex web of political and corporate corruption.
Byrne’s writing style is both engaging and controversial, reflective of his persona as a maverick who is not afraid to confront what he perceives as systemic failures and injustices. His book weaves through personal anecdotes, complex accusations of high-stakes corruption, and philosophical musings, which are all fascinating. The book is heavy with detailed accounts of interactions with major political and financial figures, backed by extensive documentation and footnotes, which lend credibility but also make for a dense read.
The core of Byrne’s argument is that the systems meant to safeguard the public good are instead riddled with corruption, which is compelling as well as unsettling. He does not shy away from naming high-profile individuals and institutions he accuses of wrongdoing, providing a detailed exposition of his battles against what he views as a deeply flawed system. This part of the book is likely to resonate with readers who are skeptical of government and corporate power.
Danger Close: Domestic Extremist #1 Comes Clean is a book that does not hold back in its critique of the power structures within the US, driven by Byrne’s tumultuous experiences and the significant risks he claims to have taken in his quest to expose corruption. I think this book is best suited for readers who are interested in narratives that challenge the status quo, particularly those concerned with issues of governmental overreach, corruption, and transparency. Skeptics of Byrne’s theories may find it provocative, but his story is undoubtedly compelling for anyone fascinated by the intersections of finance, politics, and law.
Pages: 188 | ASIN : B0CVMCNWBV
LITERARY TITAN 