Blog Archives
Open Wound
Steven Marks’s Open Wound, the first book in The Last Immunity series, is a speculative medical thriller that turns a secretive luxury clinic into the doorway to a much larger biological conspiracy. The story begins with Celia Harlow, a famous woman seeking a discreet medical procedure at Vale Sanctuary, where privacy has been refined into an expensive art. When Ray Danner, a longtime waste-route driver, discovers a living young woman hidden inside a supposedly routine transfer, the novel shifts into a tense escape story. The woman calls herself Mara, but nearly everything else about her identity, her body, and the institution that created her remains uncertain.
What makes this science fiction thriller so compelling is the way it treats autonomy as something built through ordinary choices. Mara has spent her life observed, instructed, and classified, so sleeping when she chooses, stepping into the rain, or deciding whether to answer a question carries real emotional weight. Ray’s cautious kindness gives those scenes warmth without turning them sentimental. His son Evan brings scientific curiosity and moral unease into the house, while Naomi Crowell, an employee inside Vale Sanctuary, shows how conscience can survive within a system designed to make cruelty sound procedural.
Marks writes this bioethical thriller in measured, atmospheric prose. Vale Sanctuary is especially vivid, with its muted corridors, controlled scents, and language polished until violence sounds like administration. The recurring contrast between managed interiors and the unruly natural world gives the novel a strong visual rhythm. It is worth noting that the narration, at times, circles an image or idea a little longer than necessary, and readers looking for rapid-fire action may find the pace deliberate. Still, that restraint suits a literary suspense novel concerned with surveillance, consent, medical power, and the quiet ways people reclaim ownership of themselves.
Open Wound works best when its conspiracy and character story move together. The mystery surrounding Mara expands steadily, but the book never loses sight of the frightened person at its center. Its final chapters open the story into a broader medical conspiracy involving immunity, human experimentation, and other lives shaped by Vale’s work, giving the series plenty of room to grow. Readers drawn to speculative fiction, medical suspense, dystopian thrillers, and morally complex science fiction will find a thoughtful, unsettling story here, one that understands survival as more than staying alive.
Pages: 512 | ASIN : B0GX2V17G8
Eden, Divided
Steven Marks’s Eden, Divided is a thoughtful reimagining of Adam and Eve’s fall that treats temptation as a slow fracture rather than a single reckless choice. The novel begins with Eden in radiant harmony, where Adam and Eve live without shame, suspicion, or any sense that love might require protection. When the serpent first approaches Eve, she recognizes the deception and refuses it. That refusal becomes the book’s most intriguing decision, since the serpent must find subtler ways to unsettle the couple. Instead of relying on obvious hunger for the forbidden fruit, he introduces comparison, possessiveness, private thoughts, and the idea that a person might keep part of themselves separate from those who love them.
Marks spends much of the novel exploring how these small inward changes reshape Adam and Eve’s relationship. A touch becomes a claim. A private thought becomes something deliberately withheld. Admiration begins to mingle with jealousy, while individuality starts to feel like isolation. Adam and Eve remain loving and deeply devoted, which makes their growing distance more affecting. Their conversations give the story its emotional center, especially when they sense that something has changed but lack the experience to understand it. The book’s version of sin is closely tied to division, not only division from God, but division within the self and between two people who were created to live openly with one another.
The novel recalls C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra, another story that expands the biblical temptation into a sustained psychological and spiritual struggle. Lewis presents temptation as an intellectual siege, while Marks brings it closer to the emotional patterns of a marriage. His serpent succeeds by teaching Adam and Eve to reinterpret love as ownership and vulnerability as danger. The lush, reverent descriptions of Eden also carry something of Lewis’s sense of creation as spiritually alive, though Marks’s style is more intimate and meditative. Readers who enjoy biblical fiction, theological speculation, or character-driven stories about trust will find plenty to discuss here.
At times, the deliberately elevated prose and repeated attention to subtle emotional shifts slow the pace, but that patience is central to the book’s purpose. Marks wants the reader to feel every degree of separation before the fruit is finally taken, so the familiar ending arrives with renewed weight. By the time Adam and Eve hide, blame one another, and leave the garden, their exile feels like the physical completion of a division that has been growing for many chapters. Eden, Divided is ultimately a sorrowful story about how love can remain real after innocence is gone, and how truth, trust, and mercy become choices once they’re no longer effortless.
Pages: 412 | ASIN : B0D6W6LXHK
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
No Free Will, No Choice
Judas, Otherwise follows a deeply human Judas Iscariot as Roman violence, family loyalty, spiritual longing, and political unrest shape him into a man whose misdirected love leads him toward history’s most infamous betrayal. What drew you to reimagining Judas as a man wrestling with fear, love, and choice?
Ever since I was a child, I have struggled with the idea that Judas was chosen by Jesus to follow Him, favored among the disciples, and tasked with a responsibility to deliver Jesus as was needed for Him to complete his path and provide salvation to all… and in all of this, Judas was the only one who had no free will, no choice, and then gets vilified for eternity. The Bible tells the necessary tale, but we have no idea who Judas was, or how he became the man who could fulfill what was needed.
The novel asks whether Judas was truly free to choose differently. How did you approach that question without making the story feel irreverent or overly revisionist?
This was of the utmost importance to me. I had no desire to challenge God, Jesus, or the Bible. I didn’t want to challenge anyone’s faith or beliefs. My goal was to give backstory, to explain that Judas was a man, was chosen by Jesus, and completed a task nobody else could be counted on to do. I wasn’t apologizing for Judas, or making him seem like a hero. I just felt that Judas deserved to be understood and then let people decide for themselves if his legacy was fair.
The conversations between Judas, Shimon, Ezran, Matthew, Peter, and Jesus carry much of the book’s moral tension. How did you develop such distinct voices for each of them?
I did my research through the Bible and available texts and tried to keep the spirit of each man, and Mary of Bethany alive and distinct. It was important to me that the interactions between them all had weight and merit and not just added fluff. It was especially important where Jesus was concerned because adding dialogue to Jesus had to be consistent and fair to his spirit as much as it can be known. I didn’t want to attempt to change anyone or give them characteristics that didn’t appear anywhere else. I didn’t want cartoons of those sacred to the story.
What do you hope readers take away from Judas’s tragedy, especially in the way the novel frames his downfall as misdirected love rather than simple evil?
I would like for people to have an open mind about Judas. He was human like the rest of us and given the most hateful task in history, even though it had to be done for Jesus to be able to offer the world salvation through His blood and sacrifice. Jesus died for everyone, and I find it hard to believe that He didn’t immediately forgive Judas – and perhaps no forgiveness was needed since Judas did what had to be done. I guess someday we may all know the truth, but since Jesus tasked everyone with being forgiving it would seem that Judas was just as deserving or at least worth a deeper thought.
Author Links: Website | Amazon
Everyone knows what he did.
But what if no one has truly understood why?
Judas, Otherwise reimagines the most infamous betrayal in history through the eyes of the disciple who committed it.
Set in first-century Judea under Roman occupation and rising unrest, this haunting historical novel follows Judas as he is drawn into a storm of loyalty, fear, ambition, love, guilt, and faith. As the world around Jesus grows more volatile, Judas is forced toward choices that will wound not only the people he loves, but the course of history itself.
This is not the story of a monster.
It is the story of a man.
A man who longed to matter.
A man who believed he understood what had to be done.
A man caught between devotion and ruin, between free will and destiny, between the kingdom he hoped for and the tragedy he helped unleash.
Emotionally rich, morally searching, and deeply human, Judas, Otherwise explores betrayal, sorrow, consequence, and the terrible cost of trying to force God’s hand.
Judas, Otherwise
Judas, Otherwise by Steven Marks is a thoughtful historical novel built around one unsettling question: what if Judas had truly been free to choose, and what if he chose differently? The author frames the book as “a spirit of imagination, not irreverence,” and that feels like the right doorway into it. This is a faith-adjacent reimagining that treats its sacred material with seriousness, but it’s also very much a character study about pressure, fear, love, and the cost of trying to control what can’t be controlled.
The strongest part of the book is how patiently it builds Judas before he becomes “Judas.” We meet him as a boy in Kerioth, shaped by Roman violence, family loyalty, his father Shimon’s hard-won restraint, and his cousin Ezran’s sharper, more dangerous certainty. The early chapters give the story its moral vocabulary. Judas isn’t drawn as a simple villain or a misunderstood saint. He’s a serious, wounded, perceptive man who keeps trying to make sense of suffering, and that makes his later choices feel painfully human.
Marks is especially good at writing moral tension as conversation. Shimon, Ezran, Matthew, Peter, Jesus, and Judas all speak from distinct places, and the best scenes don’t feel like debates so much as people pressing on each other’s hidden bruises. One line from Judas, “I believe men become what they practice,” works almost like a hinge for the whole novel. The book keeps returning to that idea, asking what happens when fear, caution, anger, responsibility, and love become habits before a person realizes they’ve hardened into character.
The novel’s Jesus is gentle, and the disciples are allowed to be earthy, funny, tired, and confused. That helps the middle of the book breathe. The scenes around the purse, the crowds, Bethany, Jerusalem, and the growing danger around Passover give the story a lived-in texture. The political pressure is also handled well. Rome, the Temple authorities, zealotry, poverty, and public unrest all become part of the trap Judas walks into, but the book keeps the focus on his inward logic rather than turning the plot into a history lecture.
Judas, Otherwise is a tragedy about misdirected love. Judas doesn’t fall because he feels nothing. He falls because he feels too much and decides feeling must become management. The final chapters are heavy, intimate, and sorrowful, especially in the way they show aftermath as ordinary life continuing after catastrophe. It’s a moving, reflective novel, best read by someone who wants a slow, character-driven reimagining that sits with consequence.
Pages: 392 | ASIN: B0GTBN4HMH
