Juno Rushdan’s debut novel, Every Last Breath, is intense. Suspense, action, and explicit sex scenes are roughly equally dispersed through the book. What is missing are the quiet sequels after the action to allow the reader to recuperate. Protagonist Maddox moves in...
You have a new novel coming out, The Fourth Courier, set in Poland. What’s it about? Photo by Michael Honegger @ www.michaelhoneggerphotos.com. The Fourth Courier opens in the spring of 1992, only four months after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A series...
To celebrate Earth Day, I am sneaking in a book review on Monday rather than Thursday. The release of Julia Goldstein's Material Value: More Sustainable, Less Wasteful Manufacturing of Everything from Cell Phones to Cleaning Products is being timed with Earth Day, so...
Pickle's Progress is the debut novel of Marcia Butler, retired world-famous oboist. The title drew me in as I could only think of one other novel with “Pickle” in the title, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. The latter is an 18th century satire in which a young,...
Martine Fournier Watson meets with me today to talk about her debut novel, The Dream Peddler. It is historical/literary fiction released April 9, 2018 by Penguin Books. Originally she hails from Montreal, Canada but has been living in the U.S. for fifteen years. Like...
The Lost History of Dreams is an accomplished debut novel which reminded me of classics such as Wuthering Heights and the more contemporary Possession by A.S. Byatt. Set in Victorian England, the book, rich with Gothic creepiness, layers several love stories into a...
Today, author Michael R. Johnston joins me to talk about his debut science fiction novel, The Widening Gyre (The Remembrance War, Book 1), issued by Flame Tree Press on March 14, 2019. Michael is a high school English teacher and writer living in Sacramento,...
In her debut novel, Isabella Hammad uses richly-textured prose to invoke the turbulence of the Middle East right after World War I. I recently read Kurt Seyt and Shura by Nermin Bezmen and The Carpet Weaver of Usak by Kathryn Gauci, both of which deal roughly with the...
Author Eva Seyler Eva Seyler's debut novel, The War in Our Hearts was just released on March 24, 2019. She was born in Jacksonville, Florida, but left that humidity pit at the age of three and spent the next twenty-one years in California, Idaho, Kentucky, and...
Set shortly after the Soviet Union imploded, this international intrigue takes FBI agent Jay Porter into Poland. There he’s quickly involved in a case where three men have been found dead on a riverbank. All have a minor genetic deformity: a stub of a sixth finger....
More daylight = more time to read, so it felt like the perfect occasion for a new bookish giveaway! 🌞📚One lucky winner will receive an eBook copy of A Different Kind of Fire, and a $10 Amazon gift card. This one ends a week from today, so get in while you can. Click...
Christie Grotheim joins me today to talk about her debut novel, The Year Marjorie Moore Learned to Live which will be released on April 2, 2019 by Heliotrope Books. Christie is a New York-based writer whose stories have been featured in Salon, The New York...
Because I'd read Sara Ackerman’s debut novel, Island of Sweet Pies and Soldiers, I continued with her second novel. Told in the dual, third-person perspectives of Eva Cassidy and Lieutenant Clark Spencer interspersed with real memos, headlines, and military...
Andrea Rothman joins me today to talk about her debut novel, The DNA of You and Me. It was released March 12, 2019 by HarperCollins. Before turning to fiction writing, Andrea Rothman was a research scientist at Rockefeller University in New York. She holds an MFA in...
In the City by the Lake, Viktor, a half-Jewish Russian emigre, lives a life of quiet desperation as a low-grade mobster in Chicago from 1929 to 1938. Raised in an all-male family (his mother died birthing him), his Weltanschauung is skewed. He’s a tortured character...
Author Felicia Grossman has a day job, one she absolutely adores. She's a lawyer and works for a local government agency and has fabulous coworkers. She also has a husband with a boring day-job (but who does art on the side), two little kids, and two very bad, but...
I had to read The Chef's Secret because I’ve lived extensively in Italy. I've also read Crystal King’s The Feast of Sorrow and enjoyed her approach to food. Her newest historical novel did not let me down. The descriptions of food were enough to make me...
Danielle Haas joins me today to discuss her debut novel, Bound by Danger, which was released by MacMillan on January 28, 2019. She grew up with a love of reading, partly due to her namesake—Danielle Steele. It seemed as though she was born to write out the same love...
I was intrigued enough by the title, The Psychology of Time Travel, to pick up Kate Mascaenhas's new book. This is a genre-breaking book combining time travel, science fiction, a “locked room” mystery, with touches of romance. I am sure there are techies out there who...
Today I have the honor of speaking with Dan Stout whose debut novel, Titanshade, will be released by DAW on March 3, 2019. Dan lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he writes about fever dreams and half-glimpsed shapes in the shadows. His prize-winning fiction draws on...
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