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A Horrifying Reality
Utter Darkness follows a former FBI agent who discovers that protecting his family will require him to confront a supernatural evil and decide where his faith truly lies. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I built the backstory for UTTER DARKNESS through my original series, Hawk McCullough Action Thrillers. In those three books, we meet FBI Agent Ryan Fletcher, who teams up with Jason (Hawk) McCullough to fight the human face of evil. Though he wasn’t the main character, I fell in love with Ryan Fletcher’s role. He is a man who, first and foremost, loves his family. Yet, as he fights dark forces in Seattle, he knows he is putting his family at risk. In UTTER DARKNESS, Ryan Fletcher flees from a supernatural threat he has yet to comprehend by taking his family to a small town in Middle Tennessee. As the new police chief, Ryan soon realizes that, regardless of where he lives, he is the focus of an evil he has only begun to understand.
Ryan has already experienced something supernatural before arriving in Cedar Grove. Why was it important that he begin the story with uncertainty about what he had witnessed?
UTTER DARKNESS begins with Ryan’s night terrors about the mysterious force he confronted on a street in Seattle. As a man more familiar with the grim, physical side of humanity—crime, criminals, justice, and punishment—he glimpses a horrifying reality: what he witnessed in Seattle was a malignant force occupying a realm most people would be glad to keep unseen. For Ryan Fletcher, that’s not an option.
The investigation begins with a missing child and gradually reveals trafficking, corruption, and supernatural forces. How did you approach connecting the human and supernatural sides of the story?
Ryan Fletcher is a lawman with an innate desire to do right, and, as a family man, the abduction of a child hits especially close to home. But that horrendously evil crime serves a larger purpose, leading to a clash between two opposing forces, fighting an age-long battle. The harsh reality of child trafficking and corruption, with its real and horrific consequences, presents the real-life consequences of the unseen supernatural battle between good and evil. Ultimately, the reader is left with a choice.
The immediate conflict reaches a resolution, but the ending makes it clear the larger spiritual war is continuing. Why was that important?
The larger spiritual war has raged since the beginning of time. It hasn’t ended, nor will Ryan’s story. Though the future will test Fletcher’s faith in unimaginable, heart-wrenching ways, he will unite with familiar and new friends who, alongside him and the spiritual forces of good, continue the battle against the forces of utter darkness. Ryan’s battle may be more visible and traumatic than those the reader faces, but it is important nonetheless. It’s mirrored in each of our lives in ways both big and small. I hope Ryan’s decision to stand on faith will help others do the same in the face of what appear to be overwhelming challenges.
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THE DARKNESS HUNTS. THE WAR RAGES. ONE MAN’S FAITH WILL DECIDE IT ALL.
Former FBI agent Ryan Fletcher escaped the shadows of Seattle for the rolling hills of a quiet Tennessee town, trading bullets for badges as the new police chief. He craved peace for his family—until the ancient Darkness he thought he’d left behind follows, unleashing a terror no one sees coming.
When a seven-year-old girl vanishes without a trace, the veil between worlds rips open. Fletcher faces an unimaginable foe: a supernatural force committed to his destruction, demanding a gut-wrenching choice that could shatter his world forever. His decision brings eternal consequences.
Utter Darkness is a pulse-pounding Christian supernatural thriller where heart-stopping suspense collides with fierce spiritual warfare. In the unseen battle for souls, Fletcher faces an unyielding truth: though faith is the ultimate weapon—the cost of obedience is shockingly high.
Blood of a St. Claire
Blood of a St. Claire starts with a wonderfully small warning sign: Evan St. Claire knows his father is lying because the family is eating off the good plates. From there, the story keeps widening. What begins as a teenager grieving his mother and wondering why his father is acting strangely turns into a supernatural crime thriller involving murder, organized crime, buried family history, possession, and a curse that has followed the St. Claire bloodline for generations. The book moves quickly, and it has an easy, conversational style that makes even its darker material surprisingly readable. Evan’s sarcasm, Mason’s relentless jokes, and Heather’s dry responses give the story personality without draining the danger out of it.
The heart of the book is Heather and Evan. The supernatural mythology gets increasingly elaborate, but their relationship gives all of it somewhere to land emotionally. Heather has spent years carrying guilt over what their father trained her to become, while Evan has to reckon with memories, violence, and family truths that were deliberately taken from him. Their father, Henry, works especially well as an antagonist because his idea of family is inseparable from ownership. He treats blood as destiny, while the siblings gradually learn to treat it as something they can interpret for themselves. That makes the book’s central question more interesting than simply whether a curse can be broken. It’s really asking how much power an inheritance should have over the person who receives it.
The blend of family horror, dark humor, and supernatural chaos reminded me most of Grady Hendrix, particularly How to Sell a Haunted House. Hendrix also likes putting messy, believable family relationships in the middle of increasingly outrageous paranormal situations, then using humor to keep the characters human when the horror gets intense. Blood of a St. Claire has a similar instinct. Mason can make a joke while half-dead, Heather and Evan can bicker in the middle of a crisis, and those moments help the characters feel like people who knew each other before the plot started. The St. Claire mythology is more crime-driven and sprawling than Hendrix’s usual setup, though, with mob connections, secret properties, old institutions, murder investigations, and generations of supernatural history all feeding into the same family story.
I enjoyed the way the ending brings the book back to ordinary life. After everything the St. Claire name has represented, Evan and Heather don’t need to destroy it or worship it. They get to decide what it means now. The final image gives the story a satisfying emotional resolution because it turns survival into something quieter than victory. Blood of a St. Claire is a fast, twist-heavy supernatural thriller, but its strongest idea is surprisingly intimate: family history can explain you, haunt you, and hurt you without getting the final say in who you become.
Pages: 547 | ASIN : B0BW7N6856
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
