Blog Archives
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
A Good, Hard Slap
A Good, Hard Slap, by Catherine Bator, drops readers into 1930 Hollywood at exactly the right moment for trouble. Talking pictures are changing the industry, studio publicity departments are manufacturing reality, and movie star Garland Westover is dead. Seven women connected to the studio stenography pool know more about his death than anyone should, and they’re determined to keep that knowledge buried. At the center is Gracie Perkins, a sharp, ambitious stenographer who wants to write movies and has a much more complicated relationship with Garland than her friends realize. Bator uses that setup to create an engaging blend of historical fiction, mystery, and early Hollywood fiction, with suspense driven by secrets, loyalty, and the frightening ease with which a powerful studio can decide what the public will believe.
Gracie and her supervisor, Madeleine Singer, give the novel its emotional backbone. Both women are intelligent and capable, but they’ve learned different ways to survive a workplace where men hold nearly all the authority. Madeleine has spent years teaching her stenographers to remain professional, make no waves, and deliver a “good, hard slap” when a man crosses the line. Gracie, meanwhile, prides herself on being modern, independent, and harder to fool than everyone around her. Watching those beliefs unravel gives this women’s historical fiction story much of its force. As buried experiences finally get talked about, Gracie begins reconsidering what she thought she knew about Garland, while Madeleine confronts the cost of treating silence as protection. The book handles those realizations gradually, allowing the characters to recognize uncomfortable truths at the same pace the reader sees the larger pattern taking shape.
The Hollywood setting is also a major pleasure. Bator fills the story with studio lots, stenography offices, costume departments, publicity schemes, Prohibition-era restaurants, jazz clubs, movie premieres, temperamental writers, ambitious actresses, and the chaotic shift from silent pictures to talkies. The details make Kaplan Talking Pictures feel like an actual workplace. There’s plenty of humor in the daily absurdities, particularly when Gracie finds herself doing much of the real writing while highly paid men argue over who deserves the credit. That wit keeps the darker material from flattening the novel into a single mood. The early Hollywood historical mystery elements are strongest because they’re rooted in this working world, where a murder cover-up feels disturbingly compatible with an industry already accustomed to transforming scandals into carefully polished publicity stories.
What stayed with me most about A Good, Hard Slap is its interest in the stories people tell, both publicly and privately, and what happens when those stories stop being believable. Gracie’s dream of becoming a writer turns out to be especially fitting because she spends much of the novel sorting through competing versions of her own past before she’s ready to write one for herself. Her relationship with Detective Nick Zingarelli adds warmth and provides another way for her to reconsider ideas she’s treated as settled facts, while the final chapters give her choices about work, love, honesty, and ambition room to feel earned. As historical fiction set in Old Hollywood, the novel has glamour, crime, studio intrigue, and period detail, but its strongest current comes from the women behind the stars, the ones typing the scripts, keeping the secrets, and eventually deciding which stories deserve to be told.
Pages: 281 | ASIN : B0H7T3BNQ6
Earth’s Last Hope
Mary L. Schmidt’s Earth’s Last Hope is an apocalyptic survival novel that starts with a frighteningly simple problem: Yellowstone is about to erupt, and humanity has almost no time to prepare. When scientists realize the supervolcano is behaving far more aggressively than expected, President Joyce Zimmerman and government leaders move quickly to protect as many people as possible. Much of the story follows retired General James Tilson and his extended family as they take shelter in a massive underground complex beneath the Denver Federal Center. Schmidt spends a lot of time showing how bunker life actually functions, from hydroponic food production and medical care to schooling, security, recreation, and daily chores. That practical detail gives the novel the feel of both a disaster story and a survival manual, while the worsening eruption, ash-filled atmosphere, extreme cold, and collapse of normal society keep reminding everyone that the world above them is changing permanently.
What gives the book its personality, though, is its focus on family and community. James may be dealing with presidents, generals, secret facilities, riots, evacuations, and classified missions, but he’s also Grandpa James, a husband and the emotional center of a sprawling family. The quieter scenes matter just as much as the disaster scenes. People cook together, work in the hydroponic gardens, teach children, fall in love, get married, play games, paint, pray, deal with injuries, and eventually welcome new babies. Those moments create an unusual rhythm for an apocalypse novel because Schmidt is interested in more than simply surviving the next catastrophe. She’s interested in what people would do with ordinary life once ordinary life has been forced underground. Faith is also central to that vision. Prayer, gratitude, marriage, childbirth, and the belief that humanity has a future become recurring parts of the characters’ response to enormous loss.
About halfway through, Earth’s Last Hope expands from disaster fiction into science fiction when the Nyard, an advanced extraterrestrial race secretly connected to humanity since the Roswell era, become crucial to Earth’s survival. Their technology changes the scale of the novel dramatically. Instead of concentrating only on how long people can endure underground, the story begins asking whether the planet itself can be repaired. Yellowstone is permanently neutralized, new technology removes volcanic ash from the atmosphere, nanobots assist with cleanup, and a new source of clean energy helps humanity rebuild. In that sense, the book reminded me somewhat of Andy Weir’s The Martian. Both stories enjoy explaining solutions instead of simply announcing that a problem has been solved. Weir tends to build those solutions through tightly constrained engineering and scientific problem-solving, while Schmidt blends scientific explanation with speculative technology, government coordination, faith, and family life. Her canvas is also much larger. Instead of one person trying to stay alive, she follows an entire society trying to figure out what living should look like after almost losing the planet.
The result is a hopeful kind of apocalypse story. There’s tremendous destruction here, including mass death, ruined cities, toxic ash, starvation, psychological trauma, and the near extinction of humanity, but the novel keeps returning to rebuilding. By the final chapters, survivors are confronting what remains of Denver, salvaging materials, restoring communities, welcoming new life, and imagining a society built differently from the one that disappeared. The birth of Georgy near the end works especially well as a symbol of that direction, arriving just as the characters finally face the physical remains of their former homes. The epilogue carries that idea forward three years into reconstruction, with salvaged stone, granite, new infrastructure, and green energy becoming the foundations of another civilization. Earth’s Last Hope is ultimately a story about catastrophe as a test of cooperation. Its biggest interest is the question of what people preserve when nearly everything familiar is taken away, and its answer is remarkably consistent: family, knowledge, faith, useful work, community, and the determination to build something that can last.
Pages: 221 | ASIN : B0GX36GXN2
UTTER DARKNESS
Tony Knapp’s Utter Darkness is a Christian supernatural thriller that combines a small-town police investigation, human trafficking, family drama, and an increasingly visible war between good and evil. Ryan Fletcher arrives in Cedar Grove, Tennessee, hoping his move from the FBI to a police chief’s job will give his family a quieter life, but he’s already carrying memories of something inexplicable and frightening from Seattle. When seven-year-old Becky Perkins disappears, the investigation pulls Ryan toward an abandoned farm, a trafficking operation, corrupt local officials, and beings that don’t fit into an ordinary criminal case. What starts with Ryan wondering whether the evil he once witnessed was real eventually becomes a story in which the unseen spiritual world is every bit as consequential as the physical one.
The book works especially well when its supernatural conflict becomes personal. Ryan’s determination to protect Laura and their children gives the story an emotional center, while former police chief Walt O’Brien becomes its most complicated character. Walt’s grief over losing his son, resentment over losing his career, wounded pride, and spiritual bitterness make him vulnerable to exactly the kind of temptation the story wants to explore. His arc gives the book more weight than a straightforward battle with demons would have, because the darkness operates through recognizable human weaknesses before it ever shows its claws. Rebecca is another standout. Her repeated efforts to protect Becky and later Rachel give some of the book’s most frightening scenes a strong human counterweight. By the climax, the story has brought police officers, pastors, parents, children, skeptics, and believers into the same conflict, making the central idea quite clear: courage here means choosing whom and what you’ll trust when fear gives you every reason to surrender.
Readers familiar with Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness will recognize some of the territory. Both books treat spiritual warfare as a literal struggle in which demonic forces influence ordinary events while angels intervene in ways most people can’t see. Knapp gives that idea the rhythm of a police thriller, though, moving between crime scenes, interrogations, forensic evidence, corrupt officials, missing children, hospital emergencies, and supernatural encounters. The frequent shifts in point of view keep the story moving, and the dialogue has a direct, plainspoken quality that fits Cedar Grove and its law-enforcement characters. Scripture isn’t simply decoration here. It shapes the characters’ decisions and ultimately becomes part of the action itself, especially when Ryan, Jesse, Will, and Roger confront Murgley together and discover that their strength comes through faith, loyalty, prayer, and their willingness to stand beside one another.
What I liked most about Utter Darkness is that its real subject is allegiance. Ryan has to decide whether protecting the people he loves means sacrificing himself to evil or trusting God when he can’t see a way out. Walt has to confront what his anger and pride have cost him, and his final return to faith gives his story a painful but meaningful resolution. Even Roger’s crisis of faith matters because the book allows courage to include fear, doubt, retreat, and the decision to come back anyway. The final chapters provide a satisfying victory without pretending Cedar Grove’s spiritual war has ended. Ryan has his family and friends around him again, Rebecca has found a temporary home with the Fletchers, and Michael’s identity as Ryan’s supernatural protector becomes unmistakable, but Murgley is already gathering forces for another confrontation. That ending fits the book well. Utter Darkness is an energetic, faith-forward thriller about family, redemption, temptation, and the conviction that the darkest forces are real, but so is the light that opposes them.
Pages 299 | ASIN : B0FTTVWCTD
TwinStar
D Cohen’s TwinStar, the first novel in the GW Canyon series, is an aviation thriller built around a technological catastrophe and the people drawn into its widening consequences. The novel opens with Sierra West Flight 721 behaving as though an unseen operator has taken control, leaving its crew unable to command the aircraft before it crashes near Melrose, New Mexico. From there, Cohen expands the story into an investigation involving aircraft manufacturer TwinStar, software entrepreneur and pilot GW Canyon, systems engineer Allison Tobias, and an increasingly disturbing trail of compromised technology. The author announces his governing principle before the story begins: “Plots fade. Characters don’t.” That statement proves to be more than a preface to the novel. Although TwinStar contains sabotage, corporate intrigue, hidden alliances, violence, and multiple aviation emergencies, its central interest lies in the lives caught inside that machinery.
Allison is especially important to the book’s design. Her expertise in TwinStar’s onboard systems places her at the center of the technical investigation, but Cohen gives equal attention to the way she evaluates relationships, friendship, grief, and her own decisions. Her methodical temperament carries naturally from the laboratory into the rest of her life, creating a character whose professional intelligence and emotional intelligence continually inform one another. Other women, including Connie Finley, Elaine Ionello, Ming Hunter, Heidi Mesmer, and NTSB investigator Lisa Myers, broaden the novel beyond a single heroine and give its events several distinct human perspectives. GW remains a major presence, with his history as a rancher’s son, pilot, software entrepreneur, widower, and father gradually filling in the man behind the public success. His developing relationship with Allison becomes one of the novel’s principal emotional threads, and it works because their attraction grows through shared work, danger, candor, and increasing trust.
The technological mystery is carefully constructed around the CCS flight-control system and, eventually, a tiny P120 microchip capable of responding to concealed commands. A second aircraft incident at O’Hare, a dangerous live test aboard TwinStar #43, Ian Wunderlich’s suspicious death, and evidence of an insider at TwinStar progressively turn an apparent systems failure into deliberate sabotage. One of the book’s most effective discoveries comes when Heidi tests the suspect chips and realizes, simply, “It listens.” That compact observation changes the scale of the story. What first appears to be an aviation problem becomes a vulnerability embedded in ordinary electronics, with implications far beyond a single manufacturer or crash. Cohen handles this escalation through engineering details, corporate maneuvering, investigation, and physical danger, while keeping the technical material connected to recognizable stakes. The closing “News from the Future” section then carries those implications forward, showing how the P120 scandal eventually grows into an international crisis.
As a whole, TwinStar is a character-centered technological thriller with substantial strands of romance, corporate drama, aviation fiction, and family history. Its three-part structure allows the initial disaster to develop into a larger conspiracy while also making room for mourning, friendship, sexuality, parenthood, and second chances. The ending brings the investigative and personal arcs to different kinds of resolution: the immediate threat is exposed, the larger P120 story is positioned to reverberate beyond the novel, and Allison and GW arrive in Colorado with the possibility of a shared future that feels deliberately chosen. That balance defines the book. TwinStar treats technology as consequential because of the people who design it, exploit it, investigate it, and depend on it, and it treats intimacy with the same attention to observation and decision. The result is a novel in which the aviation mystery provides the structure, but character gives the story its lasting weight.
Pages: 337 | ASIN : B0H6T1J8BB
By Her Own Hand: War and Passion in a Woman’s Wounded Heart
Jack Deveny’s By Her Own Hand is a war novel, romance, and psychological thriller built around two soldiers who come home carrying much more than memories of Afghanistan. Madeline Crowne and Eliot Lange are both fugitives in their own ways, haunted by disastrous moments in combat that left innocent people dead and their own lives shattered. Madeline’s guilt is especially central to the story. She enters the military partly to escape the pain of leaving her abused younger brother behind, only to accidentally kill a pregnant Afghan woman during a chaotic firefight. Eliot carries a parallel burden after trying to protect his best friend, Will, during a severe PTSD episode and accidentally causing the death of an Afghan civilian. Those opening events give the novel its emotional foundation and explain why both characters see themselves as guilty even when the circumstances are far more complicated.
What makes the novel so interesting is how quickly it moves from the battlefield into a much more personal story. Madeline and Eliot find comfort in each other, and their relationship becomes the safest place either of them has known. Their romance is tender, physical, and sometimes intensely sentimental, but that fits these characters because affection isn’t just affection to them. Holding hands, sleeping beside someone, or being touched without fear becomes evidence that life can still contain something good. Deveny frequently shifts perspective between Madeline and Eliot, letting readers experience how differently they carry similar kinds of guilt. At the same time, the story keeps widening. Madeline’s search for her addicted brother, Eliot’s concern for Will, and the dangerous Mira all pull the couple back toward the violence they’re trying to escape. Mira is especially important because her history with Madeline connects love, jealousy, exploitation, and revenge, giving the novel much of its thriller energy.
In that sense, By Her Own Hand reminded me somewhat of Kristin Hannah’s The Women. Both stories are deeply interested in what happens after combat, especially when a soldier returns carrying guilt and trauma that ordinary life can’t easily absorb. Deveny takes a more action-driven and romantic approach, mixing PTSD, crime, pursuit, international travel, and courtroom drama into the same story. His characters tend to experience everything at full emotional volume, so the book has the feel of a sweeping melodrama as much as a military novel. That intensity works best when Madeline and Eliot’s private pain collides with the question of how other people judge what happened in war. By the final sections, the chase has evolved into a legal reckoning, and the same events that have tortured the characters internally have to be retold as evidence, testimony, and competing versions of the truth. Madeline’s trial, for example, forces witnesses to confront how little certainty can exist in the smoke and confusion of combat.
What I liked most was the book’s belief that healing can become a responsibility. Madeline and Eliot don’t just want to survive what happened to them. By the end, they begin imagining lives built around helping people who have suffered in ways they understand personally. Eliot wants to work with veterans who have PTSD in honor of Will, while Madeline considers helping wrongly accused veterans or women affected by sex trafficking. That ending gives the title another dimension. The characters have spent much of the novel feeling as though their own hands caused destruction, but those same hands can eventually comfort, defend, and rebuild. It’s a very earnest novel, and its mix of war, romance, trauma, crime, and redemption gives it an unusually broad emotional range. For readers who like character-driven stories where love is tangled up with guilt, danger, and the difficult work of living after violence, By Her Own Hand has plenty to hold onto.
Pages: 312 | ASIN : B0FRP4NQY7
Olivia
Michael E. Bowers’s Olivia is a sprawling, multigenerational family tragedy inspired by true events and written as a prequel to Captured by COVID, Deceit, Conspiracy & Death. It begins by tracing the histories of the people who shaped Olivia, then gradually brings those separate lives together around a devastating crime and its long aftermath. The book moves through Depression-era Youngstown, military life, family courtship, 1980s Acapulco, cartel violence, government secrecy, psychiatric treatment, and emerging technology. That wide scope gives the novel the feel of a family chronicle fused with a conspiracy thriller.
At the center of the story is the Schultz family, whose warmth makes the darker turns hit with real force. Olivia’s teasing relationship with her parents feels casual and lived-in, while Allen and Kim’s marriage is presented through jokes, affection, arguments, and shared memories. Bowers spends considerable time establishing earlier generations, particularly Bill’s difficult childhood and Kim’s formative losses. Those histories aren’t decorative. They show how abandonment, loyalty, grief, and survival travel through a family, shaping how each person responds when life becomes unbearable.
The novel’s most striking quality is its willingness to follow trauma beyond the event that caused it. Olivia’s death becomes the beginning of a second story about grief, delusion, institutional power, buried evidence, and Allen’s consuming search for the truth. The plot grows increasingly ambitious as Allen rebuilds his life through education and technological research, only to turn that new knowledge toward a deeply personal reckoning. Bowers writes in a direct, plainspoken style, mixing blunt violence and sexual material with domestic humor and emotional vulnerability. The result can be startling, but it fits a story populated by people whose feelings, appetites, anger, and pain are rarely restrained.
Olivia is a novel about what happens when love has nowhere safe to go. It carries the momentum of a thriller, but its deepest concern is memory: the stories families preserve, the truths institutions suppress, and the private realities the mind creates when ordinary reality becomes intolerable. Its large cast and long historical reach build toward a final convergence that reframes the entire book as the origin of a much larger act of vengeance. Raw, relentless, and deeply personal, Olivia turns one family’s unbearable loss into a haunting story about memory, truth, and the price of refusing to let the dead be forgotten.
Pages: 343 | ASIN : B0CWS68XHJ
