Winner Fiction: Cross-Genre The 2020 Best Book Awards
The heart has a home when it has an ally.
If Millie Crossan doesn't know anything else, she knows this one truth simply because her brother Finley grew up beside her. Charismatic Finley, eighteen months her senior, becomes Millie's guide when their mother Posey leaves their father and moves her children from Minnesota to Memphis shortly after Millie's tenth birthday.
Memphis is a world foreign to Millie and Finley. This is the 1970s Memphis, the genteel world of their mother's upbringing and vastly different from anything they've ever known. Here they are the outsiders. Here, they only have each other. And here, as the years fold over themselves, they mature in a manicured Southern culture where they learn firsthand that much of what glitters isn't gold. Nuance, tradition, and Southern eccentrics flavor Millie and Finley's world as they find their way to belonging.
But what hidden variables take their shared history to leave both brother and sister at such disparate ends?
Finalist Fiction: Cross-Genre The 2020 Best Book Awards
Welcome to Fellowship City, where the Haves are super-powered, and the Have-Nots are just like you.
The Mighty have all the wealth, fame, power, and superpowers, but even they are subject to the monastery’s control. To maintain peace, telepathic monks see into the past, present, and future to police the other Mighty and the minority of powerless Citizens, who have nothing but their identity tags tattooed on their wrists.
Twenty-year-old Mario lives with his kid sister in one of the many camphouses on the island south of the city. Unlike the other citizens he stands in line with every morning waiting to be bussed to work, he actually likes his downtown job and the Mighty restaurateur who employs him.
Finalist Fiction: Cross-Genre The 2020 Best Book Awards
When Ezzy and Remy Alares visit the Paris Catacombs they should have paid more attention to the instructions: Don’t touch the bones.
1815. Following Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat at the battle of Waterloo, Alexandre Guynemer and his wife, Giselle, plan to escape from their role as carrier pigeon operators for a London bank. But when a competitor wants the information they possess, a disastrous chain of events results in the couple’s murders and their bones abandoned within the Paris Catacombs.
Near future. Remy and Ezzy crave a vacation from the stress of Remy’s banking position. While visiting the famous catacombs, Remy accidently touches a skull, becomes delusional and claims he’s two hundred years dead. The reborn soul, armed with a second chance, seeks revenge for the past and has no intention of giving back the life it's now taken.
What happens next will test all Ezzy and Remy thought sacred.
Finalist Fiction: Cross-Genre The 2020 Best Book Awards
Natalie Clark carries a dark secret. When she was fourteen years old, her older sister was kidnapped in the middle of the night. And Natalie had known it was going to happen.
Natalie was born with an unusual sense of intuition. An outsider would call it a gift. Natalie calls it a curse.
Four years after her sister's disappearance, Natalie is still overcome with guilt for failing to save her. Natalie moves to Florida with a plan to keep everyone at a distance as she restarts her life. Her vow to never tell anyone about her intuitive abilities is cut short when she's involved in an accident that brings Michael into her life, a guy with unique abilities of his own. This encounter leaves Natalie changed, and the closer she grows to Michael, the more powerful she becomes.
Finalist Fiction: Cross-Genre The 2020 Best Book Awards
Ah, the unfortunate Bartley Hannigan. Teacher burnout is just one of his problems. There’s also his disintegrating marriage, the inheritance of a haunted property with its uninvited bibulous guest, a psycho poet with a fatal attraction, the arrival of an Irish banshee hunter with poor personal hygiene, his sudden passion for a stripper, and eventually, the hit man on his trail. But as the gypsy said, this “shit-storm” will lead to either a higher plane of understanding—or sudden death. Either way, Bartley can hear his train a comin', and he's ready to jump aboard and ride the winding rails to the last stop, because he's done with the bullshit! Done!
Finalist Fiction: Cross-Genre The 2020 Best Book Awards
Most people dream of being stranded on a tropical island, but down-on-his-luck Cal Batten just wants to sell his dad's ramshackle, football-shaped house, fly home and pay off his creditors. Unfortunately for him, nothing on Blacktip Island goes smoothly. Or quickly.
His dad's will is nowhere to be found. What passes for an attorney has a taste for rum and is working his own agenda. The locals reckon there's treasure stashed in the house and are ready to tear the place apart to get at it. And his childhood former-best friend, now a beautiful scuba instructor, might just drown him out of spite. There's also the matter of sharks showing up every time he gets in the water. If Cal can't figure out what his old man was mixed up in, fast, he may end up stuck on the crazy backwater island, broke and homeless.
The Secret of Rosalita Flats is a smart, funny tropical misadventure for anyone who's ever dreamed of chucking it all and running off to the Caribbean.
Finalist Fiction: Cross-Genre The 2020 Best Book Awards
In Worship of a Hollow God, James Sniechowski bears witness to the world of a sensitive, nine-year-old boy, subjected to the underbelly of his Polish Catholic family in working class Detroit. The year is 1950. The family gathers for a Friday night family poker/pinochle party. The outcome reveals a world no one ever talked about then and are forbidden to talk about now---the unspoken, the impermissible, the reality beneath every family’s practiced appearance---and what lies beneath when the front has been ripped away.
Sniechowski unsparingly yet compassionately evokes the temptations, trials, and tactics of the family characters while revealing the hollow gods they worship without knowing it.
There are no vampires or werewolves to be found here, only an ancient, forgotten myth. Lilith.
Her evil is legendary. Her reputation raises eyebrows. Supernatural hauntings, mysterious rituals, and psychological nightmares expose her true agenda. Dark humor, witch’s spells, and magical folklore reveal her true nature. She will once again be worshipped as a goddess!! She will rise!!
But first . . .there’s a huge problem. The curse must be lifted.
Anyone she recruits to help her is driven nuts by her sermons of obscure new-age prophecies invading their minds and are confused by her vague and cryptic guidance. Believability of her goal for humankind is challenged by annoyingly crazy rantings, grandiose preaching, and promises of free will.
