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Echoes
Matthias Meinhardt’s Echoes is a collection of eleven historical fiction stories arranged across roughly twelve thousand years, beginning with a prehistoric community in Southwest Asia and ending amid Cold War espionage in 1961 Athens. Between those points, the book moves through ancient Ur and Rome, medieval Damascus, Reformation-era Lübeck, revolutionary and industrial Paris, prewar Vienna, Weimar Berlin, and Auschwitz. The changing settings give the collection considerable range, but its deeper continuity comes from the moral situations its characters encounter. Priests, artisans, soldiers, printers, executioners, inventors, artists, guards, prisoners, and spies all find themselves working within structures larger than themselves. The stories repeatedly examine how those structures acquire authority, how ordinary people sustain them, and what happens when personal conscience begins to conflict with accepted duty.
The collection establishes its central concerns early. In “The First Stones,” belief becomes a means of creating communal identity out of grief, culminating in Edo’s observation that “we don’t believe stories because they’re true. We believe them because they hold us together.” That idea reverberates throughout the book in increasingly complex forms. Written law gives Ur order while institutionalizing inequality. Rome builds an empire through discipline, assimilation, and fear. Religious conviction turns military necessity into holy war in Damascus. Revolutionary ideals in France harden into a system that sends former believers to the guillotine. Meinhardt is particularly interested in the moment when a useful structure becomes self-perpetuating, and when its participants discover that following its rules no longer relieves them of responsibility. Because each story approaches that tension from another century and another social role, the chronological structure creates a cumulative argument about the persistence of human behavior beneath changing institutions.
Meinhardt’s prose favors clarity, momentum, and sharply defined scenes. Characters often articulate the central ethical problem directly, giving several stories the quality of historical parables while keeping them grounded in personal consequences. “The Printer” is especially effective in this respect. Hans Keller regards himself as a craftsman who merely reproduces the ideas that pass through his shop, until antisemitic violence forces him to confront his role in spreading them. The story distills that realization into three words: “Words have weight.” Variations on that recognition shape “The Executioner,” “The Inventor,” and the harrowing “The Death Machine,” in which professional duty and moral agency become increasingly difficult to separate. The collection also makes room for a different register in “The Movie Star,” whose comic collision between Hollywood glamour and German Expressionism brings warmth and creative energy to the book while still placing its characters inside a culture approaching political catastrophe.
Echoes is a book about historical change viewed through individual participation. Its recurring professions matter because they turn large abstractions such as religion, law, empire, revolution, technology, propaganda, art, genocide, and geopolitics into acts performed by particular people. The later stories give the earlier ones additional resonance: mechanical efficiency moves from the optimism of the 1889 Exposition to the industrial organization of Auschwitz, while the Cold War finale shows governments once again subordinating moral history to strategic usefulness. The appendix reinforces the collection’s method by separating its fictional characters from the historical circumstances that shaped their worlds. Across its wide chronology, Echoes presents civilization as an accumulation of inventions, institutions, beliefs, and stories whose meaning depends on the people who inherit and use them. That perspective gives the collection its coherence and makes its title especially apt: centuries change, systems evolve, but the moral questions continue to echo.
Pages: 128| ASIN :B0H12NLLKM
By Her Own Hand: War and Passion in a Woman’s Wounded Heart
Jack Deveny’s By Her Own Hand is a war novel, romance, and psychological thriller built around two soldiers who come home carrying much more than memories of Afghanistan. Madeline Crowne and Eliot Lange are both fugitives in their own ways, haunted by disastrous moments in combat that left innocent people dead and their own lives shattered. Madeline’s guilt is especially central to the story. She enters the military partly to escape the pain of leaving her abused younger brother behind, only to accidentally kill a pregnant Afghan woman during a chaotic firefight. Eliot carries a parallel burden after trying to protect his best friend, Will, during a severe PTSD episode and accidentally causing the death of an Afghan civilian. Those opening events give the novel its emotional foundation and explain why both characters see themselves as guilty even when the circumstances are far more complicated.
What makes the novel so interesting is how quickly it moves from the battlefield into a much more personal story. Madeline and Eliot find comfort in each other, and their relationship becomes the safest place either of them has known. Their romance is tender, physical, and sometimes intensely sentimental, but that fits these characters because affection isn’t just affection to them. Holding hands, sleeping beside someone, or being touched without fear becomes evidence that life can still contain something good. Deveny frequently shifts perspective between Madeline and Eliot, letting readers experience how differently they carry similar kinds of guilt. At the same time, the story keeps widening. Madeline’s search for her addicted brother, Eliot’s concern for Will, and the dangerous Mira all pull the couple back toward the violence they’re trying to escape. Mira is especially important because her history with Madeline connects love, jealousy, exploitation, and revenge, giving the novel much of its thriller energy.
In that sense, By Her Own Hand reminded me somewhat of Kristin Hannah’s The Women. Both stories are deeply interested in what happens after combat, especially when a soldier returns carrying guilt and trauma that ordinary life can’t easily absorb. Deveny takes a more action-driven and romantic approach, mixing PTSD, crime, pursuit, international travel, and courtroom drama into the same story. His characters tend to experience everything at full emotional volume, so the book has the feel of a sweeping melodrama as much as a military novel. That intensity works best when Madeline and Eliot’s private pain collides with the question of how other people judge what happened in war. By the final sections, the chase has evolved into a legal reckoning, and the same events that have tortured the characters internally have to be retold as evidence, testimony, and competing versions of the truth. Madeline’s trial, for example, forces witnesses to confront how little certainty can exist in the smoke and confusion of combat.
What I liked most was the book’s belief that healing can become a responsibility. Madeline and Eliot don’t just want to survive what happened to them. By the end, they begin imagining lives built around helping people who have suffered in ways they understand personally. Eliot wants to work with veterans who have PTSD in honor of Will, while Madeline considers helping wrongly accused veterans or women affected by sex trafficking. That ending gives the title another dimension. The characters have spent much of the novel feeling as though their own hands caused destruction, but those same hands can eventually comfort, defend, and rebuild. It’s a very earnest novel, and its mix of war, romance, trauma, crime, and redemption gives it an unusually broad emotional range. For readers who like character-driven stories where love is tangled up with guilt, danger, and the difficult work of living after violence, By Her Own Hand has plenty to hold onto.
Pages: 312 | ASIN : B0FRP4NQY7
A Red Age
A Red Age by Sage Osterberg and Ulysses Kittilson is a sprawling piece of military science fiction, dystopian fiction, dark fantasy, and dinosaur fiction that treats its dinosaur civilization as a fully developed political and cultural world. The foreword makes that ambition explicit, presenting the novel as an attempt to expand what dinosaur stories can do, and the book follows through with governments, religions, propaganda, ancient histories, military bureaucracies, mass media, technology, class divisions, and generations of resentment. The opening assault on Juliobriga establishes the tone immediately: this is a violent, profane, frequently funny war story in which soldiers joke their way through sewage, gunfire, terrible decisions, and gruesome deaths. From there the story expands into a much larger conflict between the Coalition and the Alliance, with political leaders, soldiers, spies, royals, civilians, and prisoners all getting caught in the same machinery of war.
One of the strongest parts of this dystopian novel is its willingness to let the world feel messy. The Coalition and Alliance each have ideologies, grievances, heroes, monsters, competent people, fools, opportunists, and characters who genuinely believe they’re protecting civilization. Cartassius, in particular, gives the political side of the story some weight. His concern that victory achieved through atrocities will simply plant the seeds of the next war gets at one of the book’s central ideas: civilizations can become trapped inside the stories they tell about their enemies. Zamma approaches the same problem from another direction, questioning the endless cycle of violence while surrounded by a royal culture that treats warfare as inheritance. Meanwhile, characters such as Kuyucak, Thalsos, Botilda, Asgremis, Zorphax, Hassa, Akragos, Izmit, and others broaden the novel into something closer to an ensemble war epic. There’s a lot happening, but that density suits a world where political intrigue, religion, espionage, family loyalty, military ambition, and personal survival are constantly colliding.
The book’s personality comes from how readily it mixes horror with absurdity. Horrific combat can sit beside bureaucratic incompetence, vulgar arguments, terrible advertising, propaganda broadcasts, religious references, and jokes that arrive at the least dignified possible moment. That combination gives this dark sci-fi novel a distinctly satirical streak. Even when the stakes reach an almost apocalyptic scale, everyday stupidity keeps intruding. The effect is especially sharp near the climax, when the Nemesis weapon transforms military victory into catastrophe. A single strike wipes out a fleet and then produces consequences far beyond the triumphant moment its users imagined, turning soldiers from both armies into equally terrified creatures running from the resulting destruction. That sequence captures the novel’s larger view of war beautifully: technology, nationalism, faith, revenge, and ambition can dress violence in grand language, but eventually the violence becomes bigger than everyone who thought they controlled it.
By the end, A Red Age feels like the opening movement of a much larger dinosaur science fiction saga, and its cliffhanger embraces that serialized quality. Kuyucak’s final blood-pit sequence folds together several of the novel’s recurring interests: spectacle, propaganda, captivity, exhaustion, violence as entertainment, and the strange possibility of finding agency inside brutality. That sequence turns the gladiatorial spectacle into something unexpectedly bleak, giving Kuyucak’s storyline a darker emotional edge before the novel closes on a chaotic final note and the promise of Part 2: A Poisoned Sky. It’s a fitting ending for a book that keeps escalating its world while maintaining a rough, conversational sense of humor. Readers drawn to military science fiction, dystopian fantasy, and dinosaur fiction will find a strange and remarkably committed world here, one where prehistoric bodies carry rifles, argue about politics, worship gods, watch trashy entertainment, make catastrophic choices, and inherit the same old problems of power and violence.
Pages: 518 | ASIN : B0FVRXDNJ8
My Salvation – Literature & History
By Her Own Hand centers around two decorated soldiers haunted by civilian deaths, abandonment, and the fear that a single terrible moment has defined them forever. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
To begin with, my own fractured upbringing where substance abuse and violence prevailed. Born as an empath, this environment was particularly painful to one of my nature. But irony emerges in strange places. My older brother tutored me at an early age to love literature and history, both ancient and contemporary. That was my salvation.
The novel contains elements of war fiction, psychological drama, romance, and thriller. What drew you to blending these genres?
In terms of war fiction, my extensive reading of conflicts in the Middle East. On a more personal level, the friends who died in the Viet Nam war and those who came back with the horrible affliction of PTSD. As far as psychological drama, the setting of the novel and the characters involved dictated high drama.
In reference to romance, most of my emotional responses would be classified as feminine. I relate to women’s feelings more than men’s. Thus, I write more directly to them. Moving on to thriller, once again, given the setting of high conflict and the personal inner conflicts of my characters, thriller was a necessary component.
Madeline’s relationship with Eliot and Mira reveal different aspects of her personality. What did each relationship teach readers about her?
Even as horrible as her family life was, she did not become hardened. She still has the will and the strength of character to open herself to vulnerability. In Eliot’s case, it led to an enduring love. In Mira’s case, Madeline’s nature was manipulated into lies and deceit. Yet, in the end, Madeline does not seek revenge. She knows that would only tarnish the real love she has found.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I do have a new novel in mind, but you know how superstitious novelists can be when it comes to divulging details too soon. Fortunately, I’m married to a loving and levelheaded wife who keeps her crazy writer in check!
I do promise you’ll be among the first to know when my next book comes out.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Amazon
She escaped one war—only to be hunted in another.
When Madeline Crowne flees an abusive home by joining the army, she rises from survivor to hero during her deployment in Afghanistan. But everything shatters when she’s falsely accused of a war crime and becomes the target of a global manhunt.
Saved by Mira, a survivor of Lebanon’s civil wars, Madeline finds comfort in their shared scars—until Mira’s dangerous double life as an illegal arms dealer turns obsession into betrayal.
Back in the U.S., Madeline crosses paths with Eliot Lange, another soldier on the run after being accused of desertion. Their chemistry is instant, their trust fragile. Together, they try to rebuild a future.
But the FBI is closing in.
And Mira wants revenge.
Disheartened
A.L. Waddington’s Disheartened, the second book in the Spirit Quest Series, follows Sidney as she lives two parallel lives 160 years apart. In 2020 Boston, she and Landon face medical school, hospital work, the COVID-19 pandemic, political unrest, and a painful family loss. In 1860, she is married to physician Keifer, gives birth to their son, visits his family in Savannah, and travels to Chicago as the nation moves toward civil war. Through the inherited gift of E.V.E., Sidney remembers both worlds and struggles with the desire to protect people whose futures she already knows.
I liked the alternating chronology because the two periods reflect each other without feeling identical. Both are marked by fear, social division, and families trying to preserve ordinary life while larger events close in. The domestic scenes give the novel much of its texture: shared meals, hospital shifts, childbirth, letters, road trips, and quiet conversations between couples. Sidney’s grief over Nicholas is especially effective because he connects her two lives, and his death leaves her emotionally unmoored.
The novel is also strongly political. Its characters debate COVID restrictions, race, elections, slavery, taxation, secession, and Lincoln’s role in the coming war. These views are presented from a distinctly conservative perspective, and readers will need to be comfortable with that approach. At times, the political dialogue slows the story and makes several characters sound alike. The book is strongest when those beliefs produce personal consequences, especially in Keifer’s divided loyalties and Sidney’s confrontation with the father who abandoned her.
I’d recommend Disheartened to readers of historical fiction, time-slip fantasy, family saga, political fiction, and romance. Its divided-life premise recalls Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, though Waddington focuses more on parallel families and foreknowledge. Disheartened is ultimately about having two homes and knowing neither can ever be safely left behind.
Pages: 442 | ASIN : B0GR9PWSL2
By Her Own Hand: War and Passion in a Woman’s Wounded Heart
By Her Own Hand is a sweeping blend of war novel, psychological drama, romance, and fugitive thriller. Jack Deveny centers the story on Madeline Crowne and Eliot Lange, two decorated soldiers carrying the moral injuries of Afghanistan into an uncertain life back home. Both are haunted by civilian deaths, abandonment, and the fear that a single terrible moment has defined them forever. Their growing love gives the novel its emotional center, while accusations of war crimes, an international arms trafficker, and a relentless pursuit keep the story moving. The book’s subtitle, “War and passion in a woman’s wounded heart,” captures its central tension beautifully.
Madeline is the novel’s driving force. She’s fierce, vulnerable, sexually candid, and burdened by guilt that reaches back to her childhood and her brother John’s suffering. Her relationships with Eliot and Mira reveal different sides of her hunger for safety, loyalty, and forgiveness. Eliot, meanwhile, brings a gentler energy to the story. His devotion to his traumatized friend Will and his tenderness toward Madeline give the romance genuine warmth. Their intimacy is presented as more than desire. It becomes a private language through which two damaged people recognize each other and begin imagining a future.
Deveny writes with emotional directness and a strong visual instinct. Combat scenes arrive in flashes of blood, smoke, confusion, and irreversible choices, while quieter moments linger over hands, scars, clothing, rooms, and treasured objects. The shifting viewpoints bring readers close to the characters’ thoughts, and the story moves confidently from Afghanistan to Sacramento, Libya, Beirut, and military courtrooms. At times, the intensity is almost unbroken, but that sustained pressure suits characters who can’t simply step away from their memories. The novel is deeply interested in moral injury, especially the painful distance between what a person intended and what their actions caused.
What stays with you is the book’s belief that remorse can become a source of purpose. Madeline and Eliot don’t erase their wounds. They learn to carry them toward service, compassion, and a life devoted to people suffering as they have suffered. By the closing pages, justice matters, but mercy matters more, and love becomes an active choice. By Her Own Hand is a fierce and intimate story of two wounded soldiers who discover that love can’t undo the past, but it can teach the heart what to do with it.
Pages: 351 | ASIN : B0H2HGZJPY
The Light Reapers: A Good Day to Die
The Light Reapers: A Good Day to Die, by Gary Hickman, is a post-apocalyptic military horror thriller that follows Priest and the Light Reapers as they face a world overrun by infected monsters, ruthless human enemies, and the rising threat of the Trinity, three intelligent, terrifying beings with plans that reach far beyond simple survival. The story moves from brutal rescue missions and underground battles to safe zones that may not be safe at all. At its core, though, this is a book about loyalty. Who gets saved. Who gets left behind. And what it costs to keep fighting when the world keeps giving you reasons to stop.
Hickman writes like he wants the reader strapped into the passenger seat of an armored vehicle with no seatbelt. The action comes fast, loud, and bloody, but there is more going on here than gunfire and monsters. Priest is written as a man shaped by rage, grief, and purpose, and that mix gives the book its emotional weight. He’s not soft, and the story never pretends he is. Still, the quieter moments, especially the ones built around Dora, Doc, Vivian, Lia, and the larger Reaper family, give the violence somewhere to land. I liked that. Without those moments, the book could have become one long firefight. Instead, it has breath between the explosions.
Hickman’s choices are bold, sometimes harsh, and often intentionally uncomfortable. This isn’t a gentle post-apocalyptic novel. The horror is physical, but it is also moral. The monsters are frightening, yet the human betrayals can feel even uglier. I found myself thinking a lot about how the book treats obedience, power, and protection. The Trinity wants control. The Reapers survive because they choose each other. That contrast works well. The dialogue can be blunt and rough around the edges, but it fits the world and the people living in it. These are soldiers, survivors, killers, parents, lovers, and friends trying to hold a line in a ruined world. They don’t speak in polished speeches. They snap, joke, curse, grieve, and keep moving.
I would recommend The Light Reapers: A Good Day to Die to readers who enjoy gritty military science fiction, post-apocalyptic horror, and action-heavy thrillers with a strong found-family thread. It will especially appeal to readers who like their heroes damaged but loyal, their villains monstrous in more ways than one, and their survival stories soaked in danger from the first page to the last. This is a violent, emotional, high-stakes genre novel, and it fully commits to the brutal, high-stakes story it sets out to tell.
Pages: 381 | ASIN : B0GZZ51ZBW
Article Five: A World War Three Novel
Article Five, by J.D. Duncan, is a geopolitical military thriller that kicks off with coordinated attacks and covert sabotage that shove NATO toward its most frightening promise: collective defense. We bounce between the pressure-cooker halls of London, field operations chasing a sleeper agent tied to bombings near St Paul’s tube station, and the widening war footprint stretching to places like Estonia and Moscow. The spine of the plot follows Prime Minister Powell as he tries to hold the line politically and morally while Tony Abbott and John Rafferty chase the human machinery behind the chaos, including Andrew Barker and an injured would-be defector, Gregov Maximov. It all drives toward a tense, exhausted ceasefire and a messy “angry peace,” not a clean victory.
What I liked most is how the book moves. Duncan uses tight point-of-view hops and quick location stamps to keep you aware of the board while still letting you feel the sweat in the room. Powell’s sections especially land for me because they aren’t written like a superhero fantasy. They feel like a person trying to sound steady while everything is shaking, including the uncomfortable reality that allies might hesitate when you need them most. The action scenes are crisp without turning into a tech brochure. There’s a memorable early sequence with a special forces team taking down a Russian helicopter to grab its electronics, and you can almost smell the burning fuel and wet forest in the aftermath. It’s the kind of detail that makes the genre work: specific enough to feel real, but still readable if you don’t speak “military” fluently.
I also appreciated the author’s willingness to sit in the moral grey. The spy stuff isn’t framed as glamorous. It’s transactional, paranoid, and sometimes petty in a relatable way. Rafferty, for example, is funny and sharp, but also tired, cynical, and constantly measuring people for leverage. That energy pairs well with the book’s bigger idea: wars are not only fought with tanks and missiles, but with narratives, timing, and information control. Maximov’s “evidence hidden in plain sight” angle, tucked into something as mundane as a fishing-rod website, is a perfect little metaphor for modern conflict. And Barker’s thread, from coerced bombing logistics to his end, left me cold in the right way. It’s not melodramatic. It’s bleak, brisk, and believable.
I’d recommend Article Five to readers who like their thrillers political, modern, and a little unsettling, the kind that makes you put the book down for a second and think. If your happy place is the Tom Clancy and Brad Thor lane, but you want something with a more current-media pulse (there’s even a nod to BBC coverage and the churn of online commentary), you’ll probably have a good time here. It’s best for people who enjoy big-stakes geopolitics and the smaller, grimy human choices underneath it, and who don’t need a tidy ending to feel satisfied.
Pages: 341 | ASIN : B0FPCZ6V8B
