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Deep, Dark Concept
Smiling Faceless Woman follows a linguistics student whose carefully planned life unravels when terrifying paranormal experiences lead him into a group investigating the mysterious forces behind hauntings. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
In a way, I have been thinking about this story all my life. I was always interested in the supernatural and the paranormal, and devoured whatever content was playing on TV, and borrowed whatever books from the library on the subject. I used to go ghost hunting with my little brother. I have had many experiences I can’t explain. So, I guess this book was my way of making sense of spirits and hauntings and the afterlife. But the genesis of this specific idea was a very difficult semester I had in college. Like in the novel, I was overworked and stressed and burnt out, and found myself balancing everything on the line from grades to relationships to a few mysterious encounters. I would say the other inspiration was just being a healthcare worker, surrounded by the sick and the hurt and the dying. I have worked in many various historic facilities, and with each strange thing seen or heard or heard about, a kind of deep, dark concept brewed that much more.
How did you decide how much of the story should focus on everyday life versus supernatural events?
There were a few sentiments I had going in. I always appreciated college and that time in my life, being a mall rat. I started to feel like modern rock is kind of dead, so I wanted to relive that a little. And I missed the early internet days when memes were still new and fresh and just starting to blossom. My first drafts were actually a little too heavy on the day-to-day stuff so I had to pull back. Although it was fun to dip into nostalgia and coming-of-age territory, of course, this is first and foremost a horror suspense thriller. I consider the structure of the book in three acts. First is mostly romance and some paranormal. Second and third is some romance and mostly paranormal. The relationship starts as a foundation but becomes a kind of frame narrative because the action and mystery builds up then takes over. I think this approach worked because you really care for the main character first before every terrifying otherworldly threat.
What inspired the creation of SPIRAL?
During the preparation of this novel, I felt compelled to do research on a level I hadn’t done before. I always do some, but not to this extent. I talked to a paranormal investigator, a preacher and also a local expert. I actually went to reportedly haunted locations by myself at night with nothing but a flashlight. So, a lot is inspired from these conversations and these experiences. I got a lot of different perspectives and ideas. As for the group itself, the name was something I thought of a long time ago. I knew the story would begin with a protagonist and a love interest but expand to this whole other route where I needed a cast of characters. The initial concept was kind of like your typical crew from those paranormal investigation reality series before. But I decided to use each character to represent a new layer of depth. In doing so, I made each character very unique from one another, and there was a nice ongoing contrast which was so pleasant to capture.
What do you hope readers take away from Alex and April’s reflections on their past?
First and foremost, my goal was to make the reader fall in love with these characters, and to fall in love with these characters being together. My intention was for audiences to get a slice of their lives and personality, a taste of the chemistry and attraction between them, and feel how they go so perfectly together in a lot of different ways. But I wanted there to be flaws and imperfection and incompatibility to some extent that could be examined with a magnifying glass. I thought it would be interesting to see a whole relationship timeline, from the crush stage to the courting stage, getting comfortable and then getting complicated. My aim is to have introspective lingering questions about what defines love and romance, and what makes a relationship work or not work, plus timing, plus fate.
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SMILING FACELESS WOMAN is a multiple award winning textured, nostalgic, cerebral thriller that dissects college life versus the so-called real world, crosses blurry lines between just friends or more than friends, transports readers back to the age of Sony Ericsson and the Motorola Razr and early internet culture, and explores the possibility of an afterlife through a scientific, supernatural and spiritual lens.
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
Vanished Twin by Lawrence Hoffman
POINT FIRST by Nannette Potter
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
Walking Away by Richard Michael O’Meara
Pulsar: The Time Traveler by Alexander Heed
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Moloch and the Angel
Moloch and the Angel is a paranormal psychological thriller that opens with a childhood vision that transforms Anna Cordero Smith’s life. Decades later, now a practicing psychologist, she has buried her psychic abilities with the losses that shaped her. When Rachel McCormick seeks psychological help for her son Mel—named Moloch—Anna feels those powers stirring again. What starts as an unusual therapy case develops into a supernatural mystery and murder investigation involving telepathy, clairvoyance, psychic energy, family secrets, and a deeply troubled man who may be far more dangerous than Anna initially suspected.
Anna makes an engaging center for this psychic suspense novel because she approaches extraordinary events with the habits of a therapist. She analyzes behavior, questions motives, considers diagnoses, and keeps trying to separate intuition from evidence even while the evidence grows increasingly strange.
Mel is particularly effective as her opposite. His sessions move between vulnerability, resentment, disturbing fantasies, family trauma, and genuine psychic powers, creating psychological tension around what he believes, what he can actually do, and what he’s deliberately hiding.
There’s also a surprisingly warm domestic side to this supernatural thriller. Anna’s marriage to Kevin, her friendships, her patients, the animals around their home, her coffee rituals, and the familiar details of everyday life give the story an authentic feel between darker scenes. Those moments matter because the novel leans toward relationships as much as psychic phenomena. Confronting Mel forces Anna to reassess her mother’s psychic legacy and reclaim the gift she once associated with guilt and exploitation.
As the paranormal thriller builds toward its climax, the psychic elements become increasingly vivid, with telepathic attacks, energy drains, spirit guides, dream states, and battles fought as much through consciousness as through the physical world. The final confrontation delivers the book’s central insight: psychic power does not determine character; the choices made with it do.
With its mixture of psychological thriller, paranormal suspense, psychic mystery, family drama, and murder investigation, the novel offers a distinctive story about reclaiming identity while confronting someone determined to invade and control it. Moloch and the Angel gains real power from Anna’s struggle to separate clinical judgment, psychic intuitions, and fear. It pulls you in on a deeper level and doesn’t let go.
Pages: 314 | ASIN : B0H7T6KXF2
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.
