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Point First
Nannette Potter’s Point First is a globe-spanning political thriller with a strong romantic-suspense core. Professional knife-thrower Genevieve “Blade” Broussard is investigating why the powerful Andrews family wants her dead when her search leads from a Charleston estate to Oxford and the oil-soaked waterways of Nigeria. Meanwhile, Chase Maserati and the Soldati di Cristo uncover a network connecting massacres, child labor, stolen crude, and a presidential campaign. The converging storylines give the novel considerable momentum while making its conspiracy feel both personal and international.
Blade is the book’s center of gravity. She’s physically formidable, stubborn, emotionally guarded, and genuinely vulnerable when questions about her parents begin dismantling the story she’s inherited. Her relationship with Chase works because their conflict isn’t simply romantic uncertainty. They’re negotiating trust, independence, faith, and the dangerous instinct to protect someone by excluding them. Alec Quinn also adds welcome moral friction. He’s calculating and self-interested, yet his better choices arrive when they cost him something. Among the supporting cast, Ngozi Kalu makes the deepest impression because her courage gives the Nigerian storyline its human and ethical weight.
Readers of David Baldacci will recognize the brisk chapters, rotating viewpoints, political corruption, covert operators, and powerful families protecting old crimes. Potter brings a different energy to that familiar territory through Blade’s theatrical background, the faith-driven Soldati, and the sustained focus on environmental exploitation in the Niger Delta. The oil conspiracy is more than scenery. It links historical atrocities to modern finance and shows how respectable institutions can distance themselves from violence while continuing to profit from it. At times, the large cast and frequent viewpoint changes crowd the narrative, but they also create the sense of a hidden machine being exposed piece by piece.
I found the novel’s interest in inheritance compelling. Blade receives family blood, buried evidence, grief, and eventually a choice about which parts of that legacy she’ll carry forward. The title becomes especially fitting near the end, when truth lands with the precision of one of her knives. Point First delivers muscular action and a satisfying conspiracy, but its real subject is the moment when survival turns into commitment. It’s an ambitious, earnest thriller about choosing loyalty, accountability, and hope after discovering exactly what power has tried to conceal.
Beneath the Canopy
Beneath the Canopy brings Nazi-occupied Netherlands to life through the eyes of two twelve-year-olds who are close in geography but living remarkably different versions of the same war. Johanna is carrying responsibilities far beyond her years as she tries to protect her younger sister and keep her family together. Rein, largely left to fend for himself, scavenges, steals bread, dodges soldiers, and leans on humor and nerve to survive. Moving between their perspectives gives the novel an immediate, intimate quality. History is happening all around them, but what matters most on the page is often painfully simple: finding food, staying warm, getting home, protecting someone you love.
Lynda Riggers has a real feel for the details that make wartime deprivation understandable on a human scale. Johanna’s compulsive counting becomes both a character trait and a way of measuring a world she can’t control. Rein’s hunger, bravado, loneliness, and fierce attachment to his brother give his chapters a different rhythm, sometimes funny and sometimes devastating. The book is especially effective when those ordinary childhood impulses collide with the realities of occupation. A loaf of bread can feel like treasure. A pair of wooden shoes can become an act of grace. A childhood crush can briefly make the war recede. Those moments give the story warmth without softening what these children are living through.
The novel also makes room for complicated questions about survival, loyalty, prejudice, courage, and kindness. Rein’s relationship with Heinrich, a Nazi officer who helps feed him, is particularly compelling because Rein has to hold two truths at once: this man belongs to the force that has brutalized his country, and this same man has shown him mercy. Johanna’s journey has its own moral and emotional weight as responsibility pushes her toward a maturity she never asked for. Around them are Resistance members, collaborators, frightened civilians, starving families, displaced people, and children trying to decide what kind of adults they can trust. Riggers keeps returning to individual choices, showing how enormous history is experienced through small decisions that can save a life, betray a friend, or offer a little dignity.
What gives Beneath the Canopy its deepest resonance is knowing that its fictional story grew from the lives of real people. By the time liberation arrives, survival doesn’t erase what Johanna and Rein have endured, but it gives them the chance to imagine a future again. The final pages understand that home can mean more than a building and that freedom can arrive carrying grief alongside joy. The author’s note adds another layer by revealing what became of the people behind the characters, including losses that remained unanswered for decades. It leaves the reader thinking about how family stories survive, how trauma travels through generations, and how easily history disappears when nobody keeps telling it. Beneath the Canopy turns history into something we can feel, reminding us that the past stays alive when we remember the people who had to survive it.
Pages: 222 | ASIN : B0HHNSW6M4
Phantom Ranch
Scott Wells’s Phantom Ranch is a psychological survival thriller built around two kinds of danger: the physical threat of the Grand Canyon and the damage people carry into it. The novel follows Ben Brady as he undertakes a Christmas hike with his estranged brother Todd and close friends Robert and Christy, fulfilling his late father Sonny’s wish that the brothers make the trip together. Running alongside their journey is the story of a violent fugitive who calls himself Mark, a predator hiding deep in the canyon and gradually moving into their path. Wells establishes early that the landscape will do more than provide scenery. The canyon watches, conceals, echoes, and preserves secrets, giving the book an almost supernatural sense of menace even when the danger is entirely human. That combination gives Phantom Ranch its identity: part wilderness thriller, part family drama, and part story about what people do with the things that have hurt them.
The emotional center is Ben, and his complicated relationship with Todd gives the suspense more weight than a straightforward stalk-and-survive story would have. Their history includes cruelty, homophobia, violence, and childhood trauma, so the hike carries years of unresolved anger down the trail with them. Sonny’s death gives them a reason to be together, but the canyon becomes the place where they’re finally forced to see one another without the familiar family roles surrounding them. One of the book’s strongest choices is allowing that change to happen through small experiences as well as dramatic ones: a near fall, shared memories of their father, jokes that only brothers understand, and the scattering of Sonny’s ashes over the canyon. By the time Todd begins to recognize that Ben has never asked him to change his beliefs, only to treat him with the same dignity Todd expects for himself, the trip has become as much about emotional survival as physical survival. That makes Todd’s arc the novel’s boldest element because Wells asks readers to hold the seriousness of his past behavior alongside his capacity to change.
There are echoes here of Stephen King, particularly The Shining, in the way Wells uses an isolated place to put pressure on damaged relationships. King’s Overlook Hotel seems to absorb and amplify what a family brings into it, and Wells gives the Grand Canyon a similar presence. The difference in setting produces a very different kind of energy. Here, exposure replaces confinement: cliffs, ice, darkness, distance, exhaustion, and the knowledge that help may be hours away. Wells also embraces a broader tonal mix than pure horror. There are turkey chases, road-trip insults, Christmas presents, crude jokes, friendship, sex, grief, family memories, and sudden eruptions of graphic violence. That range makes the characters feel as though they had lives before the thriller machinery reached them. Mark, meanwhile, becomes increasingly disturbing through his fixation on condors, stalking, trophies, and control. His obsession eventually turns the bird imagery back on him in a particularly fitting piece of narrative symmetry when the creatures he admires become the ones that find what remains of him.
What I liked most wasn’t the serial-killer plot by itself, but the way Wells connects survival to belonging. Ben enters the canyon carrying grief, fear, memories of abuse, and a lifetime of having parts of himself judged by people he loves. He leaves having survived something almost unimaginably violent, but the book keeps going long enough to show why surviving matters. The final family gathering and Ben and Kent’s wedding give the story a destination beyond escape, with Todd standing beside his brother as best man and Sonny represented by a photograph saved for the ceremony. Wells makes his purpose especially clear in the author’s note, where he describes the story as growing from his own journey through silence, shame, acceptance, and survival. That personal investment comes through on the page. Phantom Ranch is a raw and cinematic thriller with a surprisingly earnest heart, one that treats the climb out of the canyon as both a feat of endurance and a metaphor for finally finding your way home.
Pages: 280 | ASIN: B0H46SVRV3
Hunting the Red Fox
Hunting the Red Fox by W. Kenneth Tyler, Jr. is the kind of novel that feels like sitting down with a gifted, slightly mischievous older man who casually mentions that he once stole a 200-carat diamond, fought behind enemy lines during World War II, played professional golf with legends, knew Hollywood stars, and spent a good portion of his younger years charming women and breaking rules. Roger Mace, an aspiring writer looking for extraordinary stories from ordinary people, meets eighty-two-year-old Perry Barnes on a golf trip and quickly discovers that Perry could fill a book by himself. From there, Perry takes Roger through a life shaped by Depression-era Savannah, the violent loss of his father, petty crime, specialized Army training, wartime missions, professional golf, jewel theft, romance, and eventually the hunt for a criminal known as the Red Fox. Tyler wisely gives Roger a skeptical voice throughout, so the reader gets to share his recurring thought: can one man really have lived all of this? That tension between disbelief and fascination becomes part of the fun.
Perry is what holds the sprawling story together. He’s charming, vain, observant, funny, reckless, sentimental, and far more complicated than his polished gentleman routine initially suggests. His childhood talent for reading people, gambling on golf, and stealing eventually combines with military training in languages, sabotage, infiltration, and survival, creating a man whose legal and illegal talents are almost impossible to separate. That becomes especially entertaining when Perry returns to jewel theft in the 1950s, convincing himself he’s behaving like Robin Hood by stealing from wealthy people who mistreat their employees and secretly directing the proceeds to those workers. The thefts aren’t simply side adventures. They reveal something essential about Perry. He craves the intellectual puzzle and adrenaline almost as much as he wants to believe he’s doing the right thing. Tyler also has a fondness for detail, whether he’s describing a golf hole, a mansion, a military operation, a piece of jewelry, or a complicated theft. That gives the novel the texture of a long story told over drinks, where one memory leads naturally into another and the storyteller enjoys the telling nearly as much as the listener enjoys hearing it.
There’s something of Winston Groom’s Forrest Gump in the novel’s approach to history. Like Groom, Tyler sends a fictional man wandering through real twentieth-century America and lets him brush shoulders with people readers already know. Perry encounters figures such as Winston Churchill, Howard Hughes, Jackie Gleason, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and some of professional golf’s biggest names, and he treats those encounters with an amusing casualness. Where Groom gives Forrest innocence and happenstance, Tyler gives Perry calculation, swagger, appetites, and a con man’s eye for opportunity. That makes Hunting the Red Fox feel part historical adventure, part crime caper, part golf novel, and part exaggerated fireside memoir. The later arrival of Sophia Toscana gives all of those threads a satisfying place to meet. She’s a talented jewelry detective pursuing the Red Fox, while Perry is a former jewel thief who can understand the criminal precisely because he thinks like one. Their investigation turns the final portion of the book into a genuine cat-and-mouse story, culminating in the theft of the Mecklenburg Diamond, Perry’s confrontation with Clarence Desmond, and a dangerous showdown that finally forces Perry to decide what he values more than excitement.
What stayed with me most, though, wasn’t the diamond or even the Red Fox. It was the way Perry’s entire story gradually becomes an argument about growing up. At the beginning, he tells Roger that returning the Mecklenburg Diamond marked the end of his life as a thief and con man because love and family had finally become more important to him. The rest of the novel spends hundreds of pages showing how difficult it was for him to reach that conclusion. Sophia matters because she presents Perry with something none of his adventures can provide: a reason to stop roaming. Even then, he nearly ruins it by falling back into old habits and running away from commitment. The final revelation that Sophia became Mrs. Barnes, that they built a family and founded a successful detective agency together, gives the book a warm and fitting payoff. Perry doesn’t simply abandon his unusual talents. He finally figures out where to put them. That makes Hunting the Red Fox a big, talkative, frequently funny life story about a man who spends decades mastering how to escape almost anything before realizing that the best part of his life begins when he finally finds something he doesn’t want to escape from.
Pages: 300 | ASIN : B0F1FW1KKQ
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.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
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.
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Fiction
The Literary Titan Book Award honors books that exhibit exceptional storytelling and creativity. This award celebrates novelists who craft compelling narratives, create memorable characters, and weave stories that captivate readers. The recipients are writers who excel in their ability to blend imagination with literary skill, creating worlds that enchant and narratives that linger long after the final page is turned.
Award Recipients
The Voice of Cuba by Amarilys Rassler
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
The Flour Girl
The Flour Girl by Sean Esson is a supernatural mystery thriller that takes a clever crime-fiction premise and pushes it into the afterlife. Frankie Jones wakes up dead, stripped of his memories and unsure of who he was, only to learn that his ability to move on is tied to Amelia Fournier, a murdered baker who needs answers of her own. From there, the novel becomes an afterlife mystery, a paranormal crime thriller, and a detective story all at once. Frankie and Amelia can float through walls, spy on the living, and navigate a version of the city they can no longer truly inhabit, while Frankie discovers he has the unusual ability to possess living people. Those supernatural rules aren’t just window dressing. They become investigative tools, complications, and eventually sources of real danger.
The strongest part of the novel is Frankie himself, especially once the investigation begins uncovering uncomfortable truths about the life he can’t remember. Esson builds the mystery around a question that’s more interesting than simply identifying Amelia’s killer: how responsible are you for the person you used to be when you no longer recognize that person in yourself? Frankie develops from a sarcastic, confused spirit into someone increasingly invested in Amelia, Detective Royce Sheffield, Detective Jason Phillips, and the idea that doing something good still matters even when the moral ledger looks hopelessly unbalanced. Amelia gives that arc its emotional center. Their banter makes the darker stretches of the supernatural detective fiction surprisingly warm, and their growing attachment gives the investigation consequences that aren’t limited to solving a crime.
Esson also gives the thriller side of the story plenty of room. The South Side Cartel investigation unfolds through surveillance, police work, interrogations, possessions, gunfights, hidden evidence, shifting suspects, and several revelations that substantially change what both Frankie and the reader understand about the case. The action is unusually detailed, particularly when it comes to firearms, tactical movement, and police procedure, which gives this paranormal thriller a methodical, physical quality even though its protagonist is incorporeal. At the same time, the book regularly returns to death, grief, guilt, justice, forgiveness, and the uneasy difference between punishment and redemption. The pacing moves between extended investigative or reflective passages and sudden bursts of violence, allowing the crime plot and the metaphysical story to develop alongside each other.
What makes The Flour Girl memorable to me is the way its supernatural mystery becomes a story about identity and choice. Frankie can’t undo Franklin Jones’s life, and the book doesn’t treat redemption as a convenient eraser. Instead, it asks what someone does with the opportunity to choose differently now. By the conclusion, Amelia’s murder has been resolved, but Frankie’s larger question has only become more interesting, and the final turn expands the premise naturally into a broader supernatural detective series. The result is a paranormal crime thriller with a surprisingly tender center, a strong first-person voice, and an afterlife mythology built to support more than a single mystery. The Flour Girl works as a murder investigation, a metaphysical thriller, and a character-driven story about discovering that who you’ve been and who you choose to become don’t always have to be the same person.
Pages: 324 | ASIN : B0HBFV1V87
Literary Titan Silver Book Award
Celebrating the brilliance of outstanding authors who have captivated us with their skillful prose, engaging narratives, and compelling real and imagined characters. We recognize books that stand out for their innovative storytelling and insightful exploration of truth and fiction. Join us in honoring the dedication and skill of these remarkable authors as we celebrate the diverse and rich worlds they’ve brought to life, whether through the realm of imagination or the lens of reality.
Award Recipients
ȚEPEȘ: VLAD III DRACULA by Sebastian Valerius
Out of the Water by K Browning
The Galaxy of Kon-Ki: Waking on Earth by Colin Nimer
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
