With consuming literary passion, Janet Todd’s complex novel combines the past and the present together with the living and the dead. Fran is a widow who spent her life immersed in teaching, reading, and gardening. Her retirement (and... Read More

Gritty Liverpool sets the mood for Caroline Smailes’s "The Unwrapping of Theodora Quirke", a most unusual Christmas tale. Nineteen-year-old Theodora (Theo, please), while grieving the death of her boyfriend, Gabe, lives in Dante House,... Read More

"Vector Zero" is a gripping thriller in which a small town faces the perfect storm of catastrophes. In Bryan McBee’s pandemic thriller "Vector Zero", a disease threatens a small town. Shelly, who was abused by a boyfriend, took action... Read More

Robyn Doolittle’s "Had It Coming" is a nuanced, unbiased investigation of rape culture and sexual assault prosecution in the #MeToo era. Doolittle asserts that #MeToo never would have achieved critical mass without the signal boost... Read More

A thought experiment wrapped in a science fiction novel, Chris Beckett’s "Two Tribes" audits Brexit and Britain’s current political and class gulf from a dystopian future, as a historian tries to find the origins of her world in the... Read More

In Terry Roberts’s ominous historical novel My Mistress’ Eyes Are Raven Black, Ellis Island’s immigration policies take a bleak post-war turn. In 1920, an Irish immigrant vanishes after being sent to the Isolation Ward. Suspecting... Read More

When a convicted child murderer is up for lethal injection, the victim’s mother is driven to exonerate the killer in "The Necklace", a punchy thriller about an eleventh-hour discovery in the gruesome murder of a seven-year-old girl.... Read More

Family, friendship, and love convene in "The People We Choose", Katelyn Detweiler’s sensitive novel about a teenager’s revelatory summer. Not long before she turns eighteen, Calliope starts dating Max, her new artistic neighbor;... Read More