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Mancini Blue
Maggie Toussaint’s Mancini Blue is a paranormal cozy mystery built around grief, art, and a distinctly Southern sense of community. Sixty-year-old Bob Calloway has moved to a Georgia barrier island after the supposed suicide of his wife, celebrated painter Sophie Mancini. When another woman is found dead and covered in Sophie’s signature shade of blue, Bob becomes both a suspect and an amateur investigator. The case soon reaches back into Savannah’s art scene, where a missing painting, falsified prescriptions, and suspicious exhibition shipments suggest that Sophie’s death was part of something much larger.
Bob gives the novel its personality. He’s stubborn, protective, occasionally exasperating, and still learning how to live after a breakdown fueled by alcohol and grief. His ability to sense emotional energy from people and objects adds a supernatural element, but it also works as an extension of his empathy. The family material is equally important. Bob’s strained relationships with his sons, his concern for his grandniece Gussie, and his lingering guilt over Sophie make solving the murder feel like a step toward rebuilding his life.
The mystery develops through an appealing mixture of police work, family conversations, art-world intrigue, and short passages from the killer’s perspective. Toussaint plants useful clues, especially around Sophie’s paintings and the people responsible for transporting them, while keeping several credible suspects in circulation. Some information is repeated as Bob reviews the case, and the broad humor occasionally bumps against the darker material involving addiction, sexual violence, and murder. Still, the coastal setting, colorful supporting cast, and unusual older male lead give the story a warm, eccentric character. Its most satisfying thread is Bob’s gradual movement from fixation and self-blame toward renewed trust in his family and in himself.
I’d recommend Mancini Blue to readers who enjoy character-driven cozy mysteries with a light psychic element and a slightly darker crime underneath the friendly small-town surface. It should particularly suit fans of mature protagonists, Southern settings, complicated families, and mysteries rooted in creative communities. Readers who like watching an amateur sleuth collaborate, and sometimes spar, with a capable police chief will also find plenty to enjoy. The book closes its central case while giving Bob a convincing emotional fresh start and leaving room for his intuition, his art studio, and his promising relationship with Chief Darlene Smiley to carry future stories.
Pages: 263 | ASIN : B0HCHW5JGT
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Fiction
The Literary Titan Book Award honors books that exhibit exceptional storytelling and creativity. This award celebrates novelists who craft compelling narratives, create memorable characters, and weave stories that captivate readers. The recipients are writers who excel in their ability to blend imagination with literary skill, creating worlds that enchant and narratives that linger long after the final page is turned.
Award Recipients
The Voice of Cuba by Amarilys Rassler
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
The Flour Girl
The Flour Girl by Sean Esson is a supernatural mystery thriller that takes a clever crime-fiction premise and pushes it into the afterlife. Frankie Jones wakes up dead, stripped of his memories and unsure of who he was, only to learn that his ability to move on is tied to Amelia Fournier, a murdered baker who needs answers of her own. From there, the novel becomes an afterlife mystery, a paranormal crime thriller, and a detective story all at once. Frankie and Amelia can float through walls, spy on the living, and navigate a version of the city they can no longer truly inhabit, while Frankie discovers he has the unusual ability to possess living people. Those supernatural rules aren’t just window dressing. They become investigative tools, complications, and eventually sources of real danger.
The strongest part of the novel is Frankie himself, especially once the investigation begins uncovering uncomfortable truths about the life he can’t remember. Esson builds the mystery around a question that’s more interesting than simply identifying Amelia’s killer: how responsible are you for the person you used to be when you no longer recognize that person in yourself? Frankie develops from a sarcastic, confused spirit into someone increasingly invested in Amelia, Detective Royce Sheffield, Detective Jason Phillips, and the idea that doing something good still matters even when the moral ledger looks hopelessly unbalanced. Amelia gives that arc its emotional center. Their banter makes the darker stretches of the supernatural detective fiction surprisingly warm, and their growing attachment gives the investigation consequences that aren’t limited to solving a crime.
Esson also gives the thriller side of the story plenty of room. The South Side Cartel investigation unfolds through surveillance, police work, interrogations, possessions, gunfights, hidden evidence, shifting suspects, and several revelations that substantially change what both Frankie and the reader understand about the case. The action is unusually detailed, particularly when it comes to firearms, tactical movement, and police procedure, which gives this paranormal thriller a methodical, physical quality even though its protagonist is incorporeal. At the same time, the book regularly returns to death, grief, guilt, justice, forgiveness, and the uneasy difference between punishment and redemption. The pacing moves between extended investigative or reflective passages and sudden bursts of violence, allowing the crime plot and the metaphysical story to develop alongside each other.
What makes The Flour Girl memorable to me is the way its supernatural mystery becomes a story about identity and choice. Frankie can’t undo Franklin Jones’s life, and the book doesn’t treat redemption as a convenient eraser. Instead, it asks what someone does with the opportunity to choose differently now. By the conclusion, Amelia’s murder has been resolved, but Frankie’s larger question has only become more interesting, and the final turn expands the premise naturally into a broader supernatural detective series. The result is a paranormal crime thriller with a surprisingly tender center, a strong first-person voice, and an afterlife mythology built to support more than a single mystery. The Flour Girl works as a murder investigation, a metaphysical thriller, and a character-driven story about discovering that who you’ve been and who you choose to become don’t always have to be the same person.
Pages: 324 | ASIN : B0HBFV1V87
Literary Titan Silver Book Award
Celebrating the brilliance of outstanding authors who have captivated us with their skillful prose, engaging narratives, and compelling real and imagined characters. We recognize books that stand out for their innovative storytelling and insightful exploration of truth and fiction. Join us in honoring the dedication and skill of these remarkable authors as we celebrate the diverse and rich worlds they’ve brought to life, whether through the realm of imagination or the lens of reality.
Award Recipients
ȚEPEȘ: VLAD III DRACULA by Sebastian Valerius
Out of the Water by K Browning
The Galaxy of Kon-Ki: Waking on Earth by Colin Nimer
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
The Numbers Six (Part 1)
Yvette Evans’s The Numbers SIX: Part One is an ambitious mythic fantasy that reimagines creation, the fall of humanity, and the origins of evil through a distinctly feminine lens. The story begins on a cosmic scale, introducing a universe populated by divine beings, magical “Paths,” living trees, and elemental creatures before narrowing its attention to Atom and the first woman, who eventually names herself Lilly. Lilly’s awakening becomes the emotional center of the book. Her struggle to be treated as an equal, her discovery of her wings and power, and her decision to define her own purpose turn a familiar origin story into one about self-possession, motherhood, betrayal, and the cost of freedom.
The novel’s world is packed with imaginative details. Trees have consciousness, flowers communicate, emotions can physically alter nature, and celestial beings move between fire, flesh, crystal, and shadow. Evans writes in a lush, highly ornamented style, often giving the setting as much personality as the characters. That density creates a story that feels closer to an oral cosmology or sacred epic than a conventional fantasy adventure. Even the unusual names, wordplay, recurring sixes, and chapter titles encourage the reader to look for hidden relationships. The book asks for careful attention, but it rewards that attention by gradually connecting its cosmic mythology to witch camps, inherited rituals, colonial privilege, illness, and the life of a young girl named Seren.
In spirit, the book recalls Octavia E. Butler, particularly Wild Seed, because both authors combine mythology, Black history, supernatural inheritance, and complicated struggles over power. Butler’s prose tends to be restrained and psychologically direct, while Evans favors abundance, symbolism, and sweeping description. Evans also gives the natural world a stronger speaking role. Earth, trees, flowers, blood, wind, and fire aren’t just scenery here. They’re witnesses, victims, conspirators, and carriers of memory. That choice makes the novel feel like a creation myth told not only by humanity, but by everything humanity has touched.
What stayed with me most was the book’s sense that ancient choices keep echoing through families and civilizations. Lilly’s resistance, Iblis’s wounded vanity, TOL’s grief, Prisca’s sacrifice, and Seren’s inheritance all become parts of the same long conflict. The later chapters bring that mythology into a recognizable modern world, giving the earlier cosmic material a more personal weight and ending on an ominous confrontation involving Annalise Minnott. The Numbers SIX: Part One is expansive, strange, passionate, and deeply interested in how stories shape ideas about gender, race, beauty, faith, and authority. It reads like the opening part of a much larger saga, with enough unresolved history and danger to make the next part feel necessary.
Pages: 139 | ASIN : B0F4X7HSHT
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Fiction
The Literary Titan Book Award honors books that exhibit exceptional storytelling and creativity. This award celebrates novelists who craft compelling narratives, create memorable characters, and weave stories that captivate readers. The recipients are writers who excel in their ability to blend imagination with literary skill, creating worlds that enchant and narratives that linger long after the final page is turned.
Award Recipients
Restoration by Laura Brooke
Even Angels Wear Leather Jackets and Ride Motorcycles by J.A. McGovern
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Literary Titan Silver Book Award
Celebrating the brilliance of outstanding authors who have captivated us with their skillful prose, engaging narratives, and compelling real and imagined characters. We recognize books that stand out for their innovative storytelling and insightful exploration of truth and fiction. Join us in honoring the dedication and skill of these remarkable authors as we celebrate the diverse and rich worlds they’ve brought to life, whether through the realm of imagination or the lens of reality.
Award Recipients
Crescent City Requiem by Brian Kaufman
The Suicide Council by Victer Hugo Basurco
Departure from Innocence by WILLIAM WILSON
Steel & Ballast by Markella Kara
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Each Perilous and Magical Adventure
Hallows Realm follows a young girl and her companions into a mysterious, shadow-filled realm after they uncover an urgent message begging them to save its author and avert disaster. What is the most rewarding aspect of writing a series?
The most rewarding aspect of writing a series is hearing first-hand from readers how they feel a connection with a certain hero, or villain, and how excited they are to read more about their favorite characters in the next book in the series. Many readers have commented on the realistic sibling relationships and friendships, and how these relationship dynamics resonate with them. Keeping the series going allows me to expand not only the storyline, but also on a character’s growth over time and through each perilous and magical adventure.
What was your favorite magical location or creature to invent?
My favorite creature hands-down is teenage Theo aka Theo the Lion; Roe, Ori, and Tora’s older and oftentimes overbearing brother who can magic himself into a huge, powerful lion. Theo the Lion is fearless and occasionally reckless, but a hero all the same, with all the courage of a lion and the big heart of an older brother. He is a Tamer who can control the animals with his powers. He is unselfish, protective, clever, and one of my favorite characters to write about whether he is Theo the Lion, or just plain Theo.
Many characters struggle with feeling inadequate or powerless. Why did you want to explore those emotions?
Feeling inadequate or powerless is a universally understood emotion, whether you are a young child, a teenager, or an adult. These emotions can sometimes separate us from having close relationships with others. The flip side of this is what I like to explore in all my books; how these feelings can bring us together and make us stronger. It’s within these struggles that courage, trust, and relying on friends and family really takes center stage. Overcoming our insecurities and struggles is part of being alive, and this is the sweet spot where hope shines the brightest and seemingly impossible battles are won.
What continues to inspire you to expand the world of Drifters Realm?
The flawed yet curiously relatable teenage characters and the endless possibilities for adventure, mischief, teenage angst, and a bit of magic are what’s driving me to expand the world of Drifters Realm. It’s also extremely motivating when a fan reaches out to me to find out when the next book will be released. It’s a thrill and a blessing for someone like me who loves telling stories.
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As the deadly Storm Catcher Curse spreads, teenagers across the realm are transformed into spectral Outsiders and towering, sentient trees. With enchanted paintings revealing events in real time, the siblings journey through the murky Elsewhere Dismal, the tangled Entangled Forest, and the web-choked Wailing Ruins to uncover the truth—and stop Councilman Jinn, who manipulates the true Storm Catcher, his daughter Ryah.
When Ori is bitten by a cursed spider and begins to change, saving the realm becomes heartbreakingly personal. The triplets must embrace their destinies as the Vanquisher, the Restorer, and the Bold—and discover that courage, hope, and family are the most powerful magic of all.
HalLows Realm, book four of the Drifters Realm fantasy adventure series, continues the tale of survival, friendship, and family.
