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Bones of Black Saints
Alex Charns’s Bones of Black Saints is a legal thriller and courtroom drama rooted in the politics, history, and racial tensions of Durham, North Carolina. The case centers on Marcos Salazar, a young Black Lives Matter activist accused of shooting a white police officer during a traffic stop. His defense rests with veteran civil rights attorneys Star Gwiazda and Zenko Luczek, who believe the officer shot himself and that the police department has closed ranks around him. From jury selection through closing arguments, the novel turns legal procedure into a contest over whose version of reality will survive.
Zenko’s first-person narration gives this crime novel its distinct personality. He’s anxious, funny, devoutly Catholic, obsessed with hockey, and deeply shaped by his Polish family’s experiences during World War II. His thoughts move freely among the trial, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, the Greensboro Massacre, old wounds, and elaborate hockey metaphors. Those digressions make the story feel intimate and politically alert, though I did feel that their frequency can slow the courtroom suspense at times. They also reveal how history lives inside Zenko’s daily choices, especially his determination to recognize fascism and institutional abuse before they’re allowed to hide behind respectable appearances.
The courtroom scenes are the strongest part of this police corruption thriller. Charns, a civil rights attorney, writes with a practitioner’s command of motions, evidence, jury selection, witness preparation, and cross-examination. Star is especially memorable, confronting hostile witnesses and prosecutorial misconduct with theatrical nerve and sharp legal instincts. Her relationship with Zenko brings humor and affection to proceedings charged with danger. Their shared mental health histories add further depth, showing two capable advocates who rely on medication, routines, friendship, faith, and hockey to remain steady under extraordinary pressure.
As social justice fiction, Bones of Black Saints connects one contested traffic stop to racial profiling, white supremacy, economic inequality, police solidarity, and the limits of courtroom justice. Its humor keeps the political argument lively, while its detailed trial strategy makes the eventual verdict feel earned. The final development lands with particular force because it exposes acquittal as one moment in a much longer struggle. This is an impassioned legal thriller about lawyers fighting for a client while wrestling with their own histories, blind spots, fears, and stubborn faith in justice. I recommend Charns’s novel to readers who enjoy thought-provoking legal thrillers that explore racial injustice and the complex pursuit of justice.
Pages: 419 | ASIN : B08F75MNK2
Misplaced Trust
The Climb follows a grieving attorney and an international missionary team whose journey into a politically unstable nation becomes increasingly dangerous and deadly. What inspired the idea behind The Climb and the larger series you’re beginning with this novel?
I joined a mission trip to South America in 2018. That trip was preceded by several years of court work as a lawyer, along with the experiences of my early life. Together, these influences sparked the idea behind The Climb. However, while they shaped the framework of the story, their role provides more context than consequence. The real mission trip was very different from the one portrayed in the novel, and although the main character borrows elements from my life, many aspects diverge—such as the death of Sarah.
The true driving forces behind The Climb and its plot were several, including, inter alia, a human‑trafficking seminar I attended in 2017 and various influences from film, music, literature, and news. The motivational tone of the novel grew out of two long‑standing aspects of my personality: motivation and faith. I have always viewed hardship as a platform for growth. But the only way to truly achieve that is through Christ, and the best way to show that to others is by using the talents He has given me.
My walk with God has been far from perfect. Very often, it feels as though the things I want to do, I do not. Interestingly, that struggle became a thread stitching pieces of the novel together. Many of the characters in The Climb reflect that reality. They come from imperfect backgrounds and lead imperfect lives. Their struggles mirror my own walk with God.
The novel explores trust on several levels, including trust in other people, leaders, institutions, and God. Why was trust such an important theme for this story?
Trust is something many overlook, yet it can have tremendous impact. When attempting a difficult journey, misplaced trust can derail us and prevent us from completing it. Sometimes that comes from an overreliance on others or on things. Other times, it comes from the overconfidence we place in our own abilities. The book uses this theme to remind us whom we should truly trust. We are imperfect creatures—failing even ourselves. How could we expect others not to fail us?
What do you hope readers take from the idea that faith doesn’t necessarily prevent hardship but can influence how someone moves through it?
“Faith doesn’t prevent hardship” is a takeaway in and of itself. Faith is one of many approaches a person can take when facing difficulty. Some always run. Some place trust in themselves. Others place trust in things or people. Choosing faith ensures God is present when hardship comes. However, no matter what choice we make, life quickly teaches us—we must choose.
Will future books continue exploring Santiago and its political and criminal conflicts, or will the series broaden into other settings and challenges?
The story will remain rooted in Santiago. However, the geographical settings continue to change as the narrative moves forward, and new challenges will emerge.
At the conclusion of The Climb, the characters aren’t necessarily safe. Many events in the book carry deeper significance than readers may initially realize. The origins of certain characters—and the reasons they find themselves in this dangerous situation—take on greater meaning as the larger narrative unfolds.
As for timing, I can’t yet say when the next installment will be released. I only write when I’m able to, and I take my time, because writing should be enjoyable.
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After the death of his fiancée—three months pregnant—Mark Crosby lost sight of the life he once knew. He performs his 9-to-5 job and returns home to his elderly grandmother, occasionally attending a nearby church, if only just. But the invitation of an old presbyter changes everything: a mission trip to the breakaway territory of Santiago—the last place on Earth he wanted to go.
Joining a team of eight volunteers—alongside three missionaries, a bus conductor, the driver, and his family—he embarks on a journey through a country caught between escalating civil unrest and a strained dictatorship.
When their trip to the remote village of Puerto Palermo takes a wrong turn, the tour bus crashes off the road near a deep precipice, and Crosby makes a troubling discovery—the accident wasn’t an accident.
Nimble, Restless Intellects
World of Worlds follows young travelers, reporters, climbers, drifters, and idealists across continents and political upheaval as adventure becomes a reckoning with danger, history, and the self. What drew you to the period between 1968 and 1981 as the backdrop for these stories?
WORLD OF WORLDS is a collection of action and adventure stories during a time of transition, upheaval, exploration, and self-discovery. These tales are the product of culture shock. Or more precisely, reverse culture shock. Whatever it was by the mid-1970s, my life on the road at an end but not quite willing to give it up, I decided to try my hand at literature by recreating in fictional form the characters, complexities, landscapes, situations, tastes, smells, psychologies, dramas, insights, pleasures, and terrors I had seen in the worlds I had traveled. The main time focus is from 1968, that hinge year, to 1974. That was the moment of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War, when Apartheid firmly gripped South Africa and wars of national liberation swirled around it, and African dictatorships sprouted like poisonous weeds, and political killing became the norm.
Many of the characters are young, restless, and morally tested. What interested you about writing people at that stage of life?
Only young people should contemplate making the journeys described in the stories. The characters – overwhelmingly young – are Americans, mostly, but there also are Australians, Brits, and Africans. An alienated, energetic, and rebellious bunch, they have been on the move for months on end. They often are challenged by the situations they encounter. That is due partly to their limited experience and judgment. Also, they are alone in foreign spaces, where everything is new and strange. To overcome their problems and to succeed, they need courage, quick thinking, energy, curiosity, and empathy in much higher doses than if they had simply stayed at home. The characters create their own predicaments and manage their own escapes. Or sometimes not.
The stories balance adventure with reflection and consequence. How did you approach that balance?
The characters in WORLD OF WORLDS have nimble, restless intellects. They think a lot. But they face fearful stress often of their own making: an engagement going up in smoke; an illusory friendship unmasked; ideals nearly betrayed; a journalist chasing a perilous story; a conniving financial fugitive near broke in central Africa; an Englishman begging in India; a hitchhiker surrounded by violent hatred in South Africa; an overworked reporter about to burn his bridges; a mountain climber escaping from himself; two travelers in a leaky canoe on the Congo River. Consequence and responsibility come from personal choice; they can be frighteningly unpredictable.
What do you hope readers take away from the collection’s encounters with political unrest, culture shock, and personal ambition?
It’s usually a good idea to be aware of what the locals are thinking when one is abroad. It can save you a lot of trouble. The triad of political unrest, culture shock, and personal ambition were constants among travelers in underdeveloped parts of the world in the 1960s and 1970s, though. They were particularly prominent in Africa amid the instability and aftershocks that followed the end of colonialism. Is that moment behind us? The characters make unlikely role models. As one reviewer of WORLD OF WORLDS remarked, “What lingers most powerfully is the remarkable fortitude of these central characters. Seen from a contemporary perspective, they feel almost otherworldly—resilient figures thrust into remote corners of the globe, often facing misfortune or profound uncertainty. One cannot help but wonder if, placed in similar predicaments today, would modern travelers possess the same grit and resourcefulness?”
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The characters, Americans mostly-tough, rebellious youth, far from home, on bad roads, usually broke-test cultural and racial limits in strange, alluring, but pitiless surroundings, exposed to relentless existential and physical pressures that threaten their moral underpinnings and their very survival.
WORLD OF WORLDS readers prize Vietnam-era historical fiction, post-colonial Africa travel stories, character-driven 1970s political thrillers, coming-of-age adventure. They want moral seriousness alongside the action. Anyone who has traveled the world’s back roads-foreigners abroad, children of expats, tourists, students of post-independence Africa, Africans, Europeans, Americans, Australians-will recognize the authenticity immediately.
The author is an accomplished novelist, journalist, and diplomat. But above all, he was there.
Fatal Consequences
Deadly Dial follows a radio host who takes a chilling late-night call that opens the door to a civic nightmare. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
When I began developing the novel, the country was on the verge of another government shutdown. Approximately 1.4 million people (670,000 federal employees and another 730,000—including personnel from the TSA, NASA, OSHA, and the EPA) were forced to work without immediate pay. With roughly $14 billion in wages temporarily withheld, localized consumer spending collapsed. The politicians orchestrating this crisis appeared entirely insulated from its fallout, detached from the reality of citizens struggling to afford basic necessities.
Simultaneously, public discourse was fracturing; people grew increasingly brazen, invoking their First Amendment rights while remaining blind to the consequences of their words. While no single event inspired this book, the collective anxiety and social friction of that era heavily shaped the narrative. This atmospheric tension is also why I chose to leave the setting unnamed—I wanted to capture a universal cultural climate rather than anchor the story to a specific location or headline.
Were there particular crime novels, political scandals, or media events that influenced the book?
Although I intentionally steered clear of writing the story based on direct current events, reality had a way of bleeding into the pages. A mere week into writing the manuscript, a well-known conservative commentator was assassinated during a Q&A session on a university campus as he fielded questions about violence. Ironically, he was a man of faith who prided himself on unfiltered speech, and his sudden death served as a chilling, real-time validation of what I was exploring in my fiction. It proved, in the most tragic way possible, that our current culture of reckless speech carries heavy, sometimes fatal, consequences.
Did you want readers to fear the Prophet as a person, or as a symptom of something larger within the city?
I wanted readers to fear the Prophet as a symptom of a much larger, systemic issue within society. On a personal level, the Prophet simply mirrors the dark realities we see every day: politicians driven by corruption, self-interest, and a complete disregard for the “ordinary person.” The true horror stems from the reality that, in our world, these figures rarely face consequences for the devastation they cause. In my novel, however, that immunity is stripped away. While I am certainly not advocating for real-world assassination, within the heightened dramatic stakes of the book, these corrupt actors are finally exposed and forced to face the ultimate reckoning for their actions.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
Writing has truly become something I simply cannot put down; creating these worlds and sharing them with readers is incredibly therapeutic and fulfilling. Right now, I am juggling several exciting projects. I am currently finishing a medical-dental suspense thriller titled A Deadly Extraction. Additionally, I have three completed, fully edited novels ready to go for The Dante Villehart Files series, along with a few standalone projects. My main focus right now is deciding whether to continue down the self-publishing route or pursue traditional publishing for these next releases. Either way, there is a wealth of new material coming very soon!
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In a world where words can wield deadly power, talk show host Riley Anderson finds herself at the epicenter of a possible political storm. When an anonymous caller, later dubbed “The Prophet”, rants about government corruption, his chilling threats suddenly turn into reality as the politicians he names, along with some of their associates, begin to turn up dead.
As fear grips the city, Riley struggles with the weight of her role in amplifying the chaos. Teaming up with seasoned detective Alex Thompson and tech whiz Eleanor “Ellie” Mitchell, Riley embarks on a harrowing quest to uncover the truth behind the calls. But when they discover that the number used by the caller belongs to a man who has been presumed dead for years, the lines between reality and conspiracy blur.
With each shocking revelation, Riley must confront the haunting legacy of a man driven by vengeance and the dark secrets that could change everything. As the clock ticks down to the next assassination, Riley and the team must race against time to unravel a deadly game that could cost her–and everyone in the city–everything.
Perfect for fans of political thrillers, murder mysteries, and fast-paced suspense, Deadly Dial delivers a pulse-pounding ride where the truth is the deadliest weapon of all.
Deadly Dial: A Political Thriller
In Michael H. Balfour’s Deadly Dial, radio host Riley Anderson takes a late-night call from a chilling anonymous voice known as the Prophet, and that call becomes the first note in a larger civic nightmare. As political murders, public confessions, hidden corruption, and copycat violence ripple through the city, Riley joins Detective Alex Thompson and forensic analyst Ellie Mitchell in trying to understand whether they are hunting a killer, a movement, or the city’s own diseased conscience made audible.
I was pulled in by the book’s atmosphere first. The city feels perpetually fluorescent, rain-smeared, and morally overheated, a place where every institution has a locked drawer and every public statement sounds half-rehearsed. Riley is a strong center for that world because she is not simply brave or clever; she is complicit in the strange machinery of attention. Her microphone gives her power, but it also makes her vulnerable, and the novel is at its best when it asks whether exposing rot is the same thing as feeding it.
The strongest scenes have the tension of a broadcast where no one can find the off switch. The Prophet’s voice is grandiose, sometimes almost baroque, but that theatricality works because the book understands spectacle as a weapon. I also enjoyed the uneasy partnership between Riley and Alex, which gives the story a human voltage beneath the larger political conspiracy. The prose leans into noir darkness, but its best images have a serrated beauty, turning offices, studios, courtrooms, and evidence rooms into haunted civic organs.
This book is best suited for readers of crime thrillers, conspiracy thrillers, and noir mystery fiction, especially those who like investigations tangled with media ethics and institutional decay. Readers who enjoy the grim procedural pressure of Michael Connelly mixed with the paranoid civic sprawl of James Patterson’s darker thrillers will find familiar pleasures here. Deadly Dial is a tense political thriller about what happens when a city finally hears the sound of its own corruption calling back.
Pages: 265 | ASIN : B0GHPW46JL
Lifelong Traveler
Balance of Evil follows a retired mining executive who happens upon a titanium USB on a Cabo beach and finds himself involved in a conspiracy involving a secret Cold War pact. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
I’m a walker. On vacation, I walk every day, preferably on a beach. Years ago, on one of those walks, I started asking myself, What if? What would it take to upend an ordinary man’s life with a single object in the sand? That question kept building, walk after walk, until I had a book.
Scott Barton is not a typical action hero; he’s older, reflective, and recovering from a major health scare. Why did you choose to center the story on a protagonist at this stage of life?
Thrillers usually hand the world to people in their thirties, but I wanted someone with more depth, confidence, and means, which meant someone older. Scott is close to my age, so I knew the ins and outs of his head. I wanted a person with a history, a heart that had betrayed him, and enough energy and wit to fight back.
The novel moves across multiple countries and political landscapes. How did you research and construct such a global setting while keeping the narrative cohesive?
I’m a lifelong traveler. At eighteen, I spent a year crossing Europe and reached as far as Turkey, and I’ve been traveling ever since. I’ve stood in most of the places in this book. The rest I researched the way I travel: through blogs, local writers, food, and history. Skip the guidebooks. They never tell you what a city actually feels like at three in the afternoon.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I just finished my third nonfiction book on branding, and I’m well into the sequel to Balance of Evil, called LIES. The first book ended with the conspiracy only half-uncovered and several characters still unaccounted for. LIES picks up there. The pact didn’t end at Camp David in 1959—and it isn’t ending now, either.
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Driven by shocking discoveries that challenge his resolve and health, Scott teams up with his estranged daughter and a brilliant rogue hacker. Together, they work to expose the terrifying depths of a shadowy operation manipulating world events. As their mission intensifies, Scott faces devastating betrayals, unimaginable sacrifices, and deadly forces far greater than he ever imagined.
Balance of Evil delivers a fast-paced, thought-provoking political thriller packed with high-stakes action, chilling conspiracy, and brutal moral conflict. Fans of Baldacci, Ludlum, or Flynn will love this gripping tale of resilience, justice, and the fight against corruption.
Can one man tip the scales against a powerful shadow government? Or has evil already won?
Don’t wait—grab your copy today and immerse yourself in this edge-of-your-seat thriller!
Mr. Gobscheit
Mr. Gobscheit, by Avery Mann, follows semi-retired American naval officer and diplomat Mark Jamison, happily tucked away with his wife Sarah in Angel Landing, until an early-morning call from his old friend Foggy Gorgarty yanks him back into the world of espionage and geopolitics. Jamison is quickly reactivated by US naval intelligence and dispatched to Dublin under diplomatic cover, notionally to advise on safeguarding the undersea fiber-optic cables that make Ireland a digital hub, and less openly to nudge the country toward NATO membership. Once in Ireland, he finds himself reporting—at least on paper—to Jack Gobscheit, a vain, corner-cutting defence official whose celebrity stems from having “persuaded” Moscow to remove a loose Russian nuclear device from Irish waters near the AE6 relay station. Jamison, Foggy, and the American naval attaché Tom Harrington slowly uncover the truth behind that device, a Russian trawler snooping around the cables, and a web of connections linking the Irish ministry, the Russian embassy, and a powerful transatlantic surveillance contractor—culminating in a high-stakes play that weaponizes undersea infrastructure, media leaks, and public outrage to reshape Ireland’s debate over neutrality and NATO.
I enjoyed how unabashedly character-driven this thriller is, even when it’s neck-deep in technical and political detail. Jack Gobscheit is drawn as a kind of tragicomic embodiment of mid-level power: smug, lazy, eager for status, and entirely willing to trade national security for a slice of a Kremlin-backed hotel empire. His partnership with Russian political operator Sergay Markov, their pilgrimage to Putin’s seaside dacha at Gelendzhik, and Jack’s golf-course alliance with a very recognizable American president give the book an almost satirical energy; the scenes where global security is haggled over between tee shots or glossed in translation so Jack can focus on his future casinos are darkly funny and slightly chilling.
On the other side, you have Foggy–wry, loyal, quietly competent, and his complicated entanglement with Jack’s wife Sally, whose affair doubles as a human-scale melodrama and an ingenious way for NATO to keep eyes on a man who might be selling out his country one memo at a time. That blend of farce and genuine menace worked for me: nobody here is a flawless superhero, but you can feel how venality at the middle tier of government can be just as dangerous as malice at the top.
The novel grounds itself in real-world developments: Snowden’s revelations about NSA cable taps, Medvedev’s explicit threat to treat undersea cables as legitimate wartime targets after Nord Stream 2, the expansion of Russian espionage in Dublin, and the role of big tech data centers in Ireland’s economy are all woven into the narrative. I appreciated the topicality. This really is a thriller of now, not some abstract Cold War rehash. Long passages walk the reader through the architecture of ONI’s technical centers or the economics of Ireland’s data-center boom. The book earns its techno-thriller label with a real sense of dread. I just occasionally wished for one less paragraph of explanation and one more scene of Jamison actually wrestling with the moral cost of his schemes.
I’d recommend Mr. Gobscheit to readers who gravitate toward geopolitical thrillers, techno thrillers, spy novels, and political satire stories, especially anyone curious about how vulnerable our invisible infrastructure really is. If you like the mix of policy detail and moral ambiguity in a Tom Clancy novel, but wouldn’t mind a sharper, more ironic eye on bureaucratic ego and transatlantic dysfunction, this will feel pleasantly familiar. For me, Mr. Gobscheit is a timely, slightly barbed thriller that proves undersea cables and Irish neutrality can be just as gripping as missiles and moles.
Pages: 181 | ASIN : B0DYV66C5L
A Real Collusion
A Real Collusion is a political thriller told through the eyes of Skip Winters, a mid-level ad guy who looks back on his friendship with John Campbell and the wild rise and fall of a grassroots movement. It starts small, with a silly local fight over cigar smoke at a community board meeting in the Bowery, where John’s angry “I object” moment and a quick handshake outside the gym turn into a tabloid photo and a cable-news booking. From there, Skip helps John ride a wave of viral attention into the creation of the American Coalition, a scrappy effort to break the two-party lock, curb big money, and push more honest voting in Congress. As donors, TV producers, and dark-money groups close in, the story widens from New York to Washington and Philadelphia, where the movement crashes into a secretive business council and a lurking gunman in the crowd, leaving John’s legacy split between real reform and a sense that the system still has its hands on the wheel.
Skip sounds like that smart, slightly bitter friend who tells a story over a drink and keeps circling back to the parts that really hurt. The early chapters are vivid and weirdly fun: folding chairs tipping over in a hot school gym, cops’ lights splashing off old brick, a stunned ride on the F train with the Post open to a photo of your buddy on the front page. The scenes in the bar, the cramped apartment, the ad agency office feel specific and lived in, and the jokes land with a light touch instead of feeling like “political satire.” The author knows how to tighten the screws; the book shifts from goofy excitement to real tension smoothly, and by the time CNN calls and big donors sniff around, the momentum feels natural, not like the plot is dragging the characters along.
I did feel the “novel and exposé” label in the writing. When Skip and John hammer out the American Coalition platform and talk through campaign finance, independent candidates, and the way corporations game the rules, the book turns into a kind of civics lesson. I did not mind that most of the time, because Skip is honest about his own ego and fear, and that keeps the big ideas grounded in one guy’s midlife crisis and his hunger to matter. Still, a few speeches run long, and some side characters can drift toward types more than people. The scenes that follow the BCL and the man in the crowd with a gun, though, hit hard. They show how a hopeful movement can be bent or broken by a handful of people with money and no shame, and they made me uncomfortable in a way that felt earned rather than melodramatic.
The book made me angry, sad, and weirdly hopeful all at once. The introduction lays out a blunt case that the real threat to American democracy comes from inside, from quiet collusion between parties and donors who let inequality balloon while the middle class slides, and the plot keeps circling that point without ever feeling like a pure lecture. I liked how the story shows the media as both amplifier and filter, how a tossed-off joke about both parties “sucking” becomes a brand, how consultants and billionaires talk about “fixing the system” while protecting their own slice. The ending, with John gone and a handful of independents in Congress, hit me hardest; change happens, but not cleanly, and the people who lit the fire do not always get to see the house rebuilt. That left me thinking less about whether the plot was “realistic” in a narrow sense and more about how much of it already feels true.
I would recommend A Real Collusion to readers who enjoy political stories with heart, anyone who follows American politics and feels worn down but not completely checked out, and folks who like character-driven fiction about friendship, compromise, and the cost of sticking your neck out. If you are okay sitting with some ambiguity, some righteous anger, and a stubborn streak of hope, you’ll enjoy this novel.
Pages: 286 | ASIN : B0G5K3BJ1K
