Blog Archives
Unique Crimes
Better Off Dead follows an amateur sleuth who gets drawn into a case that is initially ruled an accidental swimming death, but a darker theory soon surfaces. Trisha notices social awkwardness and emotional cracks as much as clues. Why was that perspective important?
Trisha is just an ordinary person. She’s not a high-flying private investigator wearing designer clothes and shoes or a whip-smart police detective. Her mother dies while she’s in high school, and her father leaves, so she has to bring up her younger sister. Trisha’s dreams of further education go down the drain when her father walks out the door. But she is determined to keep her sister out of the “system” and focused on college. Although her intellectual education stops early, her natural street smarts become highly developed. She sees what most people miss. She’s innately intuitive, and she uses that ability to ask questions that nobody else wants to. With that instinctive capacity, coupled with her pushiness, she can solve some unique crimes.
The Barlow brothers have a deeply uneasy dynamic. Were you interested in rivalry, resentment, or something subtler?
The Barlow brothers grew up and worked in exclusive, rich Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. They were always competitive. Both liked money and what it could buy them. But Andy, the dead brother, lived in a fantasy world, which translated into living beyond his means. His unrealistic goals pushed him to gamble and put his shared financial advising business with his brother, his marriage, and his athletic targets at high risk. And the risks eventually killed him. Was the remaining brother overwhelmed with grief? It certainly doesn’t seem so.
Can you tell us more about what’s in store for Trisha and the direction of the next book?
Trisha is dusting off the day’s work at the San Francisco Giants ballpark with a walk at San Quentin Beach, right around a point of land from the infamous prison. She notices a white object floating at the tideline. As she approaches, the strange ball-like object comes into focus. It’s a skull. Within the following month, more body parts wash ashore at different beaches in Marin County: the skeletal hands of a child and the skeletal feet of an adult. What does the local paper say about the remains: not much. But Trisha is riveted when she learns that all three body parts are from different people and all were female.
The working title for book five is Dead and Gone.
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Trisha digs into the man’s history and finds fractured relationships in his family, his business and his marriage. There’s clearly more than one person who had reason to seek a deadly revenge, but would they go as far as murder?
Community Resilience
Beneath the Rings follows a veteran journalist who finds herself in the middle of an international incident when twelve athletes vanish from the Olympic Village. The premise feels disturbingly plausible. How close did you want this world to feel to our present reality?
My goal in crafting the story arc was to root it somewhat realistically. The kidnapping of the twelve athletes harkens back to the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis, where the Palestinian militant group Black September carried out a terrorist attack on the Israeli team, resulting in the deaths of 11 athletes and coaches. While the premise of this recurring seems disturbingly plausible, the level of security at the Olympic Games now versus 54 years ago does require the reader to somewhat suspend disbelief. The likelihood of an attack like the one carried out in Beneath The Rings happening today is pretty slim. But, I guess you never really know, which is what builds the suspense.
Nova is a journalist rather than a spy or soldier, making her an intriguing choice for this role. What was your inspiration for this character?
Nova’s character weaves personal echoes, real-world colleagues, and legacies of trailblazing women who’ve redefined journalism. Drawing from my roots, industry friendships, and historical figures who turned adversity into ammunition, here’s what fueled her creation.
Nova’s foundation is deeply personal, honoring my Newark, New Jersey upbringing. While I grew up in the North Ward of the Brick City, Nova hails from the Weequahic neighborhood—a vibrant, middle-class Jewish enclave where family and community resilience shaped her. Running Newark’s streets became her ritual, mirroring my own experiences in that gritty city, instilling quiet fortitude. Her solitary runs defy an unmoored world.
Her parents—Judith, a sharp-witted public-school teacher, and David, a steady accountant—echo my nurturing yet expectation-filled home. My mother, Fran, was also a teacher; my father, Ted, an entrepreneur. They raised me and my sister, Jessica, with education as key. Nova attends Solomon Schechter Day School near Seton Hall Prep, which I attended. She heads to Syracuse—where my father grew up after emigrating from Italy—for journalism, but detours to law at Seton Hall, like my sister’s JD.
This pivot reflects practical pressures, but for Nova, it’s a cage. Her return to journalism after Manhattan practice draws from my friend Alan Abrahamson, who graduated from Northwestern’s Medill School before earning his law degree at UC Hastings. He spent 17 years at the Los Angeles Times. Alan sparked Nova as an independent Olympic journalist. As founder of 3 Wire Sports, he’s a beacon in Olympic coverage, blending analysis with honesty. We collaborated at NBC Olympics from 2008-2014, where I saw him peel back the Games’ layers—politics, ethics, human stories. Nova’s platform, OlymPulse, mirrors Alan’s independent voice: probing storylines mainstream outlets overlook. His influence makes her a veteran of 14 Olympics by 2040, her reporting a rebellion against gloss.
Nova’s grit—navigating harassment in Beirut or personal loss—draws from Lara Logan, the former CBS correspondent known for fearless war reporting. Logan’s 2011 assault in Egypt embodies resilience that refuses silence. Nova channels this: surviving the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, shifting from runner to reporter amid chaos, and enduring the 2017 crash that kills her parents. Logan’s confrontation of danger sharpens Nova’s hyper-vigilance, turning trauma into journalistic fuel.
Historical figures add tenacity. Nellie Bly, the 19th-century pioneer who feigned insanity to expose asylums and circled the globe in 72 days, lends Nova audacious truth-seeking. Bly’s undercover work mirrors Nova’s infiltration of Olympic shadows, risking all for revelation.
Ida Tarbell’s muckraking exposés on Standard Oil—methodical takedowns of corruption—inspire Nova’s IOC probes, showing one woman’s research can topple empires.
In sports, Helene Elliott, the veteran LA Times writer who covered the Olympics for decades, layers Nova’s ethos. Elliott’s trailblazing—including the “Miracle on Ice” plus being the first female Hockey Hall of Fame honoree—fuels Nova’s focus on the voiceless. Her moral clarity cuts through hype.
Lesley Visser, the broadcasting pioneer first to cover Super Bowl sidelines and Olympics, embodies barrier-breaking. Visser’s poise and elevation of women’s voices shape Nova’s solitary ascent in a male-dominated field, turning isolation into a superpower.
Blending these created Nova and forged her into a truth sentinel. In Beneath the Rings, she navigates terrorism and conspiracy, a testament to how personal and historical forces birth unbreakable resolve.
If Nova resonates, it’s from real warriors who’ve shaped our world—and my path.
Beneath the action, the book raises questions about vengeance, historical grievance, and moral reckoning. How conscious were you of those themes while writing?
I was quite conscious of these themes in crafting The Obsidian Hand and the group’s motivation. I did weeks of research on conflicts in the Middle East and wanted to make sure that I was rooting the group as a whole and each individual to historically accurate discords so that their disenfranchisement felt real. Some of those details are spelled out in the book, but for more in-depth backstories on the characters themselves, you can read blog posts on each on my website, booksbybattaglia.com.
I greatly enjoyed following Nova, and it feels like she has more stories to tell. Do you see this as the beginning of a series?
Most definitely!
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Blaming the Victim
The Soul’s Reckoning follows a woman as she passes through the Barrier into a vivid, confusing, and emotional afterlife where she is forced to confront former relationships and truths she had avoided in life. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
After my brain injury, my relationships went into a downward spiral. I became acutely aware of the differences between communities and countries in how they handled social life with people who’d suffered catastrophic injuries or whose communication styles had changed. Some communities or countries focused on maintaining the relationship while adjusting to the challenging needs of the injured member. Others blamed the injured one and left. Yet Christianity, or the church, anyway, continually teaches that God will restore relationships.
Does that happen, I asked. I’d read the Book of Job years ago, which realistically portrays how friends mischaracterize suffering, blaming the victim. And it reveals what God thinks about all that. Several years ago, I wrote an ebook and a Psychology Today post on the Book of Job, including God’s perspective on Job’s friends. The book’s lessons remained in the back of my mind, and I married those lessons with my own and others’ experiences of relationships after brain injury.
I think too many put off trying to restore relationships, perhaps because they don’t want to confront the bad thoughts, bad words, and bad actions that had led them to abandoning their injured loved one. Then that person dies, and it’s too late. Or is it? And how do you reconcile with a dead person? That’s what I sought to answer.
Was there anything from your own life that you put into the characters in your novel?
As I was writing The Soul’s Reckoning, the character Shireen Anne popped up. It was rather surreal watching her name appear on the screen as I typed. It was like my past self, or a version of who I used to be, hopped into my story, declaring, “Here I am!” I wasn’t sure what to make of her appearance. But I couldn’t delete her. Turns out Charlotte Elisabeth, who isn’t anything like me, needed a friend and guide like Shireen Anne. She appears again in novel three.
What was one scene in the novel that you felt captured the morals and message you were trying to deliver to readers?
This is a tough question. My immediate inclination is to suggest the scene where Charlotte Elisabeth reconciles with her client. From the moment she decides that’s her next goal until she leaves.
Can you tell us where the book goes and where we’ll see the characters in the third book?
Book three of The Q’Zam’Ta Trilogy follows Revelation’s storyline from the time just before the cataclysm to just after the Book of Life. I’d originally intended to go to the end of Revelation, but there is so much to explore and unpack in those metaphorical thousand years without Satan, governments, and elites, that I realized I had to end it at the Book of Life. I’m thinking I’ll write another trilogy to cover the last part of Revelation.
In the third book, titled The Soul’s Turning, the characters leave Heaven and return to Earth, either as resurrected beings or, in Charlotte Elisabeth’s case, in a specially created new physical body. She doesn’t lose her memory of her experiences in Heaven, yet she no longer exists as an energy being.
In The Soul’s Turning, she must learn who she is.
Like so many of us, she equates her identity with her job. But in order to avoid second death, she must let go of that myth and face herself and learn and accept alien concepts in order to unearth her created identity.
And she must do all this in a far-future world that’s experienced eight degrees of warming, whose population is divided by economic systems, without governments, and with The Reigners, a Council led by Jesus that ensures no elites can rise.
As she’s becoming comfortable with what she believes about herself and the world, the Accuser-Adversary is released, and Charlotte Elisabeth faces a final, deadly challenge that requires her to grow courageous insight she’s never had before or be obliterated in a galactic Lake of Fire.
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In this powerful continuation of The Q’Zam’Ta Trilogy, the afterlife is not an ending but a crucible where souls are tested, relationships are stripped bare, and choices echo with eternal consequence.
The Soul’s Reckoning leads readers into a realm where mortality and eternity meet, where faith collides with doubt, and where the love that once brought comfort now demands sacrifice. Every step forward raises questions of loyalty, forgiveness, and the courage required to face the truth of one’s soul.
This Christian novel is more than a story of belief. It is a profound exploration of family dynamics, the complexities of Christian relationships, and the enduring power of friendship.
With lyrical prose and piercing insight, Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy weaves the mystery of the afterlife with the raw struggles of human connection. The result is a moving book on the afterlife that illuminates the bonds that hold us together and the grace that can heal even the deepest wounds.
A novel for readers who seek Christian books that inspire, challenge, and linger in the heart, The Soul’s Reckoning invites you on a journey where every choice matters and redemption remains possible beyond this life.
Plunge into Charlotte Elisabeth’s reconciliation quest today.
The Escape
The Escape, by Eve M. Riley, is a contemporary romance that follows two people on opposite sides of the country each trying to outrun parts of their lives that no longer fit. Aiden, a brilliant but emotionally guarded tech founder, sells the company he built from nothing and suddenly faces a terrifying blank space where his purpose used to be. Emma, a razor-sharp New York lawyer, sees the ground shifting under her feet when a ruthless colleague threatens the career she’s spent fifteen years building. Both of them are pushed toward escape, but in ways they didn’t expect and aren’t fully prepared to admit to themselves.
Riley builds her characters from the inside out, and that pulled me in. Aiden’s interior world feels both ordered and cracked, like a glass that has been knocked but not shattered. His past in the Romanian orphanage, the tremor in his hands, and the way he tries to manage his life by managing objects on his desk. Those details land with quiet force. Emma, on the other hand, is all sharp lines and forward motion until you glimpse the exhaustion under her competence. Her scenes with her family, her sister, even the texts from her mother, felt so real I could practically hear the phone buzz. The author lets their defenses show without stripping them of dignity, which kept me rooting for both of them long before their paths crossed.
What surprised me most was how much the book explores the idea of identity inside a romance-driven plot. Aiden’s wealth doesn’t free him; it disorients him. Emma’s success doesn’t shield her; it isolates her. Both are accomplished adults who still feel like they’re standing in the wrong rooms of their own lives. The writing makes space for that confusion. Some moments are clipped and almost businesslike. Others slow down and stretch out, like the narrator is finally taking a breath. The shift in tone feels intentional. It mirrors the way big life changes often come in waves that don’t match each other. I liked that the book didn’t rush to soothe anything too quickly.
The Escape is a contemporary romance novel, but it leans into emotional excavation more than tropey spectacle. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy character-driven stories with grown adults who are messy, thoughtful, competent, and a little lost. If you like romance that blends heart with personal reckoning, this one will land well.
Pages: 312 | ASIN : B0FG2Z4ZZC
The Shift Worker’s Paradox
R.E. Hengsterman’s The Shift Worker’s Paradox lays out a clear and unsettling picture of how shift work breaks down human biology, piece by piece. The book moves through personal stories, science, and practical guidance, weaving together research on circadian disruption, metabolism, hormones, and the daily realities of working against the clock. It explains how sleep loss, mistimed eating, and chronic stress grind away at the body over time. The tone blends clinical insight with lived experience, and the message is steady and stark. Working nights or rotating shifts has a cost, and that cost shows up everywhere from cognitive performance to metabolic health to emotional stability.
The writing is plainspoken, almost blunt at times, and that worked for me. I never felt lectured at. Instead, I felt nudged, reminded, and sometimes warned. The book mixes biology with stories of real people in a way that hits harder than any abstract health advice. I could feel the frustration in the author’s voice when describing tragedies on the drive home, and I could feel the weight of his decades in healthcare shaping every paragraph. Some chapters made me pause, especially the parts explaining how the body’s internal clocks fall out of sync. I knew shift work was rough, but I didn’t fully grasp how many systems it drags down at once.
What surprised me most was how personal the book becomes. When the author admits to his own struggles, the tone shifts from educational to intimate. It felt like someone pulling up a chair and telling the truth that usually gets swallowed in break rooms and morning commutes. The mix of scientific detail and emotional honesty felt unique. Shift workers aren’t dealing with one problem. They’re dealing with an entire stack of them, and the writing mirrors that tangled reality. I found myself moved, sometimes unsettled, and sometimes hopeful when the author talked about small changes that can help realign a life that’s drifting.
This book is a lifeline for nurses, factory workers, first responders, warehouse workers, and anyone else who trades daylight for survival. It’s also helpful for families who want to understand what their loved ones go through. I would recommend it to anyone who works outside a typical schedule or cares for someone who does. The book is honest, practical, and quietly compassionate, and it might be the first time some readers feel truly seen.
Pages: 394 | ASIN : B0G2SK9QDM
Bodega Botanica Tales: Carmen
Bodega Botanica Tales: Carmen is a magical-realism coming-of-age story that follows Carmen, a girl growing up in the rough edges of Silk City, where money is tight, danger feels ordinary, and a mysterious bodega might hold both miracles and curses. The book opens with Carmen navigating period poverty, unreliable adults, and shifting friendships, and soon pulls her into a world where a mystical figure named Chankla, glowing bracelets, and even chupacabras become intertwined with her very real struggles at home. The story carries her from childhood fear and survival into adulthood, where old wounds return and demand to be understood before she can move forward.
The writing is simple but charged. Carmen’s voice has this raw honesty that makes even small moments feel heavy in your hands. I kept noticing how carefully the author, Maria Rodriguez Bross, lets the magical elements slip in. They shimmer at the edges, like something you might catch from the corner of your eye. And because the emotional world is so grounded, the magic feels earned. The author doesn’t cushion anything either. Period poverty, family instability, and violence aren’t treated like plot devices but like daily realities Carmen has to navigate long before she should have to.
What I liked most was how the story keeps circling back to the same question: what does protection really look like, and who gets to have it? Carmen is just a kid trying to hold herself together, and sometimes she breaks in ways that feel relatable. I found myself frustrated with her, then proud of her, then worried for her, sometimes all in the span of a page. And when the book moves into the adult timeline, the consequences of what she lived through land with real weight. The magic expands, but it doesn’t erase anything. Instead, it forces her to face what she ran from. Some scenes feel almost dreamlike, others feel like they’re scraping the inside of your ribs, but they all build toward a truth Carmen has been avoiding for years.
The book blends mystical folklore with the grit of urban life in a way that feels cohesive, not gimmicky. And though it has fantasy woven through it, the heart of the story is emotional realism: trauma, friendship, shame, longing, and the slow work of claiming your own story. I’d recommend this book to readers who enjoy magical realism that’s rooted in real-world hardship, especially stories centering Latina girls and women finding power in places that once hurt them. If you like books where supernatural elements highlight emotional truth rather than distract from it, this one will definitely stay with you.
Pages: 146 | ASIN : B0G1RF7QGV
Sustained Courage
The Price of Nice lays out a sharp argument that our cultural obsession with being “nice” keeps us stuck in cycles of false comfort and stalled progress that preserves the status quo at home, in workplaces, and across society. What is the Think–Feel–Do–Revisit framework, and how does it help people break the cycle of niceness?
The Think–Feel–Do–Revisit framework was born out of my work in behavioral communications, not theory for theory’s sake, but years of studying how people actually change.
In my professional work, we borrow heavily from sociology, psychology, and behavioral science to answer very practical questions: What do people believe? What do they feel? Who do they trust? And how does that shape what they will do, and keep doing? We know that behavior doesn’t change just because information is correct or presented. It changes when beliefs and emotions are addressed first.
What clicked for me is that those same tools apply individually, especially when it comes to niceness.
When people stay “nice” in moments that require courage, it’s rarely because they don’t know better. It’s because of what they’re thinking, often unconscious stories about risk or belonging, and what they’re feeling, fear, obligation, loyalty, or discomfort. Those two things quietly determine what they do, usually nothing, and then the cycle repeats.
This framework helps interrupt that pattern. It gives people a way to name what’s happening internally before defaulting to silence. By revisiting the outcome, they build awareness and agency over time. That’s how mindset shifts stick. Not through one brave moment, but through understanding and practicing behavior change on purpose.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
One of the most important ideas I wanted to name is that niceness is not neutral.
Growing up and throughout my career, I was praised for being “easy,” “gracious,” and “not difficult.” But I realized those compliments often came up just as I was quietly absorbing harm. Niceness became a way for the system to stay comfortable while I paid the price.
I also wanted to challenge the idea that courage has to look loud or reckless. In the book, I introduce the idea of nerve as sustained courage. Not the big speech once, but the daily practice of choosing yourself, again and again, even when there’s pushback.
And finally, I wanted to make it clear that this isn’t about becoming harsh or cruel. It’s about replacing performative niceness with intentional kindness, the kind that takes action, tells the truth, and is willing to disrupt.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from The Price of Nice?
I hope readers walk away knowing that the discomfort they feel isn’t a personal failing. It’s often a signal that they’re outgrowing the rules they were given.
So many people, especially women and people of color, think they’re broken because being “nice” isn’t working anymore. What I want them to see is that their instincts are intact. They’re just bumping up against systems that rely on their silence.
If readers take away one thing, I hope it’s this: You’re not required to be palatable to be powerful. And choosing nerve doesn’t make you dangerous. It makes you daring.
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“What’s wrong with nice?!” A simple and powerful question. It demands we interrogate the unspoken rules that shape our lives, often without our realizing it.
“It costs nothing to be nice!” What a travesty of logic. Niceness is not free—it comes at a steep price. It’s a velvet glove over an iron fist, stifling dissent, prioritizing comfort over progress, and conditioning us to accept the status quo. Niceness is one of the most insidious social constructs, keeping us compliant, silent, and complicit in inequity. If we don’t question it, we stay exactly where power wants us—agreeable, easy to manage, and stuck.
The Price of Nice is about breaking free. Amira Barger deconstructs our cultural obsession with niceness, exposes its hidden costs, and offers a practical framework for real change. With sharp analysis and personal insight, she helps readers disrupt the narratives that keep them stuck and reclaim their power.
Guided by four dimensions rooted in social psychology—think, feel, do, revisit—this book offers immediate, adaptable practices for creating change. Because breaking free isn’t only what you know—it’s what you do next.
If you’re tired of “good enough,” this book will challenge you, change you, and call you to more.
Consistency is Key
The City of Arches follows a princess who discovers a letter containing the key to her mother’s hidden past and her connection to a powerful wizard. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I love the idea of family secrets being uncovered. For me, I loved going through boxes of old pictures that my grandparents kept and hearing about all the old stories. The real treasure for a family is always hidden in old documents and old photographs. From the beginning, I have had Learsi’s story mapped out in my mind, and to have her daughter discover it in her own words was a temptation too big to ignore.
How did you balance magic and its use throughout the story to keep it believable?
I think of it almost as a muscle. Like any talent or ability, it needs to be used, trained, and practised. And just like a physical ability, it can be strained, and it can be draining. Like anything, magic needs its limitations to be believable, and once I figured out how it worked in my world, consistency is key.
Which character in the novel do you feel you relate to more and why?
That’s a hard question. I wish I could say that I relate to the hero, but in reality, I’m probably more like Aud. She’s just this normal person who cares about her family. She’s thrust into this world of magic and mess and has to make the best of it. She’s at heart just a mom, and I guess that’s what I relate to.
Can you give us a glimpse inside Book 4 of The Sitnalta Series? Where will it take readers?
Book 4 is called The Hedgewitch’s Charm. It shows us a Colonodona that’s put at risk by a plague. A young hedgewitch named Gwendolyn thinks there’s more to it and fights to save the people alongside Ipsinki. I loved writing her, and her and Ipsinki’s dynamic, and I hope readers love it too.
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In the buried past, Kralc finds a ragged Learsi living on the streets after her home kingdom’s destruction and presents an offer: help him set things right with the mysterious City of Arches and he will give her back her family and birthright. With her parents murdered and her kingdom in ruins, she doesn’t know how he can achieve such a thing. All she knows is that she has nothing to lose.
LITERARY TITAN 