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The Self-Liberation of Parson Sykes – A Novella
The Self-Liberation of Parson Sykes – A Novella follows Parson from bondage on a Southampton County farm through a dangerous escape with his brothers, his service in the United States Colored Troops, and his return home in Reconstruction, where he tries to turn fragile legal freedom into a real life of land, work, and dignity. The book blends vivid scenes of daily plantation labor, clandestine reading at Boykins Depot, and tense military life in the XXV Corps with clear explanation of campaigns around Petersburg, the fall of Richmond, and the uneven promise of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Reconstruction Amendments. Across that arc, the story keeps one central idea in view. Freedom is not granted from above. It is seized, defended, and then tested again in the hard years after war.
I felt the writing worked best when it stayed close to Parson’s body and mind. The early scenes in Cross Keys, the hidden scraps of North Star, the first steps east toward the Blackwater, all have a sharp, cinematic feel. The language there is tight and charged, and I could almost hear the night sounds and feel the mud under his feet. The mix of fear, anger, and stubborn hope felt honest, and I appreciated how the book shows quiet resistance as much as open flight. The narrative sometimes pauses to explain laws, troop movements, and agencies in a very direct way. Those passages are useful, almost like short history briefings, but they sometimes slow the emotional drive. I wanted to stay in the scene with Parson a bit longer before shifting back into exposition about corps structure or federal policy.
I liked how firmly the author rejects any version of emancipation that treats Black people as passive recipients. Parson’s habit of scavenging newspapers, mapping telegraph lines, and studying rights language turns him into his own strategist, not just a grateful subject of Lincoln or Grant. The later chapters, where he faces the broken promises of Reconstruction, hit a different nerve. His decision to buy land, argue for equal standing, and invest in education feels hopeful, yet the narrative does not flinch from backlash, economic control, and the rise of second–class citizenship through new laws and terror. That balance of aspiration and hard truth gave the book a sober tone. I felt anger, but also respect, because the story refuses easy comfort or tidy closure.
I would recommend The Self-Liberation of Parson Sykes – A Novella to readers who want historical fiction that leans toward documentary detail and moral clarity, rather than pure adventure. It suits high school and college classrooms, book clubs that enjoy discussion about Civil War memory and Reconstruction, and general readers who like learning real history while following one family’s fight to own their lives. For readers willing to sit with context and reflection, the novella offers a moving, thoughtful look at how freedom works in practice.
Pages: 81 | ASIN : B0GHSXD3NC
Legacy of Valor
Legacy of Valor follows Major Liam O’Connor, soldier, husband, reluctant legend, bookended by the sight of a spaceport’s lights pulling him home. In the prologue, he’s greeted not by one newborn, but a tidy ambush of three, and that quiet domestic jolt becomes the heartbeat under the armor. Eleven years later, the wider fuse is lit: Marshal Kergan’s rebellion seizes Treespo, a methane-skied mining moon stuffed with rare elements, and the Alliance throws together a hybrid special-ops company, Neo-Etruscan SPEC CO plus New Terran Marines, under Liam’s command to carve out a landing zone and hold it in an atmosphere where a bad seal can turn you into a torch.
What surprised me first was how much tenderness the novel dares to keep on the page while everyone is carrying rifles. The triplets aren’t just “stakes”; they’re texture, little gravitational bodies pulling Liam’s thoughts back toward mercy even when the mission wants him reduced to a tool. And the dreamscape element, this half-mystical, half-disciplined mental terrain, doesn’t feel pasted on as a flashy gimmick; it’s intimate communication, spiritual practice, and battlefield vulnerability all at once. When Liam has to drop into trance while rounds fly, it reads like stepping onto thin ice: you can be brilliant and still go under.
I also liked the book’s willingness to let war be complicated without getting coy about it. The antagonist side gets real oxygen, Kergan isn’t a cardboard tyrant, and when the fighting turns personal, the consequences land with a dull, ugly thud. The dreamscape combat sequences, in particular, have a sharp, almost tactile choreography, less “wizard duel,” more knife-fight conducted in belief and misdirection. Some briefing-and-spec passages linger a beat too long, but even then the author’s fondness for practical detail (suits, procedures, unit culture) gives the story a grounded, lived-in smell, like hot metal cooling after a firefight.
This is for readers who want military science fiction, space opera, psychic fantasy, and alien-contact adventure braided into one campaign narrative, especially if you like competence under pressure, squad dynamics, and a dash of metaphysical weirdness that still behaves by rules. If you’ve enjoyed the disciplined military heft of David Weber (with a more mystical sub-current), you’ll likely settle into this world fast.
Pages: 442 | ASIN : B0CW974QW3
Soldiers in the Sandbox
Soldiers In The Sandbox is a military war novel that follows Sergeant Alex Vance from an Iraq deployment into the long, uneven stretch of coming home. The story opens with Vance arriving under punishing heat and constant tension, then moves through patrols, sudden firefights, and the loss that reshapes how he sees his unit. Back stateside, the fight changes form: therapy appointments, VA paperwork, and that hollow sense of trying to speak a language no one around you understands. Threaded through it all is his hidden notebook, a private place where he tells the truth to the page when he cannot tell it to people.
What I noticed right away is that Metcalf writes with a big, earnest heartbeat. He is not chasing cool detachment. He wants you close to Vance’s head, close to the moment, close to the way one memory can shove itself into the present without asking permission. Sometimes the prose leans into explanation and emphasis. Still, I kept turning pages because the intent feels honest. And because the book is willing to linger in the unglamorous parts, like waiting rooms and forms, and the slow grind of trying to get help that fits.
The notebook choice is the smartest structural move in the book. Early on, it reads like a lifeline Vance keeps tucked away in his rucksack, almost like he is hiding a small candle from the wind. Later, it becomes more methodical, a way for him to spot patterns in himself and to map the mess of reintegration when everything feels off by a few degrees. I also appreciated the author’s decision to include extra material at the end, like a glossary and a list of veteran support organizations. It is unusual for a novel, but here it fits the book’s mission of building understanding, not just telling a story. Metcalf’s own background as a combat veteran and his work with disabled veterans add context to that choice and help explain the book’s steady focus on what happens after the headlines fade.
If you tend to read war fiction for action set pieces, this might feel more reflective than you want. If you read the genre to understand the human cost, especially the after, then this is an exceptional book you’ll want to pick up. In that way, it reminded me more of the post deployment stories in Redeployment than of a plot-driven combat thriller. Soldiers In The Sandbox is war fiction with a steady pulse and a clear-eyed heart, gripping in the fight scenes, but unforgettable in what comes after.
Pages: 403 | ASIN : B0G7MZCHR2
Sense of Dilemma
Ballot: When Fate Called Their Name follows four young Australians conscripted by chance into Vietnam, and how that single moment echoes through war, espionage, and the uneasy aftermath of medals, memory, and mateship. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Life experience! As a 19-year-old, I sat with friends in a sweltering flat in Sydney and watched birthdates drawn from the conscription ballot. My date wasn’t called, but a friend of mine was.
The war in Vietnam had become hugely controversial. Anti-war and moratorium marches were frequent.
Attitudes toward the war were deeply divided.
The whole era left an indelible mark on me, and was unexpectedly resurrected when I travelled to Vietnam on business and saw the remnants of the war, including coffins draped in US flags being loaded onto an aircraft in Hanoi.
Mitch, Greg, Jay, and Kiwi feel like real blokes rather than archetypes. How did you shape their dynamics?
All based on friends and acquaintances I’ve met and known over the years, worked with, played with, and faced difficult times with. I’ve used my imagination to consider how they might have interacted had they known one another. Names are fictitious, of course!!
Jay’s choices raise difficult questions about survival and allegiance. Did you want readers to judge him, or sit with the discomfort?
I did want to evoke a sense of dilemma between loyalty, courage, survival, and freedom of choice, and to be a little provocative about what is good and what is best from differing perspectives. The clash of cultures, worldviews, and an individual’s life experience all play a part in shaping who we are and what we believe.
I think the discomfort is important. It’s real. Fight or flight. Very little in life is black and white. I think being faced with the choice between sacrifice and survival, and where to place allegiance, is one of life’s greatest tests.
That said, I am sure some readers will judge him, and that’s OK, it’s all part of the dilemma of choice, values, and self-preservation. I like the dichotomy.
What do you hope younger readers, far removed from the Vietnam era, take from this story?
It’s part of the ‘we will remember’ ethos of past wars and of those who sacrificed, who displayed courage, and who were willing to serve. So I’d like to think the story shines a little light on life during the period when the war was fought.
Perhaps, in particular, the world their grandparent’s lived in when choice wasn’t always freely available, when governments and ideologies demanded compliance.
Entertainment wrapped in a thought-provoking historical period that may create some understanding of the fickleness of life.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Instagram | Website | Dan Mulvagh | Amazon
Australia unhesitatingly responds by enforcing conscription. Twenty-year-old men are selected by ballot of their birth dates drawn from a lottery barrel, sending them to the war-ravaged jungles of Vietnam.
When their birthday numbers tumble from the call-up ballot drum, Mitch Masters, a talented motorcycle speedway competitor, destined for international fame and fortune, Jay Petrovitch, the son of Russian refugees, Greg Sunderland, dentistry school dropout, and wannabe rock star, and Kiwi, a construction worker from New Zealand, find themselves on the sharp end of the fog of war and political duplicity.
For years following the end of the war, rumours of POWs shipped off to the USSR filtered through the ranks of the war’s Australian veterans. Was it possible that Aussie Diggers were among them?
The Australian authorities said no.
Is this Australia’s greatest cover-up?
From the inner suburbs of Sydney, through the jungles of Vietnam, the Closed Cities of the Soviet Union, the horror of combat, the oscillations of xenophobic and patriotic pressures, and the collisions of ingrained world-views, Ballot is a gripping novel of allegiance and identity. Of mateship that transcends three decades, three continents, and opposing political and social philosophies.
It Could Happen
The Red in the Wrong Profession follows a widowed history teacher and his 12-year-old daughter who, at the local bookstore, discover a coded message tucked inside a classic novel, leading them to a possible espionage plot. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I had learned that spies left messages in some rather unusual places, back before there was an Internet and electronic ways to communicate with their handlers or with other spies. It intrigued me no end! So I thought it would be fun for my readers to have a bookstore used as a “spy drop.” Hey, Internet or no, it could still happen…
Spencer is a history teacher who ends up living inside history. How did you think about that irony while writing him?
I had a feeling someone like Spencer, who is an honorable character, even though he’s got a wicked sense of humor about the spy, Zinnia, would just love it if he became a part of history. Suddenly he’s no longer teaching about the Cold War – he’s living it, and in the best way possible, by involving his brother who just happens to be in the FBI.
Preston straddles family loyalty and professional duty. What interested you most about that tension?
There are some things that Preston is prohibited from revealing, even to his family members. And he doesn’t like that, but what can he do? I think he does a terrific job of informing his brother and niece as far as he possibly can as the three of them work together to resolve what they found out was happening regarding the spy in their midst.
The novel shows how misinformation and rumors spread through casual conversation. Was that a deliberate parallel to espionage?
It was more like I was trying to show who could and couldn’t be trusted. Quite a few characters aren’t what they appear to be. There’s certainly a lot of suspicion going on in that little town in Virginia where the story is set!
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
As Preston races to decipher the message, he finds himself caught between loyalty, secrecy, and a ruthless enemy determined to unearth America’s most guarded innovations. What begins as a child’s accidental discovery soon escalates into a perilous hunt across the capital, where every page turned could expose a new betrayal.
The question isn’t just whether Preston can stop the spies—it’s whether he can do so before the next secret falls into Soviet hands, changing the course of the Cold War forever.
Soldiers in the Sandbox
I read Soldiers in the Sandbox as a first-person immersion rather than a detached war story, and that feels like the book’s defining move. Author Scott Metcalf frames the novel around Sergeant Alex Vance’s deployment to Iraq, tracing his journey from the anticipatory weight of arrival through firefights, loss, and the quieter but more corrosive aftermath of survival. The plot itself is deliberately unflashy: patrols, sudden violence, the death of a fellow soldier, and the long interior reckoning that follows. What carries the book is not narrative surprise but accumulation, the way dust, fear, camaraderie, and moral unease layer themselves into a lived experience that refuses to simplify war into slogans or spectacle.
I liked how insistently physical the prose is. Metcalf writes with an almost tactile fixation on weight, like rucksacks biting into shoulders, heat pressing down, adrenaline flooding the body, and that physicality grounds the psychological descent that follows. I trusted the voice because it never strains for heroism. Alex Vance is competent, but he’s also uncertain, frightened, and frequently confused by the machinery of command that moves him around like a chess piece. The firefight scenes don’t glorify violence; they disorient. They arrive abruptly, leave behind numbness, and fade into silence that feels heavier than the noise. That restraint gave the book credibility.
The emotional center of the book, though, isn’t combat; it’s grief and moral residue. The death of a young soldier fractures the unit in quiet, believable ways: absences at meals, jokes that no longer land, routines that keep going because stopping would be worse. I was especially drawn to the journal passages, where Alex tries to articulate what the war is doing to him. Those moments resist tidy insight. Instead, they circle questions of purpose, agency, and complicity without resolving them. The effect is unsettling in the best way. The book doesn’t offer catharsis so much as recognition, a sense that confusion itself is the honest outcome.
Soldiers in the Sandbox will resonate most strongly with readers drawn to military fiction, war literature, and psychological realism, especially veterans, military families, and civilians who want a grounded portrayal of modern conflict without cinematic gloss. Stylistically and thematically, it sits closer to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried than to action-forward war novels, sharing that focus on memory, guilt, and the stories soldiers tell themselves to endure. This is not a war story about what happened, but about what remains.
Pages: 403 | ASIN : B0G7MZCHR2
Our Unconcious Mind
Operation Archer follows a grieving engineer searching for healing through hypnotherapy, who finds himself time-traveling back to 1940’s Nazi Germany, where he has to stop history from being rewritten. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The story was inspired by an incident when I was taking part in a hypnotherapy course in Birmingham in December 1998. We were doing a module called Automatic Writing. The idea was that we would all go into trance while holding a pencil over a notepad and our unconscious mind would write down useful information about the issue we had in mind. However, what happened to me was amazing. I wrote an Airman’s Diary from 1944 which extended to several pages. It featured details of being on an RAF base in 1944 and a subsequent Lancaster bombing mission over Berlin. Soon after this another person doing the course (who was a clairvoyant) carried out past — life regression hypnosis on me and discovered that I had apparently lived before as an RAF bomber pilot in1944. I had died on a mission over Berlin when my Lancaster bomber exploded after being struck by cannon shells from a German night fighter. I never forgot this incident and when I was planning my first novel I thought it would be a suitable inspiration for the plot. I thought : ‘What would happen if someone was hypnotically regressed back to 1944 and really did travel back in time and then they couldn’t get back to the present day?’ Things developed from there and I added the plot point that the hero Simon is suffering trauma caused by his wife’s death. I also added another story thread in which Simon takes part in a Special Forces raid on a German underground factory. The factory is manufacturing German flying saucers which can travel at 5000 miles an hour and win the war for Germany. Later Simon discovers that these craft can also travel in time and pass into parallel universes.
What emotional parallels did you see between bomber crews and Simon’s internal state?
RAF and USAAF bomber crews in WW2 often suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder(PTSD), now called simply post-traumatic stress, because of the dangers involved in flying a poorly- defended bomber over enemy territory against massive opposition from enemy fighter planes and anti-aircraft fire. Simon is clearly suffering from PTSD as a result of his wife’s preventable death and he has treatment from a hypnotherapist in Glasgow. So there are indeed parallels between bomber crews and Simon’s mental state.
Operation Archer moves between historical fiction, sci-fi, and psychological drama. Did you ever worry about fitting into a single genre?
Operation Archer is a unique book because it straddles several genres. There is World War Two action adventure rather like the Alistair MacLean thriller ‘Where Eagles Dare.’ There is also a time travel element, plus a love story at the core of the book and also Simon’s journey to recover from his grief. I was aware that this is a multi-genre book but that is what makes it so interesting.
Do you see Simon’s journey as healing, redemption, acceptance, or something more ambiguous?
Simon is on a personal journey during the book. When we consider the plot it could be described as boy meets girl, boy loses girl because she dies , boy meets girl again by going back in time into a parallel universe. Boy then loses girl, but he subsequently returns to the near past and meets girl again. He then manages to save the love of his life from a preventable death but unfortunately this action has tragic consequences for Simon but in the last sentence of the book there is a surprise ending which I think ties up all the loose ends and will leave all readers with a smile on their face.
Author Links: Amazon | Website
It is 1940s Europe, and Nazi Germany is close to deploying the Haunebu, a secret flying-saucer weapon capable of 5000 mph, technology that would hand Hitler victory. Recruited into a daring commando raid behind enemy lines, Simon must help destroy the Haunebu in its underground base before it changes the course of history.
As he fights SS soldiers, deadly air attacks and a dangerous escape across enemy territory, supported by Susan, a courageous woman who becomes his ally and unexpected love, Simon must survive long enough to save Britain and find a way home.
A gripping blend of military action, WW2 intrigue and time-travel sci-fi, Operation Archer delivers high-stakes suspense for fans of Where Eagles Dare, The Guns of Navarone, and alternate-history war thrillers.
A Motif of Connection
Passages follows a man from his childhood in Greece through the challenges of his family’s history to his career as a physician caring for veterans. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The factual history of a naval combat vessel active in the Vietnam conflict provided a motif of connection between principal characters, neatly laying down a plot line that would intertwine their rites of passage. The aging naval combat veteran and the young psychiatrist encounter one another under duress at parallel crossroads in their lives as their therapeutic relationship unfolds.
Can you share with us a little about the research that went into shaping your storyline?
My own training in medicine and the military provided a firm floor for a realistic representation of the formative milieu of the two protagonists. Structured interviews with sailors who were in the fight provided supportive resources on events, equipment, and tactics, and helped sharpen the context of combat events as well as the personal aftermath on the return to civilian life. Drawing on contemporaneous events in the news of Tulsa, Oklahoma served up a scenario for the make-or-break challenge that sets the story line in motion.
What was one scene in the novel that you felt captured the morals and message you were trying to deliver to readers?
Of many scenes that make a statement of conviction, an epiphany for many readers will arise from AJ’s description of the ramifications that the hyperfocus of battle can have on a young man much later in life.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
The likely next release involves four women growing up together on Staten Island and lessons of empathy learned through their deep bonds. Look again in 6-12 months for Four Corners!
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook
Miko, the precocious son of a Greek fisherman, has weathered an indecisive path to adulthood in medicine and psychiatry. . . or has he? Dormant in his soul is a muse for writing and a smoldering guilt of abandoning his father. His training trajectory finds him in Tulsa, USA, of all places, where a 2 a.m. hospital admission, the aging, drunk, and potentially violent Vietnam veteran AJ becomes the young physician’s patient. A metaphysical quirk awaits them.
Unwitting confidants in the quest to understand what each is missing, the two trade insights best borne from meeting the other where he is. AJ is a prisoner of the exhilarating echoes of a confusing war; Miko suppresses his own psychological turmoil while exposing that of others.
A chance meeting of their wives leads to a bond kept hidden under norms of confidentiality. Each woman finds something of themselves in the other and the moxie to withstand battles in their own marriages, on their own terms.
Why AJ was brought to the hospital by the police that night pits a sense of duty against self-destruction. Why was there but a single round in his Luger that night?
In Passages, the author takes aim at our enigmatic humanity. Each of us is the hero in his or her own life, a contrast of magnificence and flaws, navigating the complexity of principles and barriers as best one can.
At once philosophical and deeply human, Passages explores identity, trauma, loyalty, and the invisible threads that tether us to the people we least expect. With poignancy and grit, it reminds us that healing often comes not from having the answers, but from simply being seen.
