Blog Archives
Wolf Magick: Secret Myseries of Draakensky
Wolf Magick: Secret Mysteries of Draakensky, by Paula Cappa, is a richly atmospheric supernatural romance built around inheritance, shapeshifting, old Celtic power, and the pull of a place that feels alive. Marc Sexton is trying to build a future with Charlotte Knight, but his family’s wolf legacy keeps breaking into the present. Charlotte, newly settled at Draakensky Windmill Estate, isn’t just moving into Marc’s world. She’s being claimed by it, spiritually, artistically, and emotionally.
What gives the novel its strongest identity is the way the everyday and the mystical sit side by side. Marc runs The Grackle Bar and Grill, deals with family pressure, wedding plans, work stress, and public scrutiny, while shadow wolves, ancestral guilt, Otherworld powers, and old blood covenants gather around him. Charlotte’s life as an artist matters just as much as Marc’s magickal inheritance. Her drawings, visions, and instincts make her more than a romantic partner; she becomes a participant in the mystery. When Marc tells her, “You, Charlotte, are Draakensky,” it feels like the heart of the book clicking into place.
Cappa’s prose leans into mood, texture, and ritual. The forest, windmill, river, ravine, owls, hares, crows, horses, and wolves all feel charged with meaning. Draakensky itself speaks in the interludes, and those sections give the estate a strange, watchful personality. The book is lush and sensory, with scenes that often feel painted rather than simply described. That fits Charlotte’s artistic point of view and gives the novel a romantic, gothic pulse.
The relationship between Marc and Charlotte is the emotional anchor. Their love is passionate, but it’s also tested by secrecy, fear, family expectations, and the terrifying question of what Marc’s wolf identity might cost them. The wolf mythology has a strong communal force, too. The cry “We are wolf” captures the book’s larger movement from private fear to shared power. This is a story about lovers, yes, but it’s also about lineage, belonging, sacrifice, and choosing what kind of inheritance deserves to survive.
Wolf Magick is best read as an immersive supernatural tale with a strong romantic core and a deep interest in old-world magick. It takes its time with meals, weather, art, family conversations, folklore, and landscape because all of those things are part of the spell. The result is a book that feels earthy, dramatic, and intimate, with wolves at its edge and ancestral secrets running beneath nearly every scene.
Pages: 380 | ASIN : B0GYXX9MMT
I Had A Guradian Angel
In Teachers, Teams & Tugboats, you share your reflections on a more than forty-year career in global logistics. Why was this an important book for you to write?
As I was reflecting back on my long career, I realized I had not properly recognized or thanked some of those most important mentors and colleagues who helped me succeed. In fact, I had not communicated with some of them in over 20 years. I was motivated to let them know how important they were in my life and that they were truly appreciated. Most are elderly now, and they deserved to know the impact they made on someone else.
There was one very important mentor who I neglected to thank before he died and that has always haunted me. I mention this football coach in the beginning of my book on pages 6 to 9. I didn’t want to duplicate the regret I carried for not ever thanking him. As a result, I wrote this memoir in dedication to them all
What was the most difficult memory to revisit while writing this memoir?
The most difficult memory was the DUI and realizing I almost destroyed my career at age 31. Thankfully, I had a guardian angel.
What lessons froam the trucking and transportation world apply surprisingly well to everyday life?
The transportation and logistics world is very demanding and requires a disciplined work ethic and an attention to detail in order to succeed. Similar to everyday life, there are changes in the industry that we have to adapt to on a daily basis. Every day reveals a new challenge and adventure.
What is the best piece of advice you ever received from a mentor?
The best advice was from Charlie who said, “it is easy to just terminate a manager for not doing a good job and replace him with an A player”. “But a true leader is a teacher who can motivate and bring that manager to from a C player to a B player. That’s a real achievement.”
Author Links: Facebook | Website
Rich Higgins spent forty years in the demanding world of global logistics, helping teams through trucking deregulation, corporate bankruptcies, multi-billion-dollar mergers, and international sourcing expansions in Asia. But this isn’t a book about supply chains or bottom lines.
Teachers, Teams & Tugboats is about the seven mentors who shaped his journey, the “tugboats” who provided guidance, protection, and course correction when he needed it most.
In this candid memoir, you’ll discover: How a motor vehicle violation at age 31 nearly destroyed his career, and the friend who drove 110 miles daily to save it; What it’s like to work under armed protection when union related decisions turn dangerous; The leadership lessons learned from navigating Chapter 11 bankruptcy and emerging stronger; Why the best mentors don’t create you in their own image, they help you create yourself; How to recognize and honor the tugboats in your own life before it’s too late.
Higgins writes with the honesty of someone who’s lived through chaos and came out grateful. His storytelling blends professional insight with personal vulnerability, offering lessons on teamwork, integrity, and the importance of “paying it forward.”
This book is for: Mid-to-senior logistics and supply chain professionals; Business leaders, MBA students, and emerging executives; Anyone seeking authentic mentorship wisdom over hollow leadership theory; Readers who appreciate memoirs like Shoe Dog, Principles, and Leaders Eat Last.
More than a career memoir, this is a guide to recognizing the people who make success possible, and a reminder to thank them before the opportunity passes.
Mine-Shift
Mine-Shift, by John Kitchen, is a time-slip adventure about Joel Penberthy, a teenage Cornish miner whose life is split between the brutal reality of the eighteenth century and the strange brightness of the twenty-first. Joel first stumbles into the future through an old mine passage, carrying with him fear, guilt, superstition, and a fierce loyalty to his injured father. His first clear reaction says a lot about the book’s heart: “I don’t belong here.” That feeling of being out of place drives the story, but so does Joel’s growing sense that belonging can change.
The novel is especially strong when it keeps Joel close to the physical world he knows. The mine is hot, dangerous, cramped, and full of old beliefs, while modern Cornwall feels almost magical through his eyes, with cars, phones, medicine, surfing, bright shops, and easy friendship. Kitchen gets a lot of mileage out of that contrast. The future isn’t treated as a joke or a simple rescue. It’s confusing, dazzling, and sometimes frightening, and Joel has to learn it piece by piece.
Joel’s friendships with Cass, Karl, and Ewan give the book much of its warmth. Cass is curious, bold, and kind, and her bond with Joel gives the story a tender pull without taking it away from adventure. Karl and Ewan help widen Joel’s world, while Dr Greaves brings practical hope through medicine. What’s nice is that these modern characters don’t just teach Joel things. They give him room to become more himself, and that makes his transformation feel earned.
At the same time, the story keeps one foot firmly in Joel’s old life. His father’s injury, Hab’s anger, the Pellar’s influence, and the suspicion of “black arts” create real pressure around every trip through the portal. Joel isn’t simply choosing between misery and comfort. He loves people on both sides of time, and that makes the ending land with a quiet sadness as well as relief. By the close, when Joel is described as “a twenty-first-century boy,” the line feels less like escape and more like the final shape of a hard choice.
Mine-Shift is a thoughtful adventure about courage, change, and the shock of seeing your own world from the outside. It blends Cornish mining history, folklore, friendship, and time travel into a story that feels accessible for older children while still carrying some emotional weight. Joel is easy to care about because he’s scared, stubborn, decent, and often overwhelmed, which makes his journey feel personal rather than merely fantastical.
Pages: 225 | ASIN : B0FP4C1DDY
Dog Tags and Ghost Roads
Dog Tags and Ghost Roads is a poetry collection about military service as both a calling and a haunting, moving from enlistment and duty into combat, homecoming, healing, and legacy. D.C. “Buddy” Lee writes from a place of deep reverence for veterans, families, faith, brotherhood, and the invisible weight that follows people long after the uniform comes off. The book begins with the solemnity of “The Oath” and “For God and Country,” then widens into the dust, salt, fear, and fellowship of service before settling into some of its most affecting terrain: the kitchen-table quiet of coming home, the startled body that still hears war in a slammed door, and the slow mercy of therapy, love, and ordinary mornings.
What moved me most was the book’s emotional honesty about what service costs. Lee doesn’t treat sacrifice as a clean, polished word. He lets it drag sand into the house. In “The Echoes of Service,” honor becomes heavy enough to make breathing hurt, and in “Where Shadows Wait,” home is warm but not simple, because safety feels like a language the veteran has forgotten. Those moments stayed with me because they feel intimate rather than ceremonial. I believed the wife’s hand on the shoulder, the daughter’s laughter in the kitchen, the veteran sitting on the edge of the bed watching the dark. The best pieces in the collection understand that war doesn’t always announce itself with gunfire. Sometimes it lives in a hallway, a cup of coffee, a flinch.
The writing has a strong, thunderous pulse, full of flags, storms, steel, salt, sacred vows, and ghosts. At times, that grand register gives the poems real force, especially in the sea poems like “Underway,” “Run Silent, Run Deep,” and “A Life in Salt and Wind,” where Lee’s Navy background brings texture and authority. I loved those sensory touches: brine, deck, whistle, harbor, anchor, tide. The collection uses repeated images of fire, bone, flame, honor, and eternal watchfulness. When Lee lets the poem breathe in a specific room with a specific person, the book becomes richer and more piercing.
I felt that Dog Tags and Ghost Roads is interested in bearing witness, and there’s something earnest and worthy in that. Its ideas are rooted in respect, resilience, faith, service, and the conviction that healing is not weakness but another form of courage. This is a heartfelt, reverent book with its strongest power in the places where public honor meets private pain, and I’d recommend it especially to veterans, military families, caregivers, and readers who want poetry that speaks openly about duty, trauma, love, and the long road home.
Pages: 92 | ASIN : B0DST3795Y
Violet Mystique: Part 1
Violet Mystique: Part 1 is a supernatural mystery thriller with a strong paranormal suspense thread. The story follows Jalyn Wilds, a young woman with strange violet eyes and abilities she does not fully control, after a robbery pulls police detective Ed Daza into her orbit. What starts as a criminal investigation quickly opens into something larger: disappearances, hidden experiments, a secretive colony, and people whose gifts have been treated less like miracles and more like property.
What I liked most was the way the book drops the reader straight into trouble. Jalyn is not introduced with a long explanation of who she is. We meet her under pressure, with a gun pointed at her, and that works. It tells us she is afraid, powerful, guarded, and tired of being seen as strange, all at once. The writing has a quick, pulpy energy that fits the genre. Scenes move fast. People argue, run, hide, fight, and reveal secrets before the dust has fully settled. At times, that pace can make the story feel crowded, but it also gives the book its bite. There is always another door opening.
I also found myself interested in the choices around Jalyn and Ed. Their connection could have been treated as simple attraction, but the book keeps tying it to fear, control, trust, and the danger of being known too well. That gave the relationship more weight for me. Madam is written as a clear villain, almost theatrical in her cruelty, yet the larger idea behind her is the part that stayed with me: what happens when people with unusual gifts are raised, trained, used, and traded like tools? That question gives the supernatural elements a harder edge.
I would recommend Violet Mystique: Part 1 to readers who enjoy paranormal suspense, supernatural mystery, and character-driven thrillers with romance simmering under the action. It will especially appeal to readers who like gifted heroines, secret organizations, moral gray areas, and stories where the mystery keeps expanding instead of staying in one neat box.
Pages: 254 | ASIN : B0GYVDHQZ3
Noir Tales Are The Modern Day Fairytales
Dark Side of Mercy centers around a private detective pulled into a case that begins as a missing persons case and quickly broadens into one of corruption, blackmail, and murder. What draws you to the noir genre?
Noir tales are the modern day fairytales. The genre allows me to explore the dark psychological themes that humans struggle with while they look for hope and redemption. There is a saying that the men and women in noir stories aren’t fallen angels, but weak people who’ve tumbled into the gutter. I like the struggle of those people often clutching at anything in hope of dragging themselves out of the gutter, but often failing.
The Arizona setting has a heavy, atmospheric presence—dust, heat, corruption, and isolation. How did place shape the tone and direction of the novel?
In the first novel, No Solace in Death, I used the heat to illustrate a sort of hell that the protagonist, Benjamin Thomas, feels that he is in. I believe the atmosphere should, in Noir tales, add discomfort to the protagonist’s struggle. In Dark Side of Mercy, I used the wind and sandstorms in the desert to convey the corruption underneath the facade of civility surrounding Benjamin, and that the facade will eventually disintegrate as quickly and easily as a sand dune in the wind.
Some scenes are deliberately uncomfortable and morally ambiguous. How do you navigate the line between realism and reader endurance in a story like this?
Noir is like Odyssyus crossing paths with doomed, unsavory, and broken characters in the underworld, except in noir the protagonist is, in many cases, more broken than the people he/she runs across. Every character in Dark Side of Mercy is morally broken in one way or another. How the characters react to their situation and environment determines their level of strength or corruptibility. I believe every reader of this particular genre expects to be made uncomfortable. Like it or not, readers are going along with the protagonist into the downward spiral and landing in the belly of the beast with him to witness the vulnerability and brokenness of every character they meet in the story.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available? Right now I only have one chapter of a novel that takes place in the 80s about a Korean man (child of a comfort woman) who owns and operates a small convenience store and witnesses a murder. I have a few ideas for other novels that are percolating in my mind right now. Some are darker than others, and require more thought before I can put them on paper. At this time, I have no date for my next novel.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website
While unravelling the mystery, Ben falls for Linda Lundlum, Horatio’s daughter—a striking and alluring woman whose motives seem to be to protect her father at all costs. In a world where truth hides in shadows and every clue leads deeper into the city’s corruption, Ben’s only hope to solve the case may rest in the hands of a recluse Holocaust survivor.
Dark Side of Mercy is the follow-up novel to No Solace in Death. Douglas Herle’s complex noir tale delves into the nature of corruption, while exploring tragic characters living in a world where making moral choices may not be the right ones.
Crazy or Dead
Crazy or Dead, by Mike Slavin, is a psychological thriller with a paranormal edge, built around Gabby Flowers, a psychology PhD candidate whose life is blown apart when her parents die in a house fire that turns out to be something much darker. Gabby is smart, grieving, sarcastic, and stubborn in ways that make her feel alive on the page. The story starts with loss, then quickly pulls her into séances, missing evidence, fake memories, suspicious strangers, and a growing fear that someone is trying to make her doubt her own mind.
What makes the book work is how tightly it stays inside Gabby’s experience. She’s trained to think like a scientist, so when impossible things happen, she doesn’t simply accept them. She questions herself, tests what she can, and keeps trying to separate trauma from truth. That tension gives the story its engine. When she says, “Nothing about my life feels normal anymore,” it lands because the reader has been right there with her, watching normal disappear one strange event at a time.
The cast around Gabby keeps the pressure high. Detective Sam Stone brings steadiness and warmth, while Ron, Natalie, Antoine, O’Brien, Anna, and Colt all add new layers of uncertainty. The book is especially strong when Gabby doesn’t know who to trust, because the threats aren’t only physical. They’re emotional and psychological, too. The plot keeps circling one brutal question: is Gabby seeing what’s real, or is someone carefully building a cage around her mind?
Slavin gives the story a conversational, fast-moving voice, and Gabby’s humor helps keep the heavier material from becoming too grim. She can be scared, furious, wounded, and funny within the same scene, which makes her easy to follow through some wild turns. The title pays off in a satisfying way near the end, with a line that captures the real heartbeat of the book.
Crazy or Dead is about survival, identity, and the fight to stay grounded when other people benefit from your confusion. It mixes murder mystery, psychological manipulation, family secrets, romance, and a hint of the supernatural into a story that’s bold and personal. Gabby’s journey from grief to defiance gives the book its emotional pull, and the final turn leaves the door open for more trouble in a way that feels fitting for her new, not-so-normal life.
The Fruit of The Spirit
Pari the Panda Learns About Patience follows a young panda whose frightening escape from a trap teaches her some important lessons in patience. Where did the idea for this story come from?
I wanted to write a series of picture books for children based on The Fruit of The Spirit. I also wanted to use different animal characters that children would be interested in learning about. I already had a beta group of children and took suggestions from them as I developed each story in the series.
What drew you to using a panda as the character who learns this lesson?
I also found it fun to use an animal that began with the same letter as the fruit: P for Panda and Patience.
Why do you think patience can be such a difficult lesson for children to learn?
Many people, young and old, find themselves in a bind because of acting on impulse. Waiting for what we desire while trying to remain in good spirits is tough.
What do you hope readers remember most about Pari long after they finish the story?
I hope readers will contemplate their actions, recognizing the potential for negative repercussions from hasty choices. I also hope that kids will embrace the “safety first” mentality.
Author Links: Amazon | GoodReads
to do everything.
One morning when Pari decides to swim right after breakfast and suffers
from a stomach cramp, she decides to lie down to rest on a grassy bank.
But little does she know that her simple choice has just led her into a scary
situation. Pari the Panda is about to learn a hard lesson about the importance
of patience in keeping herself safe.
In this cautionary story for children, a panda bear learns the hard way that
being patient in life will help her avoid potential dangers.
