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Carrasco 67′ A harrowing tale of an Imperialist Pig
Carrasco ’67 is a historical suspense novel that drops the reader into Montevideo in 1967 and builds its story around political fear, family vulnerability, and a city that feels like it’s listening in. Author Elaine Broun frames the book as “a fictitious interpretation based on a true story,” and that matters, because the novel reads like a dramatized account of a real danger rather than a purely invented thriller. From the opening phone call, when Peter tells Paula, “The children, us, we are in danger,” the book announces exactly what kind of story it wants to be: urgent, personal, and rooted in the panic of trying to protect a family when the world around them has turned unstable.
What the novel does especially well is create a constant sense of exposure. Broun gives the political climate a lived-in texture through hotels, offices, chauffeurs, school runs, dinner events, bodyguards, and whispered logistics. The setting isn’t just backdrop. It’s the pressure system that shapes every choice. The affluent neighborhood of Carrasco, the business culture, and the presence of the Tupamaros all feed the book’s atmosphere, so the danger feels embedded in daily life rather than pasted on top of it.
The novel is also very character-driven, though in a direct, old-school way. Peter and Paula Gray are written less as complicated antiheroes and more as a family unit under siege, which gives the book a steady emotional center. Miguel de Luna, on the other hand, is drawn as a volatile, deeply self-involved threat, and Broun makes him effective by showing how fear becomes his method long before it becomes anyone else’s. When he says, “Frightened people are controllable, they become weak,” the line works because it doubles as both his worldview and the novel’s central argument about terror.
Broun’s prose leans into detail, sometimes almost scene by scene in the way it tracks movement, clothing, rooms, cars, and gestures. That can make the pacing feel deliberate, but it also suits the material. This is a book interested in procedure: surveillance, escape plans, daily routines, security checks, and all the tiny habits that suddenly matter when a family is being hunted. By the time the story reaches its late-stage operation to get the Grays out of the country, the accumulation of those details pays off because the rescue feels earned, organized, and tense rather than conveniently dramatic.
Carrasco ’67 is a family-in-peril historical thriller with a strong sense of place and a clear moral pulse. It’s most compelling when it stays close to the human cost of political violence and the quiet bravery of the people trying to keep one another alive. The book’s emotional engine isn’t spectacle. It’s the steady question of what ordinary life looks like once fear moves into the house and refuses to leave. That gives the novel its staying power, and it makes the story feel less like an action tale and more like a sustained account of endurance.
Pages: 234 | ASIN: B09BLBW45X
Let Me Go
Elaine Broun’s Let Me Go opens with a woman in flight and never really lets that first note of fear go slack. Isabella Hampton has slipped away from a controlling, violent marriage and taken refuge in a secluded cottage in Provincetown, where the practical business of repainting cabinets and checking window locks becomes part of a larger attempt to reclaim her own life. From there the novel braids present-day suspense with backstory: old-money damage, stolen inheritance, emotional manipulation, and the wary, slowly brightening connection between Isabella and Nate, the former Marine realtor who senses almost immediately that her nerves are not mere skittishness. It is a long, plot-forward romantic suspense novel, and it knows exactly which engines it wants running at once: danger, secrecy, desire, and eventual escape.
Let Me Go does not approach abuse as a decorative complication; it treats control as something incremental, intimate, and psychologically erosive. I found the early sections especially effective because Isabella’s vigilance is built into the furniture of the story. She is not merely “afraid”; she is counting doors, thinking about sightlines, testing locks, measuring safety in tiny domestic units. That gave the novel an authentic tension I appreciated. I also liked the cottage itself, which has a kind of weathered charisma. Broun is very good at making shelter feel double-edged: a sanctuary, yes, but also a place whose quiet can sharpen dread.
My reaction to the romance was a little more mixed, though still largely favorable. Nate is written with unabashed fantasy-novel generosity: capable, protective, broad-shouldered, emotionally available, and nearly mythic in his attentiveness. Sometimes that pushes the book toward melodrama, and the dialogue can tilt into soap-opera intensity. But the flip side is that the novel has pulse. It’s not coy, not bloodless, and not embarrassed by feeling. I admired that. Broun writes as someone unafraid of yearning, and even when the prose grows florid, there is real conviction under it. The book is at its strongest when that conviction is tethered to Isabella’s interior life, her shame, her hesitation, her gradual return to selfhood, because then the story acquires something more tensile than mere page-turning momentum.
I would hand this to readers who like romantic suspense, women’s fiction, domestic-abuse survival narratives, small-town romance, and contemporary drama with a strong emotional current. Readers who enjoy Colleen Hoover’s darker relationship plots, or fans of Sandra Brown’s blend of danger and desire, will probably recognize the territory, though Broun’s novel is more earnest than either. For the right audience, that earnestness will be part of the appeal: it gives the story an unvarnished immediacy. Let Me Go is deeply invested in its heroine’s escape, and that investment makes it a gripping story. This is a novel about what it costs to leave and what it takes to feel safe in your own life again.
Pages: 306 | ASIN : B0FTV3G2DX
In Silence
In Silence is a trauma thriller that grows into a recovery story, a love story, and finally something close to an elegy. The opening pages throw Zara Holt into a brutal fight for survival, and the book commits hard to the physical reality of pain, cold, shock, and endurance. What kept me reading, though, wasn’t just the danger. It was the way Revka Ashford builds Zara as someone defined by discipline, dark humor, and pure refusal. Early on, the novel runs on that stubborn pulse of survival.
What gives the book its heart is the shift from survival to care. Bill and Betty could have been written as simple rescuers, but they become the emotional center of the story for a long stretch, and the novel is strongest when it lets their steadiness do its work. Their kindness doesn’t feel decorative. It feels lived in, awkward at times, funny at times, and deeply earned. The book understands that healing is made of routines, meals, rides, teasing, check-ins, and people who stay. That makes the emotional arc feel grounded even when the plot keeps moving through danger, grief, and suspense.
Ashford also has a real instinct for tonal layering. The novel is heavy, no question, but it isn’t one-note. Zara’s voice can be sharp and dry even in awful circumstances, and that edge keeps the character from flattening into pure suffering. Later, when Bella becomes central, the book opens into a different register. It becomes gentler, warmer, and more romantic without losing the tension that shaped the beginning. That blend gives the story a wide emotional range. It’s a book about injury and fear, but also about devotion, trust, found family, and the strange ways people learn how to be seen by each other.
The structure is ambitious. The story keeps widening, from a close survival narrative to a larger web of relationships, investigation, secrecy, and consequence. At times, the book can be melodramatic, and some scenes are written with maximum emotional volume, but Ashford’s sincerity carries a lot of that weight. The book believes in its characters’ feelings completely, and that confidence gives it momentum. By the end, the novel feels less like a single-genre story and more like a sweeping character drama built out of suspense, romance, and grief.
What stayed with me most is that In Silence is really about being witnessed after pain has tried to erase a person. The title lands because the book keeps returning to silence as injury, protection, intimacy, and memory all at once. The final lines, “In silence, I was heard / In darkness, I was seen,” bring that thread into focus in a way that feels simple and earned. This is a book that wants to hold survival and tenderness in the same hand, and a lot of the time, it does exactly that.
Pages: 437 | ASIN : B0GR9MDBGQ
In Silence
In Silence is a romantic suspense novel with a strong thread of trauma recovery and found-family drama. It follows Zara Holt, a woman who survives a brutal assault tied to a long, dangerous mission, then tries to rebuild herself with the help of Bill and Betty, the older couple who become her refuge, and later Bella, whose love slowly opens a door Zara never meant to leave unlocked. The book moves through pain, secrecy, investigation, tenderness, and loss, and it keeps asking what it really means to survive when your life has been split into before and after.
Author Revka Ashford writes like she’s not interested in looking away, and I respected that even when the material was hard to sit with. The opening is harsh and cold and visceral, then the story gradually makes room for warmth without pretending warmth fixes everything. I liked that. The writing can be intense to the point of overload at times, and there were moments when the emotion felt piled on, but I never felt the book was faking its heart. It wants readers to feel the bruise, not just admire the sentence. Sometimes that worked beautifully.
I also found myself thinking a lot about the author’s choices around silence, identity, and care. Zara is not written as a neat lesson or a simple survivor figure. She is stubborn, trained, fractured, loving, evasive, and often hard to reach. That made her feel real to me. The book’s structure, with its shifts in perspective and its widening circle of people around her, lets healing feel communal, which is one of the most convincing things about it. Bill and Betty give the novel its soul. Bella brings a softer current, but not a weak one. Their relationship gives the story a pulse that keeps it from becoming only about violence and aftermath. I appreciated that the novel keeps love from feeling magical. Love matters here but it doesn’t erase damage. It just gives Zara somewhere to stand while she carries it.
By the end, I felt like I had been through something heavy but relatable. I would recommend In Silence to readers who like romantic suspense with real emotional weight, to people drawn to stories about survival and found family, and to anyone who can tolerate darkness in exchange for tenderness that feels earned. This is the kind of book that keeps you thinking after you put it down because it cares so fiercely about broken people finding their way back to one another.
Pages: 439 | ASIN : B0GR7HV9FK
Identity
Identity opens as a missing-person mystery on the California coast and then keeps slipping its skin. Author A.J. Thibault begins with two teenage boys vanishing after a brutal confrontation on the beach, then widens the story to include Lakeland, a girl with blackouts and a disquieting sense of estrangement from her own life, and Detectives Esposito and Shangri-La, who investigate the town’s accumulating oddities. What follows is part murder investigation, part transformation tale, part meditation on gender, selfhood, and the unnerving possibility that the body may not be the final authority on who a person is.
I admired the book most when it refused to behave like a tidy procedural. It has the scaffolding of a thriller, but its real engine is yearning: Tommy’s anguish, Lakeland’s dissociation, Shangri-La’s precision, even the town’s uneasy performance of tolerance. I felt, while reading, that Thibault was less interested in merely solving a crime than in asking what happens when identity becomes porous, when desire, shame, memory, and metamorphosis begin to trade clothes in the dark. That ambition gives the novel an electric strangeness. The prose is almost fever-dreamed, but that volatility suits a story about people who are not stable in the ways the world demands.
Some scenes are blunt where they might have been sharper, and some thematic material is delivered with a hammer rather than a scalpel. But I never felt the novel was timid. It courts melodrama and occasionally earns it. More importantly, it has a genuine pulse of obsession running through it, and I would rather read a novel that overreaches than one that glides by on polish alone. Identity is messy, but it is a mess in the old Gothic sense, charged, moonlit, and full of psychic weather.
I would hand this book to readers of queer fiction, supernatural mystery, psychological thriller, metamorphosis horror, and dark coming-of-age stories, especially those who like their genre boundaries blurred rather than fenced. Readers who gravitate toward the uncanny earnestness of Alice Hoffman or the body-and-self unease found in some of Caitlín R. Kiernan’s work may find something here to savor, though Thibault is more raw than either. This feels best suited to adventurous readers willing to follow a strange book into stranger woods.
Pages: 430 | ASIN : B0GLL6S61C
Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale
Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale, by Alejandro Torres De la Rocha, is a psychological thriller that works like an origin story: it follows a 17-year-old senior at the Jesuit-run Excelsior Academy, as the school’s cruelty, silence, and “character-building” discipline quietly shape the conditions for the future Grim Cojuelo killings. It’s framed as the “howdunit” prequel to another book in the same universe, tracing how institutional rot and personal guilt turn a Dominican folklore figure, the limping devil reimagined as a hunter, into something inevitable.
I really enjoyed the cinematic writing. The book opens with a staged, almost spoken-word setup, with a narrator and the killer stepping in like voices in a dark theater, and it keeps that heightened, performative feel even in ordinary moments. The school itself is described with a kind of glossy dread: stained glass, marble, crucifixes everywhere, and beauty that feels like a trap. Sometimes the language is intense, almost daring you to look away. It works, especially when it’s tied to sensory detail and not just mood. Other times, it can feel a little crowded with emphasis, like the book underlining its own points. Still, the voice commits. It wants you inside Julián’s head, where guilt is not abstract; it’s a pressure in the chest.
The author’s big choice, and I mean this in a good way, is to make the horror feel system-made. The most frightening scenes are not supernatural. They’re social. A teacher humiliates a student in public, classmates freeze, phones come out, and nobody with power stops it. Then you get a philosophy class where a priest asks, calmly, if it’s ever okay to lie, and suddenly the book is talking about survival, complicity, and the cost of telling the truth in a place that punishes it. That’s where the psychological thriller genre really clicks for me: it’s less about jump scares and more about watching a closed world tighten its rules until someone breaks. If you like school-set dread where the building itself feels like a character, it reminded me at times of the slow-burn pressure and moral rot in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and the “this place is shaping you” inevitability you get in Stephen King’s novel Carrie, even though the voice and cultural lens here are very much its own.
I’d recommend A Grim Tale to readers who want their thriller to have teeth, especially people interested in stories about institutions, religious power, and how silence gets enforced. One note, it does not tiptoe around heavy material, including trauma and grooming, so you really have to be in the right headspace. But if you’re drawn to psychological thrillers where the scariest thing is watching a system teach people to look away, you’ll appreciate what this book is doing, and how patiently it builds the sense that the monster is being assembled in plain sight.
Pages: 571 | ASIN : B0FPBB3ZDL
Control Versus Agency
Rhea’s Game follows two teenagers who are trapped inside a televised survival system where obedience is rewarded, resistance is punished, and humiliation is broadcast as entertainment. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The idea grew out of watching how entertainment, social media, and economic pressure increasingly blur together. I wanted to explore what happens when survival itself becomes content—when people are rewarded for compliance and punished publicly for resistance. The game format let me push that to its logical extreme and ask what choice really means inside a system designed to control outcomes.
Do you see the system in the book as exaggerated fiction—or an extension of real structures we already live with?
It’s an extension. The world in Rhea’s Game is heightened, but the mechanics are familiar: surveillance, performative success, and invisible rules that favor those already in power. The story just removes the polite language and shows the machinery underneath.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Control versus agency. Identity under pressure. How systems convince people to participate in their own confinement. I was also interested in quiet resistance—the small, human choices that don’t look heroic but still matter when everything else is stacked against you.
What is the next book you’re working on, and when can fans expect it?
I’m currently working on Book 2 of Rhea’s Game, alongside the sequel to Memoirs of a Serial Killer. I also have My Twelve-Year-Old Wife launching in just a few days. New releases are planned throughout 2026 as I continue expanding these interconnected psychological thriller worlds.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Previously published as Chloroform Wars — Runner-Up (Wild Card), Paris Book Festival. Revised edition with two additional chapters.
They don’t execute rebels anymore — they broadcast them.
The cameras never blink. The audience never looks away.
In a near-future America, teenagers are forced into televised survival competitions where obedience is rewarded and resistance is punished publicly. Winning doesn’t mean freedom. It means staying useful to the audience. Losing doesn’t mean death — it means humiliation, punishment, and erasure, all in front of millions.
Rhea Schwartz has spent her whole life being ignored. Now the system has finally noticed her — and it wants her broken for entertainment.
Ryker Vale signed up for the program for one reason: money. He never expected to become trapped inside a machine built to control people through spectacle.
Matched against each other and broadcast nationwide, Rhea and Ryker face a brutal choice: play the roles they’re assigned… or turn the show into a rebellion the whole country can’t ignore.
Dark, brutal, and uncomfortably plausible, Rhea’s Game is a dystopian psychological survival thriller about power, surveillance, and what happens when suffering becomes entertainment.
Perfect for fans of The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, and Black Mirror.
My Twelve-Year-Old Wife: Erased Memories
My Twelve-Year-Old Wife: Erased Memories drops the reader straight into a world where time folds, grief bites hard, and reality keeps shifting under the characters’ feet. The book follows Dan, a man who loses his wife brutally, then hurls himself backward through time to save her. He lands in 2003 and discovers a teenage version of Celia, a younger and sharper incarnation of the woman he loved, and a chilling truth about Lang, the man who killed her. As Dan struggles to protect her, time glitches, memories warp, and past and future versions of Lang collide. The story moves fast, and the stakes sit right at the throat from the opening chapter.
I kept feeling the tension coil in my chest whenever Dan slipped between timelines. His heartbreak is loud. His fear is louder. I found myself rooting for him even when he made choices that scared me. The writing surprised me with small, quiet moments tucked between scenes of dread. A breakfast. A joke. A breath of calm before the ground cracked open. They made the danger feel personal instead of mechanical, and I loved that steady tug between ordinary life and cosmic consequences. There were times when the dialogue carried more weight than the action itself, and those were the moments that resonated with me.
Time travel is usually all rules and logic, but here it felt messy and emotional, which I liked. Time behaves like a living thing. It twitches when Dan pushes it. It punishes him when he presses too hard. I also appreciated how the author handled trauma. Nothing is graphic, but the emotional fallout hit real. Celia’s distrust, Dan’s guilt, the thin places in the world that react to their fear, all of it landed with a strange mix of warmth and dread. I kept forgetting to breathe during the scenes under the bleachers, especially when the masked figure flickered in and out of sight. The writing there felt sharp and cold in the best way.
I would recommend this book to readers who enjoy psychological thrillers with a strong emotional core, and to anyone who likes their time travel tangled with heartbreak instead of gadgets. If you want a story that creeps under your skin and sits there long after the last page, this is a good one. Author Dan Uselton turns time itself into a monster, and the result is unforgettable.
Pages: 323 | ASIN : B0G2FLTQSP
