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?
For years, Harris Hayes has taught his daughter, Aggie, the ways of the northern woods. So when her mother's depression worsens, Harris shows the girl how to find and sketch the nests of wild birds as an antidote to sadness. Aggie is in a tree far overhead when her unpredictable mother spots her and forbids her to climb. Angry, the ten-year-old accidentally lights a tragic fire, then flees downriver. She lands her boat near untamed forest, where she hides among the trees and creatures she considers her only friends—determined to remain undiscovered.
A search party gathers by Aggie’s empty boat hours after Celia, fresh off the plane from Houston, arrives at her grandmother’s nearby farm. Hurting from her parents’ breakup, she also plans to run. But when she joins the hunt for Aggie, she meets two irresistible young men who compel her to stay. One is autistic; the other, dangerous.
Since her encounter with Ori years ago, Jessica, an investigative journalist, has continued her mission to print the truth that the world needs to hear. Her pursuit has led her to meet with a source, Zach Carver, a leading mind at Singularity Group. The meeting goes awry, and Jessica awakens to find that she has a gap in time and memory and that Zach is now missing. What happened? Who is responsible? And how can she help Zach? It is imperative that Jessica find out, and to her surprise, Ori has reappeared to help her do just that.
Malik, an intelligent and inventive young man, is determined to find a way to overcome the virus that has impacted the world. When he crosses paths with powerful people at Confidence Biotech, the leading treatment and contact tracing company, they take an unusual interest in him. Then, all of a sudden, they paint Malik as public enemy number one, forcing him to go on the run. What do they want from him, and does this mean that he is close to discovering something they couldn’t?
Dolores, Ernesto, and Emilio Sanchez are on a quest to America to find work and to save their family, who has been devastated by their father's accident and the drought in their home country of Honduras. But making their way to America would be too expensive for a family stricken by poverty. With only their faith in God to see them through, the teenaged siblings set off for their new home, despite the threat from the cartel, corrupt police officers, starvation, and death.
Meanwhile, Eva Jordan is determined to start a new life on the American side of the Mexican border, hoping to shake off the scars from a horrible marriage. Despite her mother's concern for her daughter living so close to the border, Eva decides to take a vacation to the other side to sharpen up her Spanish and relax before her new job begins. She is struck by the beautiful towns of Mexico, but slowly, her eyes are opened to the dangers that are knocking at her front door.
Paleontologist Dr. Secora James is still reeling from injuries sustained in the previous summer’s mountain top battle, and the adoption of Monta, an Andean orphan. Her best friend, Gideon Yellow Thunder has something important to discuss, but before she can listen Secora receives a desperate call from a fellow paleontologist, Billy Riggins, who is under attack at a mammoth site in Western Washington. Secora travels from Montana, with Monta to find out if Billy is dead. Will her growing knowledge of his taboo discovery and the accumulation of indisputable proof also threaten her life and that of her tiny daughter? Where is the skeleton? Gideon, shaken by the realization Secora will always be rushing away from him, leaves town to help a client solve a mystery in remote Western Montana.
Often laid back but sometimes excitable, Allan Renner is approaching forty and currently living in Florida in the guest quarters above his parents’ garage. When he’s not working as an online copy editor or as a production assistant on independent films, he often follows world cinema, fills his head with strange accounts of the paranormal, bonds with his dog, or shoots the breeze with his small cadre of friends around the country. It’s through his dealings with these friends that we get to know Renner and how he truly comes into his own.
There’s Akhil, an alcoholic guidance counselor from India who studies cosmology and astrophysics in his spare time, when he’s not busy boozing and reliving his failed courtship. There’s Sadie, an adventurous blond rock singer who relocates to Minneapolis from L.A. after her band breaks up, and who men fight over. There’s Fred, a half-black, half-Jewish filmmaker based in Brooklyn who gets in over his head when he invites the wrong person to an acting audition. There’s Renner’s father, Philip, a poker-playing couch potato, and his mother, Alice, an even-keeled bookworm, both of whom might be in for a rude awakening. There’s Ruby, a mischievous, lovable Havapoo and Renner’s closest companion, who gets Renner and herself into a jam. There’s Carmen, an ex-clubber turned single mother from Lisbon who enters Renner’s life not long before Hurricane Irma makes its way to Florida. And there’s Xynnulu, an alien-human hybrid and soldier of fortune who Renner and Ruby must rely on in order to meet their destiny and discover certain secrets of the universe.
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.
