A brutal murder has taken place. The God-fearing citizens of the sleepy midwestern town are convinced evil has taken root.
A young married couple, Charlie and Delia Mull are left to pick up the pieces of shattered lives after the unspeakable tragedy.
Townsfolk whisper from church pews that pretty Delia Mull has brought the misfortune upon herself - a cursed family legacy. Others believe the horrific crime is merely another sign of a violent and godless age.
A mysterious woman has rented the house six doors down. Betty Malcomb is the new teacher hired at the high school. Locals are suspicious of the reclusive outsider. Why has she traveled to their peeling little town? What reasons would make her stay?
Located in the remote Kansas prairie sits the state penitentiary. Imprisoned in a concrete cell, a lone madman silently awaits his opportunity to complete his unholy calling.
The characters in Thom Brucie’s Obsidian Mirth fall into a dilemma where loss and betrayal entangle the need for forgiveness and love. Their choices reveal what distinctions lie between knowing one’s self and knowing another, choices that expose that small moment tottering between life-affirming hope and the despair of meaninglessness. This is a heart-rending and beautiful story, and these characters will hover at the outskirts of your thoughts like whispering ghosts of past kinships.
Family. The same people who destroyed Gavin's self-esteem are the ones he must save.
When Gavin looks in the mirror he sees his twin Devon — literally. Yet like the mirror, inside they are the reverse of each other. Devon is the chosen one, anointed by their tough Mob-connected father, who demeans Gavin as a nerd but expects him to save his brother from his worst instincts. Gavin struggles to believe in himself and make his own decisions in the face of Dad's bullying and Devon's narcissistic gaslighting. When Devon gets into drugs and crime, people start dying. Gavin's loyal allies tell him he can't save his twin; he must save himself. He flees to find freedom and success far away, but he can't hide from his sociopathic brother, or from the Mob.
Secrets In The Mirror is a sweeping saga of one family's journey to rise above cultural precedent. But Gavin is the one who must finally break the shackles of multigenerational and narcissistic abuse, despite inextricable bonds with a twin who's headed for self-destruction. It is a tale that grapples with the imperative to save others versus the struggle to save oneself.
Lynden Hoover is on the brink of a new beginning with a fast-growing tech company, but he first needs to confront the traumas of his past. At age eleven Lynden found a surrogate father in the form of a hobo riding a train, the Tramp, who abused and discarded Lynden. The memory of the Tramp has haunted Lynden's life, ruining his relationships. Now Lynden makes a snap decision, leaping into an open boxcar to find the Tramp and somehow punish him.
There Lynden meets The Duke, a hobo who calls America’s landscape his home. He’s “Profesh” and clings to an honor code quickly fading into the past. The Duke has his own secrets, fleeing from the merciless Short Arm, a one-time friend who now wants The Duke dead. The Duke reluctantly agrees to teach Lynden how to be a Professional hobo, all while trying to stay ahead of the relentless Short Arm.
A novel about obsession, endurance, and chasing the impossible.
CALIFORNIA, 1983. Anneliese is a young ballerina performing with a troupe of dancers ten years her senior. Immersed in new freedom, she is enchanted with Rebecca, the seamstress and costumer for the company. Anneliese’s budding attraction to Rebecca surprises and confuses her, but clarity dawns when Rebecca flirts back.
Narrow Girls on a Blue Profound Stage is a novel about identity, obsession, and finally, acceptance. Forging a painful path to awareness, Anneliese gains perspective in the world of performing arts, the dynamics of family, and the passionate personalities whose wild natures match her own.
A riveting coming of age story, that will make you laugh, cry and root for Laura to find happiness.
Laura Shirk is a normal, happy, go-lucky, little girl playing with Cabbage Patch dolls and Legos. Until she isn't. Set in the late 1980s-early 90s, a visit to her aunt and uncle's house changes everything.
What follows is a nerve-racking story shedding light on child sexual abuse. As the tragedy unfolds, Laura mutters through life concealing her secret from everyone. Feeling alone and isolated, she struggles to navigate her younger years wondering if she can or will ever find happiness.
Isaiah Moss was one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. His illegitimate son Oscar Kendall wasn't. Living in Isaiah's inescapable shadow, Oscar has become an inveterate quitter who hides his own literary work from the world rather than suffer the pain of failure or rejection.
When Isaiah suddenly dies, Oscar inherits the old man's lakefront writing cabin in New Hampshire. There he finds his father's typewriter, a full liquor cabinet, and an unpublished manuscript of such genius that it could launch Oscar's career if he claims it as his own.
As Oscar wrestles with his own twisted inspirations, he meets the women in Isaiah's life and begins to learn the depths of his father's secrets...and the costs that come with unresolved trauma and romantic delusion.
The search for the literary life. Satire at its Best!
In this indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time, two young people, Beckman and Malany set out on an odyssey to find meaning and reality in the artistic life, and in doing so unleash a barrage of humorous, unintended consequences.
Beckman and Malany's journey reflects the allegorical evolution of humanity from its primal state, represented by Beckman's dismal life as a dishwasher to the crude, medieval development of mankind in a pool hall, and then to the false but erudite veneer of sophistication of the academic world.
The world these protagonists live in is a world without love. It has every other variety of drive and emotion, but not love. Do they know it? Not yet. And they won't until they figure out why no birds sing here.
Faced with the mortality of her beloved mare, Beauty, and while trying to provide guidance and support to her twelve-year-old niece, Trina starts to reminisce her twenty-year friendship with Beauty.
Trina was a shy and nervous twelve-year-old that wasn't just happy in the shadow of her big sister, Talicia, but actively sought it out. This happened despite her not really noticing or caring that she and Talicia had been cast from the same mould, being physically similar, having similar names and being dressed in matching clothes as infants. Even having matching horses to ride that happened to be almost physically identical sisters themselves.
Just as Trina acquires her dream horse, she also starts to break out of the mould cast in Talicia's image.
S. lives with her grandparents in their house in Ossining, New York, where she has been abandoned by her mother, and S. is in the closet. The closet is a safe place to hide, to think, to ruminate. In the Closet is a triptych and each third has two parts.
In part one, S. is ten. Her grandfather is a piano-tuner in love with Thelonious Monk and his story is interwoven with that of Monk.
In part two, S. is twenty. Her grandmother is a librarian and a poet in love with Emily Dickinson and her story is interwoven with that of Dickinson.
In part three, S. is thirty. S.'s mother is a famous photographer, who lives in Brooklyn and is obsessed with Diane Arbus. The story of S.'s mother and Arbus weave together, and in the end, like Arbus, S.'s mother commits suicide.
Philip Zumwalt is an accomplished musician, poet, and idealist—a dreamer. Fresh out of college in 1940, he takes a job as a music teacher in a small, rural Illinois town. His plan is to teach for a few years hoping to save enough money to finance his dreams: go to Chicago to become a professional musician and get his pilot’s license. These dreams dominate his thoughts until one summer night when he meets Elinor Robinson.
Philip and Elinor’s forbidden romance—and the specter of war hanging over the country—put Philip’s dreams on hold. When he enlists in the Army Air Force, the gifted artist goes on an unpredictable journey of lost innocence. Life and death hang in the balance as he overcomes his fears and spiritual doubts in a desperate effort to survive aerial combat in the maelstrom of the Southwest Pacific Theater. In the end, a single dream remains for Philip: to return home to the woman he loves.
Casey Cohen, a Middle Eastern Jew, is a sixteen-year-old in New Orleans in the 1970s when she starts hanging out with the wrong crowd. Then she gets in trouble—and her parents turn her whole world upside down by deciding to return to their roots, the Orthodox Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn.
In this new and foreign world, men pray daily, thanking God they’re not women; parties are extravagant events at the Museum of Natural History; and the Marriage Box is a real place, a pool deck designated for teenage girls to put themselves on display for potential husbands. Casey is at first appalled by this unfamiliar culture, but after she meets Michael, she’s enticed by it. Looking for love and a place to belong, she marries him at eighteen, believing she can adjust to Syrian ways. But she begins to question her decision when she discovers that Michael doesn’t want her to go to college—he wants her to have a baby instead.
In her second novel, Valerie Taylor—award-winning author of What’s Not Said—gives readers another romantic comedy interwoven with forbidden love, infidelity, and family.
With the court date set for her divorce and the future she’d planned with a younger man presumably kaput, Kassie O’Callaghan shifts attention to reviving her stalled marketing career. But that goal gets complicated when she unexpectedly rendezvous with her former lover in Paris. After a chance meeting with a colleague and a stroll along Pont Neuf, Kassie receives two compelling proposals. Can she possibly accept them both?
Kassie’s decision process screeches to a halt when her soon-to-be ex-husband has a heart attack, forcing her to fly home to Boston. There, she confronts his conniving and deceitful fiancée—a woman who wants not just a ring on her finger but everything that belongs to Kassie. In the ensuing battle to protect what’s legally and rightfully hers, Kassie discovers that sometimes it’s what’s not true that can set you free.
Senator Bob Hill (R-PA) is sentenced for involuntary manslaughter for an accident in which he was driving under the influence. Prior to completing his sentence in jail, the Senator is ordered to enter a substance abuse treatment program. His personal life and his political ambitions shattered, Sen. Hill is little aware that during treatment at the Betty Ford Clinic he will be surprised by the miracle of a statue that comes to life and challenges his recovery.
Recent retiree Ruth Singer is reflecting on her life and wondering what direction it might have taken if she'd made different choices.
What if she'd learned to ski?
What if she'd had her tubes tied before her difficult youngest child was born?
What if she hadn't quit her rock band to attend college?
What if she'd run off with Danny Fortuna when she'd had the chance?
Not only does Ruth ponder these questions, she lives those what-if lives in her imagination. As the chaos of her real life swirls around her, she contemplates the roads she never took, the choices she never made, and comes to understand how she became the woman she is – and why.
Truth Like Oil, is the impactful story of two mothers in Boston, Massachusetts: Nadine Antoine, a Haitian-American nurses' aide, and Hazel Watkins, a white cantankerous nonagenarian felled by a stroke who struggles with her own helplessness and dependency.
When Nadine's youngest son, Chance, is arrested, and her eldest son, Henry, the only Black undergraduate on a scholarship at his college, threatens to quit to help the family, Nadine wrestles with how much of her sons' parentage she is willing to reveal to her boys.
Meanwhile, Chance's basketball coach, Gary, who is also Hazel's spoiled and neglectful son, turns up in court to defend the boy. Suddenly, while fighting for her sons' futures, Nadine must contend with Gary's intentions and his romantic overtures.
Ace Sinclair, now in his seventies, has one eye on a hurricane churning up from the south and the other on his old high school sweetheart, J’nelle Reade, whom he has invited to his Outer Banks beach house for a sentimental journey into their pasts. But the past is with them more than they know, and they are soon pulled into a haunting search among old memories for betrayals, mistakes, missed chances and ultimately the hard truths of their lives. As a dangerous hurricane turns in the Atlantic and heads their way, time runs short, and they must choose between the tidal pull of old dreams and the future’s wide unknown.
Set authentically in the High Sierra, The Trail is a moving story showing how nature helps us find what's missing in our lives.
More than a hiking novel, The Trail is fused with humor, philosophy, and trail lore. Woven in is a back story detailing the origins of the John Muir Trail: a 211-mile trail spanning the rooftop of the Sierra Nevada from Yosemite Valley to Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental United States.
When Christine, an idealistic young American teacher, meets and marries Hideki Yamada, an aspiring Japanese high school baseball coach, she believes that their love with be enough to sustain them as they deal with cultural differences. However, Hideki's duties, and the team of fit, obedient boys whom he begins to think of as a surrogate family, take up more and more of his time, just as Christine is struggling to manage the needs of their multiply-disabled daughter and their sensitive son. Things come to a head when their son is the victim of bullies. Christine begins to think that she and her children would be safer - and happier - in her native country. On a trip back to the States, she reconnects with a dangerously attractive friend from high school who, after serving and becoming wounded in Iraq, seems to understand her like no one else.
Your eyes seek me.My tears seek you.Your hands reach out to me. My hands fold in prayers.Your smile never leaves my sight and I seem to become a distant memory for you.All around me is YOU, and suddenly, you find yourself amongst strangers.I wake up and have your name on my lips, and somewhere in my mind, I hear you say, “MAMA.”By Sheetal OhriThis is written by the author Sheetal Ohri - a poem that tells how a mother was kept away from her child and her pain from that separation. The author had to deal with family law judicial system legalities, custody hearings, mediation, custody evaluations, and reunification therapies to be with her child. She wrote this book as she has been a victim of family law system flaws and had to struggle through many processes before she was granted custodial time of her child. Her situation was that, being an immigrant, she was not aware of the legalities of the family law system. She just believed in truth and honesty and stood her ground fighting a court battle for almost Eight years for her son.
Francesca Bodin has a near-perfect life as an accomplished music teacher and professional flutist living in the Vermont countryside with her husband Ben, and their four-year old daughter, Addie. This ends suddenly when a snowmobiling accident traps the three of them in a frozen lake. Ben, after escaping onto the ice, leaves her and Addie to die.
Francesca believes she sees their dog pull Addie from the lake and drag her into the nearby woods. Desperate to help her daughter, she crawls from the icy waters and follows them. Once she enters the forest, however, she finds herself trapped in a sinister, dream-like world where night never ends, where Addie’s whereabouts remain hidden from her, and where she encounters a group of women who, like Francesca, have been left to die and now seek to unleash their revenge on those who have harmed them. When they have Ben in their sights, Francesca realizes that if she is ever to escape this nightmare and save her daughter, she must first save the husband who abandoned them.
"It is an unanimously shared view that human knowledge must necessarily progress over time. This conviction is wrong: in fact, after centuries of progress, came the years in which, spontaneously, every form of science stopped its evolution and quickly began to regress, dragging world civilization towards social and individual organizations of existence, increasingly rudimentary, until, a few and scattered survivors adapted to an almost prehistoric condition of life. To bring the history of man back into a favorable course of events, we, Archangels Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, together with Seraph Daniel, have descended into the lands of the Village where the last civilized men lived, to ask the four Oidah brothers, to undertake a fierce war, to be fought both on Earth, and in the Earthly Paradise and they have sworn their assent with full fidelity."
Max Wendt has a family . . . but it's sliding sideways, and he has been complicit in its faltering. His wife and his daughter have pulled away from him amid his frequent absences, leaving him to bridge the distance between what he remembers and the way things are now.
Max Wendt has a job . . . but it carries him away from home most of the time, and its dynamics are quickly changing. There's a surprising new hire on his pipeline crew, strife among coworkers, and a boss whose proclivities put everything in peril.
Max Wendt has a friend . . . but this odd man Max meets during his travels perplexes him, prods him, pushes him, and annoys him. He sees something in Max that Max can't see in himself, and he's holding tight to his own pain.
Max Wendt has a problem . . . More than one, in fact, and those problems are flying at him with increasing velocity. Can someone who has spent his life going with the flow arrest his own destructive inertia, rebuild his relationships, and find a better way?
A political thriller about sexual misconduct in the #MeToo era, one victim's battle to survive and overcome trauma, and the cable news machine that feeds off titillating scandal coverage and inflammatory confrontation, Final Table draws upon Dan Schorr's firsthand experience as a New York City sex crimes prosecutor and sexual misconduct investigator to tackle the worlds of political and media dysfunction.
Former White House staffer Maggie Raster is struggling to build her own consulting firm and overcome a recent sexual assault by an ex-boss. Kyler Dawson, a broke former poker champion, desperately needs to gain entry into a controversial but potentially very lucrative international poker tournament. The host nation faces widespread condemnation for the recent murder of a prominent female US journalist, and a pending presidential executive order threatens to prohibit him and others from participating.
Told by a tart-tongued young woman with a love of Bruce Springsteen, Lies in Bone is at once a mystery and coming-of-age tale fueled by dark secrets involving love, murder, and the truths worth lying for.
On Halloween 1963, eleven-year-old Chuck Coolidge and his brother Danny are lost in a toxic smog covering the steel town of Slippery Elm, Pennsylvania. When the smog lifts, half the town is sick and twenty people are dead. And Danny is missing.
Now, over twenty years later, Chuck's teenage daughter Frank plots escape from this "busted and disgusted" town. When a murdered child is found in the river, investigators link the crime to the disappearance of Danny in '63, and Frank's life is turned upside down. In the face of her worst fears, she must uncover her family's dark past if she wants to keep her sister Boots from the hands of The State. Led to discover the unimaginable truth about Danny's disappearance, Lies in Bone culminates in a shocking eleventh-hour reveal and an emotionally charged finale.
The Fehler sisters wanted to be more than bug girls but growing up in a fourth- generation family pest control business in rural Missouri, their path was fixed. The family talked about Fehler Family Exterminating at every meal, even when their mom said to separate the business from the family, an impossible task. They tried to escape work with trips to their trailer camp on the Mississippi River, but the sisters did more fighting than fishing. If only there was a son to lead rural Missouri insect control and guide the way through a crumbling patriarchy.
After Robbie Fehler’s sudden death, the surprising details of succession in his will are revealed. He’s left the company to a distant cousin, assuming the women of the family aren’t capable. As the mother’s long-term affair surfaces and her apocalypse prepper training intensifies, she wants to trade responsibility for romance.
On a beautiful summer morning at the Jersey Shore, 4-year-old Sarah Carpenter wanders toward the ocean and never returns. The police think she drowned, but her babysitter Amy claims Sarah was abducted. The only other witness, 17-year-old Donnie Marcino, didn’t see a thing. A narcoleptic since birth, he was fast asleep.
Twenty years later Sarah’s disappearance still haunts Donnie, as does his lingering bond with Amy. When she calls from the hospital after a failed suicide attempt, Donnie returns to his hometown, but how can he help Amy, and help himself, without changing the past? In The Revolving Heart, love and redemption collide as the adult Donnie struggles to atone for his youthful mistakes.
Kassie O’Callaghan’s meticulous plans to divorce her emotionally abusive husband, Mike, and move in with Chris, a younger man she met five years ago on a solo vacation in Venice, are disrupted when she finds out Mike has chronic kidney disease—something he’s concealed from her for years. Once again, she postpones her path to freedom—at least, until she pokes around his pajama drawer and discovers his illness is the least of his deceits.
But Kassie is no angel, either. As she struggles to justify her own indiscretions, the secret lives she and Mike have led collide head-on, revealing a tangled web of sex, lies, and DNA. Still, mindful of her vows, Kassie commits to helping her husband find an organ donor. In the process, she uncovers a life-changing secret. Problem is, if she reveals it, her own immorality will be exposed, which means she has an impossible decision to make: Whose life will she save—her husband’s or her own?
