Bell’s diverting third Hott Springs Eternal contemporary (after Hott Take) finds New York City financial analyst Preston Hott angling to cinch a promotion when he learns of the life-altering provisions in his curmudgeonly late grandfather’s will. To keep Hott Springs Eternal—the wedding venue run by Preston’s sister, Hanna—in the family, Preston must return to the Oregon property and create an activities program for the town’s upcoming summer festival. If the program gets less than a 4.5 rating from attendees, the family land and business will be sold to a mining company. Fortunately, uptight Preston will have help from Natalie Archer, Hott Springs Eternal’s spunky activities coordinator. As they work together, sparks fly and Preston quickly realizes how much he needs Natalie’s creative flair in his life. Their chemistry soon becomes too much to ignore, but will their relationship survive Preston’s return to his high-flying life in New York? Bell mines her leads’ opposites-attract dynamic for some heady sexual tension. The result is both sizzling and poignant. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Loomis follows up Blue Duwamish with a lively if mystifying portrait of French Canadian fur trader François Payette (1793–1844) and those in his orbit during his exploration of the Pacific Northwest. Framed as an oral history, most of the narrative comes from Payette himself as he chronicles the day-to-day events of his life as a trapper, including his dealings with Indigenous peoples, such as a woman named Wades in Marsh Water, who gives birth to his son. Their child, Baptiste, narrates his own section about his experiences in the residential school system, while Wades in Marsh Water describes her work as a healer and medicine woman. Others, such as settlers to the region, discuss their relations with Native Americans and the taking of their lands. Loomis makes clear in an author’s note that he’s taken liberties with the historical record, but a few anachronisms stick out, such as a mention of Alberta long before the name was used. Still, the writing is energetic and colorful, as in Payette’s description of his fallen scout during an attack by Walawalałáma Indians (“He looked like a porcupine after he was showered with arrows and crawling”). Western fans ought to take a look. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bahna debuts with a sturdy, suspenseful thriller set in the world of competitive horse racing. After visiting Long Island’s Belmont Park when he was 10 years old, Matt Galiano became obsessed with the sport and devoted himself to finding out the best ways to predict winners. That pursuit endeared him to his father, a mobster who was murdered when Matt was a teenager. Now 30, Matt is hoping to leave behind his work as a gangster’s bookmaker and finally go straight. However, when he accidentally gets inside information that the trainer of his favorite horse, Heliacal Star, is being ordered to throw a race, he’s pulled back into the fray. Shielding him from danger is Kristine Connelly, a beautiful trainer who’s made it her mission to thwart the proliferation of performance-enhancing drugs and money laundering in horse racing. As Matt’s past threatens to catch up with the duo, Bahna keeps the pace fleet and the violence sharp—a fitting combination that evokes the speed and brutality of racehorses charging around the track. Dick and Felix Francis fans will relish this. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 11/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Michael debuts with an energetic tale of a nun’s rise in the 1960s women’s movement. Raised in a Catholic family in an impoverished area of Chicago, Molly Cleary joins the sisterhood in the 1950s. Sometime after Vatican II in the 1960s, she dedicates herself to working in women’s shelters, having survived sexual abuse from her father and her twin brother, Thomas. She quickly locks horns with Thomas, a priest, when he counsels a parishioner to return to her abusive husband, who goes on to kill the woman. Molly then helps a Black woman gain custody of her children from her abusive partner. Meanwhile, Molly begins to develop romantic feelings for a community leader, which causes her anguish, since she took a vow of chastity. Her struggles with her faith eventually lead her to chair a national secular women’s organization. The dialogue is often didactic (“Nowhere is it written that a penis is required for saying Mass and offering the sacraments,” Molly says at one point), but readers will cheer on the novel’s boisterous and likable protagonist in her earnest fight for social justice. It’s a rousing story of resilience and advocacy. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 11/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Stiles debuts with the enchanting tale of a family’s tragedy and miraculous new beginning. At the outset, 40-year-old Chicago TV reporter Michael Russo loses his job. He and his fiancé, Anna O’Leary, consider buying a dilapidated two-bedroom farmhouse in the country, and have sex in the barn while visiting the property. Back in Chicago, Michael, an atheist, clashes with his future in-laws, staunch Irish Catholics Colin and Grace, causing Anna to walk out on him. Seeking a new start, Michael buys the house himself, where he receives wisdom and renovation tips from a local handyman and priest who suggests to Michael that the barn has magical powers. When Anna visits, she and Michael begin to reconcile, and she tells him that she’s pregnant. Before their wedding date, Anna dies in childbirth after going into labor three months early. Their baby, Brie, unexpectedly survives, a miracle in the eyes of Colin and Grace, which Michael attributes to the fact that she was conceived in the barn. As a little girl, Brie is slow to speak, but she develops an uncanny ability to communicate with animals, and Stiles suggests she’s able to perform miracles, such as bringing a dead lamb back to life. Stiles’s hopeful novel is rich in detail and symbolism. Readers will relish this satisfying story. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 10/31/2025 | Details & Permalink

Gransden (Anemogram) brings together 14 surreal and eerie stories mining scares from technology, domestic life, and the natural world. In the wonderfully bizarre opener, “Turducken: Confirm Humanity,” a turducken comes to life, waddles from its roasting pan, and discovers the wonders and horrors of the internet. The lines between video games and reality blur in “Fuck It Cat and the Mod Hex from Hell,” while the protagonist of “ReWipe” is driven to an act of violence by the realization that he can no longer “like” anything on social media. Other stories offer more intimate horrors: an abusive mother drugs her teenage son in “Seeping Willow,” leading to strange hallucinations; and in “Pageant,” teen beauty queens turn violent against their controlling mothers. “The Disco Rice Club,” one of the standouts, delves into body horror after a heist attempted by a trio of garbage men goes horribly wrong (the “disco rice” of the title refers to maggots). The high-concept title story serves as a finale, following the exploits of Happy Bunny, a character who exists in a liminal grey room between calls to perform his part in the real world. Several of these tales take abrupt violent turns that successfully shock but feel somewhat unmotivated. Still, the inventive concepts and haunting, dreamlike imagery will appeal to horror fans. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 10/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Rae introduces an inventive if somewhat underexplored magic system in the brisk kickoff to her Sapphic Lady Knights series. In this world, magic is thought of as a corrupting plague and those with access to it routinely transform into inhuman monsters called malignants. As a result, all witches are being rounded up and executed. To escape such a fate, death witch Della and her sister, Anette, strike a deal with Princess Cordelia of Hevalon. Cordelia is eager to avoid an arranged marriage to Prince Valin of Glea and, given their striking resemblance, asks Della to go in her stead and use her magic to appear to die before the ceremony. The logic of this plan doesn’t hold much water, but it serves to set a captivating plot in motion as Della undertakes the deception and winds up falling not for her supposed betrothed but for the bodyguard he assigns her, Sir Galleon, one of Glea’s famed lady knights. Rae makes her heroines’ yearning for each other palpable as they fight their feelings amid plentiful court intrigue. Unfortunately, plot twists are set up with little payoff, Valin’s late turn to all-out villainy feels somewhat unearned, and the worldbuilding, while fascinating, raises more questions than answers. Still, the simmering romantic tension and striking leading ladies offer plenty to enjoy. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 10/10/2025 | Details & Permalink

YA author Pack (the Chronicles of Illumination series) pivots to adult fiction with this propulsive conspiracy thriller. Tray Lennox, an FBI agent investigating art crimes, gets a frantic call from his identical twin brother, nuclear inspector Carey, who swears he’s being followed. Before Tray can act, Carey is shot and killed by the unidentified pursuer. Tray suspects the bullet was meant for him, because he’s been searching for the Hero’s Knot—an ancient artifact comprising “space debris made up of nanoparticles of extraterrestrial biological origin”—for the Bureau, and he knows he’s not the only one after it. Hoping to deceive Carey’s killer into thinking they shot the right brother, Tray switches his wallet with Carey’s at the scene. He then sets out to avenge his brother’s death on top of his original mission, the stakes of which are raised when Tray learns that the Hero’s Knot can be modified to detonate nuclear weapons—and that Carey was tracking down people who’d sabotaged some of the nuclear reactors he’d inspected. Pack hits the ground running, grabbing readers from the opening pages and refusing to let go until the satisfying denouement. Dan Brown fans will be pleased. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 10/10/2025 | Details & Permalink

Darjani’s Broken Union series debut is an assured space opera with a fascinating, time-bending premise. It opens in the 24th century, with discontented flight officer Ren Yilmaz of the Earth Spaceship Hawking, being dressed down by a commanding officer, who happens to be her ex-husband. Ren considers herself the “classic star that flamed out too early, who gave up on her career, who used words and scowls as armor,” but she remains determined to be “somebody, one day.” When the ESS Hawking unexpectedly jumps 62 years into the future, she gets to see just who she turns out to be, coming face to face with her future self: the confident, happily married, and mysteriously immortal Earth Union Fleet Capt. Karenna Yilmaz. Ren and Karenna clash, but find common cause in fighting Badal, a terrorist group contesting Earth’s control of human colonies. While the military plot is fun, Darjani’s true strength lies in characterization, making both Yilmazes sympathetic but flawed in different ways and mining impressive psychological depth out of their differences and similarities. It’s a promising start. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this offbeat debut survey, paranormal historian Blanch details 13 deaths in cemeteries across his home state of Arizona, many of which he purports have become hot spots for supernatural activity. The most engrossing chapters concern grief-stricken Phoenix real estate agent Julian Holmes’s 1954 suicide at his wife, Margaret’s, grave; Holmes shot himself after laying flowers beside her headstone. Blanch also describes victims of freak accidents on cemetery grounds and graveyard employees who died of natural causes on the job, including security guard Barry Brutchey, who was found dead in his truck less than an hour after completing a patrol of the Glendale Memorial Park Cemetery. As Blanch runs through his list of cases in brief, photo-heavy chapters, he occasionally details efforts by amateur ghost hunters to communicate with the deceased at the sites of their death, but the book’s ghost hunting through line is thin. Still, Blanch’s concise recollections of human tragedies are affecting. For true crime obsessives, this is worth a look. Photos. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink