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Murder Amour
Michael Alan Stimmel’s Murder Amour follows private investigators John Mathews and Kayla Van Saint from Portland to Los Angeles, where a job involving a fire at a movie studio leads them into a much larger tangle of money, sex, and personal loyalties. John’s background in fire investigation and Kayla’s experience as a homicide detective give their partnership a useful mix of skills, though their work is only part of what keeps them occupied. They’re also lovers trying to agree on what that means. The novel moves through hotel suites, studio grounds, fashion events, and the world of a powerful escort agency, giving its crime story a distinctly social character. Access matters here: who’ll take your call, who’ll open a gate, and who has something worth protecting.
John’s first-person narration gives the book much of its personality. He’s observant, hungry, easily distracted by beautiful women, and prone to acting before he’s thought things through. His jokes and running commentary make him easy company, while his jealousy, drinking, and desire to rescue people give that company some uncomfortable edges. His compassion can be sincere even when his judgment is poor, and that tension becomes one of the story’s more interesting concerns. Kayla brings confidence, practical experience, and an appetite for adventure to their exchanges. Their conversations have the familiarity of two people who know how to tease each other and exactly where to press. The friction between professional trust and romantic uncertainty gives their scenes a reason to matter beyond the next clue.
Stimmel writes in a direct, conversational style, with short chapters and plenty of dialogue. He’s particularly attentive to the physical pleasures and daily inconveniences of the setting: a good sandwich, an extravagant purchase, a convertible ride, or another stretch of Los Angeles traffic. Those details make the characters’ time in the city feel authentoc, and the recurring Cadillac becomes an enjoyable part of the book’s personality. The same habits can wear thin, especially the repeated descriptions of women’s bodies and the extended discussions explaining the escort business. Some exchanges sound like arguments prepared for the reader, and several investigative leaps depend on convenient timing or quick assumptions. The broad sexual humor also sits alongside graphic violence, creating abrupt changes in tone that can be jarring.
I think what gives Murder Amour its strongest emotional pull is its interest in the obligations people take on when they claim to care about someone. Protection, generosity, desire, and self-interest are closely tangled throughout the story. The escort agency provides a particularly charged setting for questions about women’s independence, vulnerability, and the cost of defending a business’s reputation. John’s perspective on those questions is uneven, and his judgments can feel reductive, but his involvement gives them personal consequences. I’d recommend the book most to adult readers who enjoy private-eye fiction with a talkative narrator, a complicated detective couple, and morally messy situations. Readers drawn to Hollywood settings and the everyday push and pull between two recurring leads will have plenty to enjoy, especially if they’re comfortable with blunt humor and disturbing crime scenes.
Pages: 242 | ASIN : B0HH7WBP36
The Art of Murder
The Art of Murder opens with a Portland art gallery in flames and a body in the wreckage. For private investigator John Mathews, who specializes in commercial fires, the job begins with ash samples, insurance paperwork, and questions about how a building burned so quickly. That’s a strong invitation into a mystery: something has happened, the physical evidence is disappearing, and people have reasons to tell carefully edited versions of the truth. Author Michael Alan Stimmel gives the case a practical foundation while surrounding it with the messy business of making, selling, and assigning value to art.
Mathews is good company in the complicated way that a smart, troubled friend can be. He’s observant, persistent, quick with a comeback, and capable of making a situation worse through sheer determination. He also drinks heavily and carries grief into nearly every room he enters. His first-person narration lets us experience those contradictions up close. A joke can lead straight into an aching memory; a promising interview can become an exercise in poor judgment. The tension between his professional competence and his personal recklessness gives the book much of its energy. You want him to find answers, and you worry about the cost of getting them.
Detective Kayla Van Saint brings another kind of energy. Her exchanges with Mathews have the familiarity of people who know exactly which buttons to push, along with the awkwardness of feelings they haven’t fully sorted out. Their work together involves bargaining, irritation, concern, and an appealing amount of verbal sparring. Around them, Portland feels inhabited: food carts, bars, condominium elevators, trolley rides, and walks through different neighborhoods become part of the investigation’s daily rhythm. The movement between comfortable homes and precarious lives gives the city texture and makes money feel like a pressure acting on people, even during an ordinary conversation.
The investigative detail is especially satisfying. Stimmel takes an interest in how evidence is gathered, how insurance claims work, and how a small inconsistency can change the meaning of an interview. The art setting adds questions of its own about reputation, craftsmanship, and the relationship between a painting’s quality and its price. The pace leaves room for meals, memories, and long conversations, so you spend plenty of time inside Mathews’s habits. Some drinking scenes and reflections on his loss cover familiar ground, and his commentary on women can be grating. Those rough edges are part of a forceful narrative voice that asks readers to stay close to a man whose instincts deserve scrutiny.
What gives The Art of Murder its staying power is the way the case keeps brushing against Mathews’s private wounds. Questions about responsibility and loyalty matter professionally and personally, and the people he encounters complicate his judgments. Stimmel has a feel for the uncomfortable overlap between caring about someone and causing them harm. That makes the book an engaging choice for readers who enjoy investigative legwork, a distinctly opinionated narrator, and relationships with real friction. Its pleasures come from following both the evidence and the people trying to live with it. The Art of Murder is a sharp and bruising mystery about the things people will do for money and the people they can’t afford to lose.
Pages: 232 | ASIN : B0HH8KDN89
Fig Trees – A Childhood Lived in the Shadow of Murder
Marnie Ross’s Fig Trees is a memoir about childhood, memory, and the long reach of losing a parent violently. Ross was nearly eleven when her mother was murdered in the family’s Phoenix home in 1979, and that night becomes the dividing line of the book. But Fig Trees is interested in much more than the murder itself. Ross reconstructs the world around it: her sisters, her mother’s habits, school, birthdays, television shows, food, church, games, friendships, and the frightening instability that followed her mother’s death. Early in the memoir, Ross writes, “Memory isn’t a calendar.” That line becomes a useful way to understand the whole book. She’s telling the story as a person remembering childhood decades later, where certain details remain startlingly vivid while dates and sequences sometimes blur.
One of the book’s strongest qualities is the way Ross lets ordinary objects carry emotional weight. Bullet holes remain in curtains her mother made. A jigsaw puzzle becomes a memory of patience and tenderness. A piano becomes a way of trying to make her mother proud. The fig trees themselves grow into the book’s central image because they connect Ross to the everyday version of her mother, the woman who gardened, cooked, sewed, hummed, and cared for her children. These details give Jill, Ross’s mother, a presence beyond the fact of her death. Ross also includes excerpts from her mother’s letters home to Australia, which let readers encounter Jill’s humour, homesickness, curiosity, and growing unease in her own words. That choice adds another layer to the memoir because Ross isn’t simply remembering her mother as a child once knew her. She’s also meeting her again as an adult.
The chapters about life after the murder are especially affecting because Ross remembers childhood survival in such practical terms. Grief exists beside hunger, school lunches, Christmas presents, bruises, chores, television, and the constant effort to protect her younger sister Ayrlie. Some of the hardest passages describe Ross finding ways to get food for the two of them, whether through babysitting money or the quiet help of a friend who brought an extra lunch. Reflecting on that kindness, Ross describes love as “The kind with paper bags and silence.” It’s a small line, but it captures something the memoir returns to again and again. Care often appears through modest acts. The relationship among Ross and her sisters is especially important in this way. Their games, arguments, private worlds, and shared memories show children improvising their own forms of comfort when the adults around them can’t reliably provide it.
Ross’s style is direct, emotionally open, and strongly rooted in sensory memory. She remembers wallpaper patterns, the smell of food, television programs, pool water, songs, toys, the texture of objects, and the strange thoughts that occur to children during terrifying situations. Those childlike observations are often what make the darkest scenes feel convincing. The memoir also moves frequently between the child Ross was and the adult Ross interpreting what happened, so the reader sees both immediate experience and decades of reflection layered together. Its short, episodic chapters suit that approach. Ross accumulates memories until a fuller childhood emerges. Moments such as the imaginary “Club” she created with Ayrlie or the sisters’ stuffed-animal battles matter because they restore playfulness and personality to a story that could otherwise be defined entirely by trauma.
By the end, Fig Trees feels like an act of reconstruction. Ross is piecing together her mother, her sisters, and herself from memories, letters, objects, and stories that survived. The closing sections become more reflective, particularly as Ross considers the adult lives of the three sisters and writes directly to her mother. What stayed with me most was the memoir’s attention to the coexistence of grief and affection. Ross can remember fear and still remember laughter; she can describe cruelty while holding tightly to the people who offered kindness; she can mourn the childhood that ended while taking pleasure in the childhood moments that survived in memory. The fig trees are a fitting title because they come to represent exactly that mixture. They keep growing after Jill is gone, carrying both the ache of her absence and the evidence that she was there. That makes Fig Trees an intimate and deeply personal account of how a child remembers a mother and how those memories continue to change as the child grows older.
Pages: 245 | ASIN : B0GX2XFZWJ
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 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
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
Mystery at the Edge of the World
Mystery at the Edge of the World, by J. Clifford Barnes, is a cozy, small-town mystery centered on Jace Carter, a recently retired civil engineer living in the foggy coastal community of Inglesee, California. Jace expects retirement to consist of gardening, fishing, good coffee, and quiet afternoons, but the disappearance of his former coworker, Al Meyers, pulls him into a murder investigation. The book combines an amateur detective story with the comfortable rhythms of everyday life, giving readers a mystery that feels relaxed and approachable even when the stakes become serious.
Jace is an appealing narrator because he’s observant, practical, and refreshingly ordinary. He doesn’t have special training as an investigator, but his engineering background helps him organize facts and notice connections. His dry humor also makes his voice enjoyable. When describing his retirement strategy, he says, “The key is to not go anywhere.” That line captures his personality well. He enjoys his peaceful routine, but he’s curious enough to leave it behind when something doesn’t add up. His gardening, meals, naps, and coffee-shop visits make him feel like a person with a full life rather than simply a character moving from clue to clue.
The mystery begins with Al’s strange interest in geopolymers and the large amount of money he wants to invest. Barnes uses Jace’s professional knowledge to explain the material and its possible uses without separating the information from the story. As Jace learns more about Al’s money, his abrupt retirement, and his frightened behavior, the investigation expands naturally. The discovery of Al’s body raises the tension, while the missing funds provide a clear trail for Jace and Detective Sam Roblee to follow. The technical and financial details give the case an unusual identity and fit well with Jace’s experience.
The coastal setting adds plenty of atmosphere. Inglesee is filled with mist, Victorian houses, cliffs, local businesses, and familiar residents who make the town feel lived in. The plot also maintains a conversational pace, moving between interviews, domestic routines, and moments of danger. A shooting at Jace’s home gives the later chapters a sharper edge, and the final confrontation delivers an energetic payoff. Jace’s conclusion that “There is no peace for the wicked” neatly expresses the book’s view of guilt, greed, and the consequences of believing stolen money can create a better future.
Mystery at the Edge of the World is an inviting amateur detective novel with a distinctive older protagonist and an interesting construction-industry angle. Its strongest quality is the way it blends murder, engineering, retirement, and community life into one consistent story. Jace solves the case by paying attention to people, timing, money, and small inconsistencies, which makes the resolution feel connected to everything that came before it. The ending also leaves him open to future investigations, and his combination of patience, technical knowledge, and quiet curiosity could carry him through many more mysteries.
Pages: 101 | ASIN : B0H3GVPW3G
