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The Phisherman
Steven Marks’s The Phisherman is a crime thriller about scams, anger, family loyalty, and the dangerous comfort of having a target. Dean Rourke is a warehouse worker in Ocala whose life is already worn thin by night shifts, spam calls, and the steady pressure of getting by. When his mother becomes involved with a suspicious man named Martin Hales, Dean’s irritation turns into investigation, and that investigation pulls him into a wider network of fraud, stolen pets, gift cards, burner phones, and people who know exactly how to use loneliness as bait. The book understands scams not just as crimes, but as intrusions. They get into homes, phones, routines, and nerves until ordinary life starts to feel rigged.
What makes Dean such a compelling lead is that his concern is real, but so is the appetite that grows out of it. Marks doesn’t write him as a clean hero chasing bad guys. Dean is tired, sharp, funny in a sour way, and increasingly drawn to the sense of purpose that anger gives him. Early on, the narration says, “pressure worked whether or not it had a name,” and that line captures a lot of what the novel is doing. Dean wants to name the pressure, trace it, hit it, and make it answer for itself. The trouble is that once he starts moving, stopping becomes harder than starting.
The supporting characters give the story its weight. Gloria, Dean’s mother, is more than a victim of a romance scam. She’s lonely, stubborn, embarrassed, and still very much her own person. Deputy Morales is one of the book’s best steadying forces, not because he softens the story, but because he keeps reminding Dean that being right doesn’t make every choice acceptable. Aunt Marlene also brings a needed kind of grounded care, especially when the book turns from investigation into a study of restraint. Even Pickles, Dean’s cat, adds texture to the domestic side of the novel, giving Dean’s apartment a little warmth while everything else gets colder.
Marks’s prose has a bruised, observant rhythm that fits Dean’s state of mind. The book is full of Florida heat, cheap parking lots, county offices, vibrating phones, and rooms where people are waiting for the next bad thing to happen. It’s especially strong at showing how modern crime can feel both faceless and intimate. A scam call can come from nowhere, but it still lands in someone’s kitchen, someone’s bank account, someone’s family. As the story escalates, one line hits especially hard: “Waiting changed him faster than blood had.” That’s the heart of the book. The suspense isn’t only about whether Dean can find Martin. It’s about what the hunt is doing to him.
The Phisherman is a tense, character-driven novel about a man who follows a fraud case so deep that it starts following him back. It’s angry, funny in dry flashes, and deeply interested in the moral cost of wanting punishment to feel personal. The ending doesn’t offer Dean an easy victory, which feels right for this story. Instead, it leaves him facing the people who know his name, especially his mother, and the question of what he’s let himself become while trying to protect her. That’s what gives the book its staying power: it’s a crime story where the real hook isn’t only the scam but the part of Dean that keeps biting.
Pages: 487 | ASIN : B0H3394KCT
Twin Spirits
Creola Thomas’s Twin Spirits is a layered, emotionally rich novel about memory, identity, family secrets, and the strange ways people find one another when they most need to be seen. The story begins with thirteen-year-old Margarita Carter, a thoughtful Chicago girl who’s pushed into a cruel prank by her sisters and ends up touching the body of a woman named Lillian Smith in a funeral home. Soon after, Margarita meets Leona, a woman who looks exactly like Lillian, and what could have been a ghost story becomes something deeper and more human: a long friendship between a curious girl and an older woman carrying a lifetime of hidden pain.
At the center of the book is storytelling itself. Leona doesn’t simply tell Margarita what happened to her and Lillian; she gives her pieces of a life shaped by trauma, survival, music, faith, betrayal, and sisterhood. Her voice can feel poetic, sharp, funny, and haunted all at once. Early on, she tells Margarita, “Life at its beginning is just a dot,” and that idea fits the whole novel. The book keeps widening from that dot, moving through childhood, the South, Chicago, Memphis, marriage, motherhood, violence, forgiveness, and the hard work of deciding what to do with the past.
Margarita is a strong narrator because she’s observant without pretending to understand everything right away. She’s young when the story begins, so her reactions have humor and honesty, especially when she’s trying to make sense of adults, family tension, and Leona’s mysterious life. As she grows, the book grows with her. Her relationship with Leona becomes less like a service project and more like a chosen inheritance. Through Leona, Margarita receives stories, warnings, comfort, and eventually questions about her own life that can’t be answered neatly.
One of the most memorable parts of Twin Spirits is how it treats pain without flattening the characters into their wounds. Leona and Lillian’s history is painful, but Thomas gives them humor, style, stubbornness, beauty, music, and spirit. Even when the book enters dark territory, it keeps returning to the idea that people can carry terrible memories and still choose tenderness. That comes through clearly when Leona says, “We are not monsters, and we never will be.” It’s a powerful line because the novel is so interested in the difference between what happens to people and who they decide to become.
Twin Spirits is best read as a family saga with a mystery at its heart and a poetic rhythm running through it. It’s about Black women surviving what they were handed, protecting what they can, and passing down truth in the only way they know how. The book has a conversational warmth that makes its heavier revelations feel personal rather than distant. By the end, Margarita’s journey isn’t just about discovering the truth. It’s about deciding which truths deserve power over her life, which memories need to be honored, and which ones can finally be released.
Pages: 263 | ASIN : B0GY1WZ7N1
Blood Echoes
Aaron Ryan’s Blood Echoes follows Tracie Vossler, an ex-Marine turned prison security guard, as she becomes entangled in the horrifying mystery surrounding identical twins Elias and Gabriel Brickert. Set largely inside Airway Heights Corrections Center and told through shifting timelines, the novel begins with a murder that should be impossible and then widens into something far stranger: occult rituals, demonic possession, body-swapping, institutional panic, and a mother’s desperate fight to protect her daughter, Lela. What starts as a prison thriller curdles into supernatural horror, with blood evidence, security footage, and human memory all becoming unreliable witnesses.
I was most compelled by the novel’s atmosphere. Ryan gives Airway Heights a clammy, pressurized quality; the prison never feels like a backdrop so much as a sealed lung trying to breathe around something rotten. Tracie’s voice is brash, bruised, funny in the wrong places, and sometimes jagged enough to cut through the melodrama. Her fixation on burgers, cigarettes, nail appointments, and her daughter’s teenage moods keeps the story tethered to ordinary life even as the plot begins to levitate into the occult. That grounding matters because without it, the supernatural machinery could have felt too gaudy; with it, the horror feels personal, almost domestic.
The book also has a maximalist streak. It piles on murders, rituals, possessions, confessions, betrayals, legal fallout, and emotional wreckage with very little interest in restraint. The momentum is hard to deny. Ryan writes like someone determined to shove every locked door open, and the result is messy in a way that often feels alive. I especially appreciated how the novel refuses to let Tracie remain a clean heroine. Her love for Lela is luminous, but her choices grow morally murky, and the ending leaves a residue of grief rather than the neat click of a solved case.
I think this would be a great book for readers who enjoy supernatural horror, prison thrillers, demonic possession stories, occult suspense, body-swap horror, and psychological thrillers. Fans of Stephen King’s The Green Mile may recognize the charged prison setting and the sense that something otherworldly has slipped into a place already built for suffering, though Ryan’s novel is more lurid, more frantic, and more openly demonic. Blood Echoes is a grim and feverish book about blood ties, borrowed bodies, and the terrible cost of surviving evil.
Pages: 332 | ASIN : B0GXN2TMD5
Push for the Truth
Diagnosis or Death centers around a therapist who is pulled into a case involving a suspicious online video, benefit fraud, and the death of a fellow practitioner. What first inspired the idea behind Diagnosis or Death?
Annabel is a consultant in Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, a form of non-speaking therapy that sometimes sees her carry out a kind of detective work, figuring out what makes her clients tick. We wanted to position Janna, the heroine, as a character with a strong sense of fairness and justice. In real life, our local authority, Oxfordshire County Council, is involved in a scheme (like the fictional one in D or D) to ensure benefit claimants get the support they’re entitled to. So, for Janna to use her new Master of Psychology qualification to assist in this felt like a good fit.
Why was it important that Janna feel grounded in ordinary pressures like finances, work stress, and relationships?
Janna is not a cop, so a murder case is something she is drawn into; it’s not her business as a matter of routine. The stories follow her as she realises something is wrong, looks further into it, and finds her courage to push for the truth. In each, there is a particular reason (revealed as part of the story) why police investigations stall, and she has to step in.
How did you approach portraying therapy and EMDR responsibly within a suspense narrative?
Annabel is a registered EMDR consultant, so she kept a close eye on how this particular form of psychotherapeutic practice was portrayed in the novel.
Can we look forward to more mysteries featuring Janna Rose?
In the third Janna Rose mystery, now under construction with a working title of Seashore of Sorrows, she travels to Australia and our favourite spot there, Jervis Bay, an idyllic nook of the New South Wales coast. That will hopefully appear early in 2027.
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Pursuing her passion for justice, Janna investigates further only to be drawn into a shadowy world of Artificial Intelligence, where identity is fluid and nothing quite as it seems.
But who are the men behind the scheme, and what are their real motives? With dark forces threatening to drag her down and peril around every corner, Janna must deploy all her insights into human motivation to reveal the truth.
Thief of Echoes
Thief of Echoes, by Sandra Boyle, is a fast, moody sci-fi thriller about memory, identity, and the danger of letting powerful institutions decide what counts as truth. Elara Vale works inside a system built to extract, archive, alter, and erase memories, but the story really begins when one corrupted thread pulls her toward a buried part of her own past. Early on, she asks, “What does it say about me that I’m better at stealing memories than saving them?” That question becomes the emotional engine of the book.
The novel’s world is sleek, cold, and unsettling in a way that fits the story perfectly. The Ministry, neural syncs, memory residue, echo files, and underground networks all feel like pieces of a society that’s learned how to control people without always needing chains. Boyle gives the tech a haunted quality, so the book doesn’t read like a gadget-heavy future. It reads like a mystery where every machine might be hiding a ghost.
Elara is the heart of the book, and she’s easy to follow because her fear never makes her passive. She’s scared, confused, angry, and often unsure of what’s real, but she keeps moving anyway. Her relationships with Milo, Maren, Lena, and the other fractured figures around her give the story its warmth. The book works best when it lets those connections push against the colder conspiracy plot, especially as Elara starts to understand that memory isn’t just evidence. It’s selfhood.
One of the strongest threads is Elara’s struggle to trust herself when her own mind has been tampered with. Her father’s warning, “Don’t trust the official version of your own story,” lands as both a plot clue and a personal command. That line captures what the book is doing: turning a rebellion against a corrupt system into a fight for the right to own your own past. The shifting points of view also help widen the story, showing how many people have been damaged, rewritten, or made complicit by Mnemosyne’s machinery.
As the first book in a series, Thief of Echoes builds toward revelation while leaving plenty of doors open. It’s a story about a woman pulling herself out of someone else’s design, one memory at a time. The ending gives Elara a sense of hard-won agency, while the epilogue makes it clear that the larger conflict is only beginning. Readers who like conspiracies, fractured memories, secret archives, and heroines who have to rebuild themselves from stolen pieces will find a lot to enjoy here.
Pages: 319 | ASIN : B0FQCC129W
Diagnosis or Death (Janna Rose Mysteries)
Diagnosis or Death, the second book in the Janna Rose Mysteries series by Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick, is a contemporary mystery novel built around therapist Janna Rose, who is pulled into a tangled case involving a suspicious online video, benefit fraud, deepfake technology, psychotherapy, and the death of a fellow practitioner. What begins as a professional concern becomes a wider investigation into who is manipulating vulnerable people, who is being framed, and how easily trust can be weaponized in systems meant to help.
What I liked most was how relatable Janna feels on the page. She is sharp, funny, nosy, principled, and occasionally messy in ways that made me believe in her. The narration has a chatty, authentic quality, almost as if she is telling me the story over tea while half-watching her bank balance and half-thinking about the next clue. That looseness works well for the genre because the mystery does not unfold in some polished detective bubble. It grows out of everyday pressures: rent, family, work, ethics, professional pride, old friendships, and the awkward little compromises people make to get through the week.
The authors make some bold choices, especially in blending a murder mystery with issues like disability benefits, EMDR therapy, AI fakery, local politics, and social care. The book carries a lot. But I appreciated that it tries to make the mystery matter beyond the puzzle itself. The best parts are when the plot and the ideas rub against each other, making me wonder not only who did what, but who gets believed, who gets dismissed, and who profits when vulnerable people are pushed around. The therapy material could have felt dry, but it usually lands because it is filtered through Janna’s practical, skeptical, compassionate voice.
I would recommend Diagnosis or Death to readers who enjoy character-led mystery fiction with a topical edge. It’s especially suited to fans of amateur sleuth stories, British social mysteries, and crime novels where the investigation is tangled up with institutions, ethics, and ordinary life. Readers who like their mysteries thoughtful, witty, and grounded in real-world anxieties should find plenty to enjoy.
Pages: 292 | ASIN : B0GS462DZT
Evolving
Shadows in the Creek follows a disgraced journalist who returns to his picture-perfect town to investigate the murder of a young woman, only to uncover the lies the town has kept hidden.Was Edenvale inspired by a real place, or more of a symbolic landscape?
For me, Edenvale is more of a symbolic landscape, though the setting is somewhere familiar – a small, idyllic town somewhere between Hartford, Connecticut and New York. I live in Connecticut, and for my first novel, I needed the setting to hit close to home. But the place is symbolic in that Dante Villehart, the disgraced journalist, comes to this town he feels is quiet enough to allow him to escape into anonymity. Just as he is trying to settle, he learns of the demise of someone he knew very well. He is suddenly compelled to get back into investigative journalism, much against his initial will. He quickly learns in the process that this apparently quiet town is heavily laden with secrets the rich and powerful would literally kill to keep buried.
Dante feels both capable and compromised. How did you shape his moral center, and how important was his past failure in driving the present investigation?
Many people, including myself, have made mistakes in the past. However, not all of us get to correct them once they are acknowledged. That is, we don’t often get the redemption opportunities that would help to lighten the load of our past guilt. Dante has this opportunity, though he came by this reluctantly at first. He is compromised because he knows his mistakes directly led to consequences he wished never developed. But this compromise leads to his resilience. He now has an unwavering desire to not fail in his quests to unearth the truth. Sometimes his pursuit of the truth puts him in danger–another compromise that gives him the grit he needs to prove himself capable.
The book thrives on mood as much as mystery. How do you balance tension with introspection in a crime story?
Dante is actually coming to terms with the new person he is becoming. He is driven by his desire not to fail again but could still fail if he makes the rash decisions he once made under pressure in his past. Now, he is not trying to make deadlines with a story. He now has to solve a mystery that requires swift attention and also demands careful introspection as a guide to ensure his new path is not paved with the familiar failure he once knew. In other words, Dante is evolving while he solves the case. Part of this process necessarily requires that he reflects and looks inwards for strength and guidance.
Is this the first book in the series? If so, when is the next book coming out and what can your fans expect in the next story?
Shadows in the Creek is in fact the first book of the Dante Villehart Redemption series. The series has three books, the other two being Death in the Manor and Knight In Gale: Vengeance. The two latter books have been published recently, and I am hoping to use the momentum of Shadows in the Creek to propel them.
Fans can expect Dante to continue evolving. In the past, he would push people away, keep his guard up, and wouldn’t allow anyone to get too close. He lets himself become more vulnerable in letting others in but is still cautious as his association with people could put them in danger (and often does). Therefore, Dante starts to become the new redeemed man he has started to become – still with flaws, but less guarded and more balanced.
Fans can also expect to see Dante continue his journey solving cases in The Dante Villehart Files.
Symphony Of Lies
Symphony of Lies by Maria Monday is a psychological thriller about Emma Mally, a flawed investigative journalist whose quiet retreat in the Swiss Alps is interrupted when she is named in the will of Nicole Wagner, a mysterious Monaco acquaintance with deep ties to Emma’s past. What begins as an inheritance story quickly becomes something darker: a trail of secrets, suspicious deaths, manipulation, and questions about whether truth can ever be clean when power and money are involved. The book openly frames itself as “a cerebral, high-stakes psychological thriller,” and that genre label fits its interest in suspicion, memory, control, and moral unease.
What pulled me in most was Emma herself. She isn’t presented as spotless, which I appreciated. She has crossed ethical lines in her career; she knows it, and the book lets that guilt sit beside her sharper instincts. That makes her more interesting than a simple truth-seeker. I also liked the contrast between the cold, intimate Swiss setting and the polished, sunlit danger of Monaco. The movement between those worlds gives the novel a strong sense of atmosphere. The prose leans into description, especially when introducing people, places, and luxury, but I can see what Monday is reaching for. She wants the glamour to feel almost too bright.
The author’s choices are boldest in the way Nicole is handled. She becomes a kind of mirror for Emma, forcing her to look at grief, loyalty, family history, and her own hunger for answers. I found that compelling. The book is generous with its emotional guidance, often making sure the reader understands the weight of each revelation and the depth of what Emma is feeling. That clarity gives the story an accessible, direct quality, especially in moments where grief, guilt, and suspicion overlap.
The central idea has weight: people can build entire lives out of stories, and the most dangerous lies are often the ones that feel protective. That’s where the thriller works best for me. Not only in the threat of violence, but in the quieter fear that you may have loved a version of someone that never fully existed.
I would recommend Symphony of Lies to readers who enjoy psychological thrillers with a polished international setting, morally complicated women, inheritance mysteries, and a slow uncovering of old corruption. It’s less of a stripped-down, fast-cut thriller and more of a layered, reflective one, interested in wealth, secrecy, friendship, and the cost of knowing too much. Readers who like their suspense mixed with family shadows and social critique will appreciate it most.
Pages: 362 | ASIN : B0GHT44LK4
