Alden E. C. Bigelow’s Norton’s Lament is a provocative novel with a misleading title, if one is to define “lament” as an expression of deep sorrow, a wailing or mourning. Bigelow tells the story of Joe Norton—dropping out of... Read More

"The Alaskan Sting" lingers in the mind. The story moves along briskly with unexpected twists, but John Herold’s action novel reads like the script for a B-grade, made-for-television movie. It even looks like a script, with extra white... Read More

Thoughtful people cannot read Travis Robertson’s first novel, "The Neurosurgeon", without reexamining their own relationship to alcohol. This is an intense and fast-paced tale of booze, sex, and violence, played out by a talented and... Read More

“The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who in time of moral crisis remained neutral.” This favorite quotation of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., sometimes attributed to the Italian poet, Dante, aptly describes... Read More

Every good story begins with a hook. But Gene Dick’s tale of a young man surviving the sinking of the battleship Oklahoma in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, begins with an improbably long hook—the narrator (a lawyer) interviewing a... Read More

The intensity of the narrative dies when Myrtle the kangaroo dies, but David Macfarlane resolutely soldiers on down his “wayward path to paradise” to the bittersweet conclusion in "My Wayward Path to Paradise". This attitude... Read More

Heroes in modern mystery novels come in a variety of packages, including dashingly handsome spies and crime-fighting lawyers. In Bryan Devore’s first novel, "The Aspen Account", the hero is a certified public accountant named Michael... Read More

New Orleans is like no other city in the United States. Therein lies a difficulty. Because of its singularity, the acceptable yardstick used on other cities cannot measure the Big Easy. Likewise, Catastrophic Gumbo, a memoir of Hurricane... Read More