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Marble and Mud
K. E. Thompson’s Marble and Mud is a sprawling, character-driven novel about a woman who goes looking for purpose and winds up in a place where almost everyone has a complicated claim on what belongs to whom. Lauren Fischer, a twenty-nine-year-old nurse tired of her carefully controlled suburban life, inherits a huge Victorian mansion in the nearly forgotten California mountain town of Stewart’s Camp. She arrives imagining that restoring the house might become the significant thing she’s been waiting to do with her life. The mansion immediately complicates that dream. It’s filthy, altered, half-abandoned, and stripped of much of the collection supposedly left to her. Still, Lauren sees the craftsmanship under the damage and begins working on it room by room. Her fixation on lists, cleaning, repairs, and order makes the restoration feel like an extension of her personality. At the same time, she starts becoming useful to Stewart’s Camp in ways she never planned, especially after delivering fifteen-year-old Tristin Jensen’s baby and becoming an apprentice to the eccentric local healer, Doc Pottinger.
What gives the book its energy is that the house keeps getting larger as a symbol while Lauren’s actual control over it keeps shrinking. Gwendolyn Barnes, the deceased owner’s estranged daughter, arrives with her own entourage and simply moves in, even though Lauren has the deed. Lauren then discovers that the history of ownership stretches back further still, to Murray Stewart, whose connection to the original family makes the legal question much less satisfying than the moral one. Meanwhile, Gwendolyn converts the mansion into the Alpha Male Inn, an elaborate brothel that becomes the center of the town’s gossip, hypocrisy, economic anxiety, and resentment. Thompson lets this plot expand into a genuine ensemble story. Tristin, Jonathan Porter, Doc, Jack Fletcher, Kate, Bob, Gwendolyn, and even the visiting clients all develop motives and secrets of their own. That makes Stewart’s Camp feel less like a backdrop than a closed ecosystem where everybody’s choices eventually affect everybody else.
I would compare this book to Fannie Flagg, particularly Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Thompson has a similar interest in eccentric small-town communities where humor, tragedy, gossip, prejudice, loyalty, and buried history all occupy the same few streets. Like Flagg, she moves easily among different characters instead of keeping the camera fixed on one protagonist. Thompson’s version is rougher and more spiritually argumentative, though. Marble and Mud spends a lot of time with Christianity, moral judgment, sexual hypocrisy, poverty, and the danger of turning conviction into self-righteousness. The late novel’s attempted lynching is where those ideas collide most forcefully. Jonathan, normally one of the quietest people in town, breaks the mob mentality by effectively asking everyone to widen the circle of guilt until they realize nobody can stand outside it. The sequence is exaggerated and darkly funny in places, but it also exposes the book’s central moral concern: people are far more comfortable naming someone else’s corruption than examining their own. Lauren herself has to confront that problem when she realizes she’d turned the mansion into a kind of personal Promised Land and cast herself in a role that allowed her to sort people too easily into righteous and wicked.
Thompson’s style suits this messy moral landscape. She likes close third-person narration that borrows the vocabulary, prejudices, jokes, and blind spots of whichever character currently owns the scene. That can make the novel deliberately uncomfortable because characters say offensive, foolish, selfish, or naïve things without the narration constantly stepping in to clean them up. The result feels appropriate for a book whose title comes from Hawthorne’s idea that life contains both the beautiful and the sordid. Thompson repeatedly turns that idea into something physical. The mansion has parquet floors and crown molding alongside mildew, needles, junk, and rotten furnishings. Stewart’s Camp contains generosity beside cruelty. Lauren’s desire to do something meaningful contains both genuine compassion and vanity. The book is funniest when those contradictions are allowed to coexist without being neatly explained, and Doc Pottinger is especially good at puncturing Lauren’s tendency to turn life into a system she can understand and manage.
The ending is what makes Marble and Mud work as more than an eccentric small-town saga. Lauren loses the physical object she thought would give her life meaning just as she discovers that her real importance has been accumulating elsewhere, through nursing people, delivering a baby, learning the town, forming relationships, and being present when she’s needed. Afterward, Doc explains the lesson more clearly than Lauren would probably prefer: purpose isn’t something a person gets to design in advance, but something that may only become visible after a long series of ordinary choices. The epilogue then reaches back to 1919 and reveals another layer of love and grief embedded in the house itself, including Beth’s ashes sealed into its structure, which gives the mansion’s destruction an unexpectedly tender final resonance.
I came away thinking the title is exactly right. Marble and Mud is about beauty mixed with embarrassment, faith mixed with ego, good intentions mixed with terrible judgment, and people who become meaningful to each other while they’re still trying to figure out what their lives are supposed to mean. I recommend Marble and Mud to readers who enjoy small-town stories, eccentric characters, and thoughtful explorations of purpose, relationships, love, grief, and finding meaning in ordinary acts of kindness.
Pages: 354 | ASIN : B0FJ7T3C19
Silicon Heartbeats
Alessandro Sappia’s Silicon Heartbeats is a novel about ambition, technology, love, and the uncomfortable question of what success is supposed to feel like once you’ve achieved it. The story follows Alex Mercer, a biomedical engineer who becomes determined to reduce medical diagnostic errors after his grandmother is misdiagnosed. That motivation grows into Vitanova Diagnostics, an AI-driven medical technology startup, and the novel tracks the company from a rough idea through fundraising, clinical validation, FDA approval, expansion, and eventual commercial success. Sappia gives the business side of the story plenty of attention, so meetings with investors, regulatory challenges, hospital partnerships, and technical debates are part of the plot. Still, the real subject is Alex himself. Vitanova becomes the thing he builds his identity around, and the novel gradually asks what happens when a mission that gives your life meaning also begins taking up nearly all the available space in it.
The strongest emotional thread is Alex’s relationship with Eliza Chen, a gifted computational biologist who joins Vitanova and becomes essential to both the company and Alex’s personal life. Their relationship grows naturally out of long nights working together, intellectual compatibility, and a shared belief in what Vitanova could accomplish. Because their professional and romantic lives are so tightly connected, the eventual collapse of their relationship hits every part of Alex’s world at once. The breakup, Eliza’s betrayal, Alex’s physical decline, and their attempt to keep working together give the middle of the novel its most compelling tension. Sappia is especially interested in the difficulty of separating personal pain from professional responsibility. When Alex and Eliza reorganize their roles so the company can function despite their history, it feels less like a convenient plot solution and more like two people realizing that good intentions alone aren’t enough to erase emotional consequences.
In some ways, Silicon Heartbeats reminded me of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. Both books follow a protagonist who begins with a powerful idea of what his life is supposed to become, then discovers that the journey changes the meaning of the goal itself. Alex initially measures progress in technical breakthroughs, funding rounds, regulatory victories, and market growth. By the later chapters, after leaving Vitanova and rebuilding his life in Europe and eventually Abu Dhabi, those markers matter differently to him. His marriage to Claire, his children, his mentoring work, and the ordinary routines of family life give him a kind of satisfaction he couldn’t find while pursuing Vitanova at full speed. Like Coelho, Sappia writes with an openly reflective style and frequently allows his protagonist to explain the lesson he has taken from an experience. The approach gives the novel the feel of someone looking back over his life and trying to understand how a series of choices, losses, and surprises fit together.
What stayed with me most about Silicon Heartbeats is the way its definition of achievement keeps expanding. Alex learns that meaningful work is only one part of a meaningful life. His romantic losses, strained professional relationships, betrayal by a trusted colleague, departure from the company, and eventual family life all reshape what fulfillment means to him. The book is at its best when those worlds overlap, especially when a business decision carries emotional consequences or a personal crisis forces a change in leadership. By the end, Vitanova has gone from being Alex’s entire future to being one important chapter in a much larger life. That makes Silicon Heartbeats feel less like a conventional startup success story and more like a novel about learning when to keep building and when to allow yourself to become something beyond the thing you built.
Pages: 147 | ASIN : B0H7FL78SS
An Everyman
Over Brooklyn Hills follows a seventy-year-old man whose struggles with the painful realities of climate change parallel larger threats involving fossil fuel interests and a climate terrorist group. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Several things bother me about a lot of climate fiction, and one is that while climate change is an actual existential threat to the social and economic well-being of humans and our biosphere, climate fiction often puts climate change to be upfront acutely. Today—and into the near future—the danger of climate change is less on a human scale than most other of life’s challenges. Much of climate fiction has some apocalyptic quality to the story or presents a main character who is a climate scientist or activist trying to correct a wrong. Unfortunately, such approaches can fail to help readers identify with the issue of climate change within their own lives. Without such identification, the issue of climate change is more likely to remain abstract and all the more easily ignored.
One of the important threads in my writing of fiction and poetry is to make the attempt to capture characters’ feelings as they respond to circumstances. I love to write full-on action and plot-driven parts of stories too, but both as a reader and as a writer, I find that characters without some interiority seem only pawns in the puzzle master’s play, and no matter how compelling or cleverly built the plot may be, the story will feel empty. Raymond Chandler, as much as he’s pointed to as a master of private investigation pulp fiction, is a wonderful and effective writer because the reader gets to know Philip Marlowe, whether by actual reflection by the character, the way the character describes the world around him (including the famously odd and wonderful similes), or how he interacts with other characters.
Why did you want to tell this story through the perspective of Davin Caine at this stage of his life?
Davin Caine is something of an everyman—neither hero nor villain, not a genius with special knowledge nor someone lacking curiosity. Caine, like many other characters in the book, knows about climate change, but like most everyone else, his priorities are the bills to pay, work, friends, family, the next house repair….
By the time of the action of Over Brooklyn Hills in 2035, Caine is seeing a lot of change with the climate crisis and has gotten more involved. Climate migration—writ small and large—is one of the themes.
At the start of the series (in Kill Well, taking place in 2026), Caine is still recovering from a divorce, is worried about paying bills and the cost of energy, and is ambivalent about his paying job. All the chaos of the Trump regime overwhelms him. He’s frustrated that he can’t get into his art studio, and anxious, basically, about everything. Caine feels isolated, just like most people living in our culture today. One of the themes in this book is the difficulty of grasping in our daily lives the import of climate change; another theme is the malfeasance of entrenched interests such as the fossil fuel corporations and the countervailing forces obscuring, delaying, and denying climate action. Well, the malfeasance of moneyed interests and danger of income inequality carry throughout the series.
In Dear Josephine (which takes place in 2029), the climate situation worsens, but progress has a glimmer of hope in the U.S., post-2028 elections. Still, Caine and most everyone else tend to focus on mundane everyday concerns, but the climate crisis keeps creeping in, and acutely so with Hurricane Josephine. I didn’t want the hurricane to be experienced directly—that’s not how most of us would experience it. Caine is in the Berkshires, and the perspective on the hurricane is mediated by the news and by distance. A major theme is how climate change affects us, including economically, even when the consequence is not direct. Another theme is the previously referenced malfeasance, but in this book, the readers see bad actors emerging from different sides: pro-climate, pro-economic justice, and the big money interests.
As I age, I find myself interested in how aging fits into climate fiction, so Caine is set up to show us these effects. Farm to Me, the last book of the series and set in 2047, has Caine at 82. There’s plenty of climate progress, but the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the years before maintain a changing climate. There’s a distinct focus on young persons’ climate change struggles, in part contrasting with what we see with Caine.
I don’t think you can talk about climate change effectively without including it in daily lives.
Do you think fiction can help readers grapple with issues that often become polarized in public debate?
I believe so, but I can’t claim to know this. There have been some studies on the efficacy of climate fiction to get readers involved, but those studies are thin—small sample sizes—and there’s the lack of consideration in them about the characteristics of the specific climate fiction used in the studies. One easy conclusion? Apocalypse and dystopia may have the tendency to discourage people from acting, but I’m pretty sure there’s no need for a Ph.D. for this finding.
The biggest need for public action is to end the social silence suppressing conversations about climate change. In the U.S., nearly three-quarters of the population think climate change is a serious problem, but only something like 20 percent talk to others about it. Can the right fiction help encourage conversations? I hope so. Is my work that kind of climate fiction? I hope so, but this question can only be answered by readers. Climate change is a big problem, and big problems get addressed legislatively. Conversation is oxygen for political metabolisms.
One of the reasons why I pursued the topic of climate change through a series is to provide a sort of longitudinal study across the next two decades. Restricting the series through characters to the Berkshires helps, I hope, to keep the reader thinking about their own everyday lives in relation to climate change. The fact is that here in the developed nations, we aren’t on the verge of climate change-instigated societal collapse, even if the energy systems we’re participating in are laying the groundwork for longer-term problems that make the world a harder place for people to thrive.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I’m at work on Farm to Me, which is the last book in The Steep Climes Quartet. I expect a Spring 2027 publication date. In this last book, food production is a theme, as is the consequence that the young will suffer. Like the other books in the series, there are thriller elements, although none of the books are simply thrillers, which is why I describe the series as “literary climate fiction.”
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Davin Caine is at last on Medicare and is getting a modest Social Security check each month, but still works with Berkshire Interactive. He’s also been busier in his studio and has sculptures in galleries in the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley, and his solar/batteries and VPP membership keeps electricity bills down. His three house sharers, with housing still scarce, help with expenses. Marsha’s been with the Housatonic House on the Hill for nearly a decade, and she’s queen of the big vegetable garden. Charlie is a more recent house sharer, and a nigh-on perfect one, since he’s often away on business or holed up in his third-floor bedroom working. The newest house sharer is Be, a ceramic artist who helps Davin out with the first floor Airbnb apartment and who has just claimed a corner of the studio and could easily claim his heart if he isn’t careful.
But as summer approaches, a stunning heatwave settles over New York City, west to Lake Erie, and south into parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The heat drives people to escape into the relatively cool hills of the Berkshires just as high season is coming on, so there’s little room for the hordes. Young Brooklyn hipsters take up camping in the woods around Monument Mountain Reservation and along the Appalachian Trail, or double and triple up at the summer homes of friends’ parents, or anywhere, somewhere, to sleep. Many in the town aren’t happy about it, or the spike in petty crimes, and it’s up to Marian Gray-Fletcher, Great Barrington’s town manager, to solve the problem. But she’s distracted with her own philandering husband, until a drug-gang killing focuses her attention.
The international news is full of climate migration stories and political problems in Europe and a conflict between India and Pakistan. Central and South American climate change-induced droughts make for huge numbers of people heading north and the militarized southern border and running battles between cartels and U.S. forces are in the headlines. And then there’s No One is Safe, a climate terrorist organization that has a history of blowing up refineries and pipelines and the occasional oil exec, and one climate direct action veteran finds himself wondering how deep the NOS-cartels connection goes.
Over Brooklyn Hills
Over Brooklyn Hills, by David Guenette, is a literary climate fiction thriller set in 2035, where climate change is no longer a warning on the horizon but a daily pressure shaping politics, money, migration, housing, violence, and ordinary private life. The story follows Davin Caine, now seventy, as he moves through a Berkshire County strained by rising costs, climate migration, and civic unease, while larger threats involving fossil fuel interests, international tensions, and the climate terrorist group No One is Safe push the novel into darker territory.
Guenette isn’t just interested in disaster as spectacle. He’s interested in the way disaster becomes routine. A hot spell, a housing meeting, a town budget, a person trying to keep a home, a young worker needing air conditioning, a local government trying to respond without losing its soul. These details give the novel its weight. I felt less like I was being shown a future world and more like I was being asked to notice the one already forming around us. That’s unsettling. It’s also the book’s strength.
The writing has a restless, observant quality that I found both engaging and, at times, intentionally uncomfortable. Guenette moves between characters with a wide lens, and his choices make the book feel crowded in the way real life is crowded. Davin’s reflective passages slow the story down in useful ways, giving the thriller elements more moral texture. Then the violence and conspiracy threads cut back in, sharp and ugly, reminding me that this is still a thriller with real stakes. I appreciated that balance. The book doesn’t let anyone stay clean for long, not activists, not politicians, not industries, not regular people trying to get through the week.
I would recommend Over Brooklyn Hills to readers who like climate fiction with a political pulse, especially those who want a thriller that thinks as much as it moves. It will appeal to readers who enjoy near-future stories grounded in realistic social consequences rather than end-of-the-world spectacle. If you like fiction that blends suspense, civic anxiety, personal reflection, and big-picture questions about responsibility, this book has plenty to offer.
Pages: 355 | ASIN : B0GYV5L6SJ
Aletheia Vol. II The Binds Of Fate
Aletheia Vol. II: The Binds of Fate, by Luigi A. Kohli, continues the ambitious historical vision established in Aletheia Vol. I: In the Shadows, carrying its story of secrecy, vengeance, faith, and political danger into an even broader ancient world. Where the first volume moved through the fraught transition from Tiberius to Caligula and centered on the dangerous inheritance binding Cassius and Justus, this second volume widens the frame across Rome, Parthia, Judea, and the early Christian movement. It remains a work of historical fiction, biblical-era drama, and political intrigue, but its sense of consequence feels larger now, as private grief and buried truth begin to press more forcefully against empire.
Kohli’s strength is still his seriousness of atmosphere. He writes as though the texture of the ancient world matters, from Roman law and imperial maneuvering to Parthian custom, military culture, spiritual unrest, and the fragile lives of those caught between power and belief. Justus’s concern with justice, Saif’s search for purpose, Cassius’s corrosive hunger for vengeance, and Michtam’s movement through the shadows all give the novel a steady moral tension. Compared with the first volume, The Binds of Fate feels less like the uncovering of a dangerous secret and more like the spreading of its consequences. The pace still allows room for reflection, but the story has a stronger sense of outward motion, especially as its characters move through unfamiliar lands, shifting alliances, and widening historical stakes.
The novel’s relationship to Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur is especially important, and it’s more than a shared setting or a coincidental similarity of themes. Kohli is making a deliberate nod to Wallace’s classic, while writing in his own modern historical style. Judah Ben-Hur is not merely a distant influence on the book; his presence and dreams become part of the story’s unfolding design. Like Wallace, Kohli is interested in how individual lives cross the path of early Christianity, but the pattern has changed. This time, the focus is not on Judah’s encounter with Jesus, but on the sons of Pilate crossing paths with Jesus’ disciples. That shift gives the novel a compelling sense of literary continuation while allowing it to stand as its own interpretation of faith, fate, and the hidden costs of empire.
One of the most intriguing aspects of The Binds of Fate is the way it asks readers to think about the border between legend and history. The closing “Legend or History” section makes clear that Kohli isn’t simply using the past as decoration; he’s asking whether a story like this could be plausible within the gaps left by the historical record. The novel’s use of real events, real figures, disputed identities, and imagined connections gives the book an intellectual charge. Its suggestion of hidden Essene writings, tucked away in the hills with other documents of importance, quietly evokes the kind of revelations associated with ancient scroll discoveries. That idea fits the title’s concern with truth: history may not be fixed only by what has already been found, but also by what remains buried, waiting to complicate what we think we know.
Aletheia Vol. II: The Binds of Fate is a rich and serious continuation of Kohli’s ancient-world saga. It deepens the moral unease of In the Shadows while expanding the story into a more sweeping meditation on justice, vengeance, faith, and historical memory. Readers drawn to Ben-Hur, Roman historical fiction, biblical fiction, and political conspiracy will find a novel that respects its inspirations without being confined by them. The ending offers enough resolution to satisfy the movement of this volume, but its epilogue also leaves the strong impression that Kohli’s larger design may not yet be finished.
Pages: 478 | ASIN : B0FGJWQQW8
Political and Religious Questions
Vanguardian: Book I follows an exiled mother and her son, who develops supernatural powers that draw the attention of those in power, sparking political upheaval. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Admittedly, the setup, particularly with there being two parts in the 326-page book, might come off as a bit unorthodox for some sci-fi romance readers. That divide comes from what first inspired the story, colliding with my desire to add more to it. The initial spark was the opening scene of a soldier capturing a refugee. At the time, I was big on romance books, especially historical romance, and the scenario was somewhat dark fantasy. I was in my 20s (~2013)—my mind was in the gutter half of the day. I understand that these days, a fantasy like this has to be executed delicately, so over the years before publishing the book, I reworked it and toned it down. And although the opening scene was a dark fantasy scenario, it is also something you’d never want to actually have happen to you, because reality is always different than fantasy. Still, I included reality—such as certain consequences Nasrin, the refugee, could face—in the fantasy to create depth and give me more to play with for the rest of the book.
As for the political elements, I hate romance stories with fake conflicts, so after completing my first chapter, I grew bored of the idea of a narrative focused on just two people. I also knew I wasn’t going to write a play-by-play of a spicy scene, which is a payoff romance readers expect. So, I threw in political and religious questions that I’m interested in. The social elements, like the racism levied on Nasrin, came from things I’ve experienced, observed, or read about. Overall, the politics and religion in the story aid in touching on the bigger picture of the series. Once we step outside of Book One, there will be different systems to compare it to. And the questions readers can ask are: Which system is actually good? Which system is bad? Can there be something in between? Can we escape the bad? Is the bad necessary? Ultimately, why are things the way they are?
While writing Vanguardian, I decided to pull the story, which was supposed to be purely a love story, into my astral warrior series—a series I started taking a hack at around 2010. Lucian is key to tying Book One to the rest of the series. Also, throwing a kid into the mix of a historical romance story is uncommon, particularly a kid who can steal the show/narrative on his own. I found that adding a young child to the plot was a good way to add a different dynamic to the romantic element and branch off into something else; hence, the two parts of the book. The romance served as the setup to legacy.
Finally, music inspired parts of the story:
Vermilion Pt 2 by Slipknot
Inspiration for Nasrin/Fabien – I used the lyrics in this song to get a male perspective of how Fabien might feel about Nasrin during kidnapping and wooing/trapping Nasrin – a man obsessed/possessed kind of scenario. After reading the book, readers find out why his feelings are so strong.
Key Lyrics:
“She is [ . . . ]
The unrequited dream
A song that no one sings
The unattainable
She’s a myth that I have to believe in
All I need to make it real is one more reason
I don’t know what to do
I don’t know what to do
When she makes me sad [ . . . ]
She isn’t real
I can’t make her real.”
Down with the Sickness by Disturbed
Inspiration for Lucian and his urges.
Key Lyrics:
“The world is a scary place now that you’ve woken up the demon in me.”
10,000 Days (Wings Pt. 2) by Tool
Inspiration for my overall astral warrior series, particularly End of One, which has been sitting on my hard drives since 2010. That story requires me to be a more experienced author to sufficiently complete. But elements of the song also directly inspired how I have others view Lucian within Book One.
Key Lyrics:
“You’re the only one who can hold your head up high
Shake your fist at the gates saying
‘I have come home now
Fetch me the Spirit, the Son, and the Father
Tell them their pillar of faith has ascended
It’s time now [ . . . ]
You were the light and the way they’ll only read about [ . . . ]
You’re going home”
Monde feels structured around hierarchy and perception. How do reputation and social control function as forces in the story?
Like any other society. Like America now. Optics and narratives matter. From my self-education on the great houses of the titled class in Europe, I learned a lot about how servants spread gossip about the goings-on in private estates. Hence, practices such as staff turning to face the wall or standing in corners when the masters of an estate and their guests came nearby. They were to be invisible, never to interact unless called on. But, I also learned about countless inappropriate relationships between masters of homes and staff, such as in stories like Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson, even recently in the series Downton Abbey. So, I could not help but play with those old realities. My focus in my stories is on gritty realities. Those things that truly happen behind doors, not just how things appear. I did not choose to start my series with historical fiction to focus on the revered, pretty customs, gestures, and dress. The historical dramas and history that always hold my attention are those stories that go behind the veil, exposing human flaws and struggles. Although a lot of historical romance glamorizes the past, particularly the Victorian, Regency, and Edwardian eras, those periods were as corrupt, if not more corrupt, than now, despite the elaborate outward displays of civility. One only needs to read The Rag Nymph to get one slice of the corrupt pie of the past.
The book gradually reveals its speculative scope. Why choose a slow unveiling instead of immediate explanation, and what themes are you exploring through Lucian’s abilities and origins?
For pacing, I took a lot of inspiration from the TV series The Outer Limits, and how that show lulls people into ignoring odd clues as to something not being quite right, and I also wanted to make the oddity that was Lucian and the lights seem believable for the 18th-century French-adjacent period and location through long-term exposure to those elements. Making the lights a cyclical, almost common occurrence made the sci-fi element feel like it could happen in any time period. In modeling after the staging and pacing in Outer Limits, in which every episode ends with a moral about humanity or something in the universe, I slowed down the story and trickled in sci-fi elements. Also, similar to The Outer Limits, I blew what is odd wide open into what became obvious for the audience. The goal is for the reader to say, “That makes sense,” when they close the book.
Lastly, regarding pace, I probably have read too many pre-20th-century books and have grown accustomed to slower pacing as a reader. Going forward, I plan to pick up the pacing in my writing.
Where does the story go in the next book, and where do you see it going in the future?
This series focuses on individual warriors of different ranks in a vast system of what is essentially part of the universe’s immune system. The concept of the universe having an immune system is indirectly inspired by an Outer Limits episode. So, keeping with that concept, I planned to introduce each warrior in a separate book, then move on to them working together in battle. However, plans often change once you get started on things, so based on reader feedback, the next book will focus on what happens to Lucian after Book One. Then, I plan to publish the 2010 manuscript I referenced above, which is the true Book One of the series, but it will likely be Book Three. Readers might be delighted to know why I spent so much time on Nasrin and Fabien in Book One . . .
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A war refugee and her supernaturally gifted son find shelter in the kingdom of Monde, where a marshal’s protection leads to dangerous political consequences.
The empire of Monde is the envy of its neighbors. Nasrin, a war refugee in hiding, has lived illegally in the kingdom for years with her son, Lucian. Her raven-black hair and prismatic eyes mark her as a foreigner, ensuring she will never escape scrutiny. Lucian is also different, but not in the same way as his mother: his silver-gray eyes can arrest someone with a glance, his memory is infallible, and his body recovers from wounds no one else could survive.
When Fabien de Vistré, Marshal of Monde, captures Nasrin, duty demands he punish her. Instead, he shields her and her child, threatening his standing with the king. The marshal knows his duty: serve His Majesty and enforce the law. Yet his preoccupation with Nasrin drags him into dangerous defiance.
Lucian’s gifts cannot remain hidden. As he grows, he defies his mother’s warnings, drawing the attention of rival kings. When he reaches manhood, his powers shift. Something beyond himself begins to guide his path. And after a long-buried secret surfaces, the empire that once offered refuge may become a battlefield.
Ultimate Sin
Ultimum Judicium: The Last Judgment follows a prophet living in a civilization that has fallen who has been chosen by God to lead the survivors on an odyssey to a place of redemption while battling his own inner demons. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The current state of the world is the basis for what prompted me to explore a future doomsday scenario in my novel—a warning, maybe? There is more anger and disagreement than I’ve ever before seen or read, leading to fighting and rioting that could ultimately lead to the end of civilization—or so it did in my book.
Ultimum Judicium is a novel exploring the classic concept of good versus evil. Growing up as a Roman Catholic, and that being the largest formal religion in the world, I adopted that Christian perspective for this book. The basis for most end-of-world stories seems to be rooted in themes of good vs evil, focusing on exorcism and demonic possession governed by Catholicism. The priest I created was ordained by God, the good, and is tempted by Satan, the evil. Here, I gave him a weakness in his attraction and passion for women—an ultimate sin for a priest. The story follows the Christian Bible’s Revelation. It is the journey to Armageddon—the last battle between good and evil.
I find the world you created in this novel is haunting and full of possibilities, with both light and dark elements. Where did the inspiration for the setting come from, and how did it change as you were writing?
The future I invented occurred 200 years after all governments of the world had fallen. A reader must try to envision exactly what a world would be like after so many years without laws or any civilization whatsoever. It would likely be a horror show. We can realize this with certainty after reading about the hairline fractures of civilization called wars that history has documented so clearly. In all wars, we saw the extreme brutality of humanity.
Once I committed to embracing that reality—one of extreme brutality—I found I had created a very different place. So, I contrasted the wickedness of such viciousness with love and kindness. Hence, I gave birth to three loving romances to counteract the savagery. Also, most of the characters within the stronghold, including the Manhig, or Leader, are good and caring people, except for the few bad ones.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
My book, Ultimum Judicium: The Last Judgment, explored good vs evil in a broken world. However, it also shows the resilience of men and women in such times. As with war, it shows humanity’s ability to overcome and survive. And ultimately, love will defeat hatred.
Where do you see your characters after the book ends?
At the end of this book, the characters judged as good went to a place some theologians refer to as the Millennial Kingdom of Saints from the book of Revelation. The evil went to be with Satan, locked in the pits of Hell for the same millennium period.
At the last minute, before this book went to publication, I removed the Aftermath written for the book. It thoroughly explained the actual places each character went and what they planned to give closure to the story.
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Since the dawn of humanity, people had always survived. Cultures fell, but new ones continually emerged and thrived. Humans fought wars, but they kept rebuilding after the destruction. That pattern changed in the future—everything did.
There were predictions and warnings—both spoken and written—but no one paid attention to them. As the ominous signs grew, still, no one obeyed. The unrighteous one kept everyone from seeing what was coming, even though it was obvious; he cast veils over their eyes. Not long after the final recorded year of 2040 AD, humanity faced a worldwide economic disaster of catastrophic proportions following years of street riots. Over time, human moral transgressions led to the collapse of societies worldwide. Countries turned against each other as the world became a wicked and ungodly place. More than two centuries after the last civilization fell, people lost the ability to speak—their capacity to verbalize had ended years earlier. Our future became our past—one marked by brutality and barbarism.
Guided by angels, a prophet chosen by God leads His remaining followers on an odyssey to a place of redemption. Anointed as Manhig, or Leader, he and his armies of male and female warriors are the only hope of preserving some form of civilization, where everyone must obey the laws or be forever banished into the now-wild wastelands of the countryside, overrun with destructive intruders.
Attracted to a feisty woman he cannot have and tempted by the young and beautiful, captivating yet sharp-witted and brilliant General Helen, the manhig wrestles with his inner demons—his inability to resist the lures of Satan regarding women. If he succumbs, the way of life he spent years cultivating will unfold—all will be lost.
The manhig leads his warriors and people from one temporary stronghold to another for defense in an otherwise shattered world—a place now dominated by hordes of unhuman beings: evil cannibalistic beasts, demons, and other mutations—created centuries earlier by the science of that long-ago era. Now living in a surreal culture, while following strange laws, customs, rituals, and practices, and speaking a vernacular of the future, the manhig commands his warriors while battling these creatures alongside many evil humans: thieves, wicked gangs, slave traders, and other nefarious characters who roam the wilderness as the followers journey toward a confrontation between good and evil—the last battle before God’s judgment.
The strongholds—an attempt by the manhig to provide some form of civilization to battle-weary warriors—taverns and bars for his followers to eat, drink, and socialize. They are also a haven of temptation from the evil one. Adultery—forbidden by law by the leader—manifests within those walls of protection as the end draws near.
The Final Shelter
The Final Shelter is a haunting dystopian novel that follows Phoebe, a young scientist and teacher, as she navigates a fractured world where survival is reserved for the wealthy and compassion has become a rarity. Through her eyes, we see a society collapsing under the weight of greed, fear, and inequality. Underground bunkers are built for the privileged while the majority struggle with hunger, violence, and despair. Phoebe, torn between her ideals and the harshness of reality, stumbles upon an invitation to a secret shelter that promises safety, forcing her to confront impossible choices about trust, survival, and who deserves a place in the future.
I felt an immediate connection with Phoebe because her frustrations, her quiet resilience, and her moments of doubt felt raw and relatable. The writing is vivid, with unflinching descriptions of a decaying society. I caught myself pausing to breathe, especially during the riot scenes, because they were written in such a way that I could feel the dread in my chest. The mix of tenderness, like Phoebe talking to plants or comforting a student, and the sheer brutality of the crumbling world gave the book a strange rhythm that pulled me in deeper than I expected.
At times, the dialogue leaned toward being a little more polished than everyday speech, almost like the characters were speaking with extra clarity and purpose. But the ideas within those conversations were sharp and thought-provoking. The story often felt like a mirror reflecting our own society, raising questions about fairness, wealth, and the meaning of kindness. Even in the moments that read more like lessons than story, the impact remained strong, and I couldn’t ignore the weight behind the words. The book made me angry, it made me sad, and it even gave me flickers of hope.
I was left thinking less about the plot twists and more about the questions it forced me to wrestle with. Who do we choose to save when resources are limited? What happens when morality collides with survival? I’d recommend The Final Shelter to readers who love dystopian fiction but crave stories that lean hard into emotional weight rather than just action. If you like books that shake you up and make you reconsider the world around you, this one is worth your time.
Pages: 215 | ASIN : B0FHG57QXP
