Supernatural Event
Out of the Thicket follows the people of Yana who, for over a decade, have had all their twelve-year-old boys vanish on the same night each year; only this year, two boys decide to run, trying to escape their fate. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
One evening, an image popped into my mind unbidden: a man and a woman sitting on the ground facing one another, with a boy between them. I thought, “That’s a strange idea. Maybe I can make a story out of that.” I had to ask, “Who are these people, and why are they sitting like that?” From there, I came up with the ritual surrounding the supernatural event called the Seizing that serves as the backdrop for my story.
What interested you about exploring faith through characters who do not always agree about what they believe or how belief should guide them?
I wanted to write a book that showed the struggle of faith. Jacob, the patriarch from the Bible, is a very important character to me. He wrestled with God and was blessed for it. I wanted to depict people who wrestled with doubt, beliefs, religion, prayer, and God’s silence. I think many books addressing faith make life too clean and easy. I wanted to mirror what faith looks like in the real world through my fantasy.
Yana has developed traditions, sayings, prejudices, religious practices, and rituals around its history. How did you approach creating a culture shaped by generations of fear and loss?
I had a lot of fun creating the world of Out of the Thicket. My starting point was the biblical world of the Old Testament, a place guided by sacred texts, complicated by corrupt religious leaders, and visited by mysterious prophets. A land where miracles happen. But I didn’t want it to read like Bible fan fiction or historical fiction, so I made up new cities, backstories, rituals, and proverbs. I hope the result is a story that arrives in a world that already feels lived in.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I’m working on a dystopian, three-volume southern gothic tale about truth. Like Out of the Thicket, it contains some elements of magical realism. I’m taking my time with it and have no idea when it will be published.
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One mother, Ramia, refuses to participate in the ritual, which infuriates Hannah, revealing that her motives have more to do with issues surrounding her own son’s untimely death. When Ramia’s son, Hazaq, and his best friend, Bear, try to escape The Seizing by running away, Yana is thrown into a maelstrom of intrigue and doubt.
Featuring a cast of fiercely independent female leads, heartwarming childhood friendships, complex villains, sage prophets, and dubious religious leaders who are caught in an entertaining plot full of twists,
Out of the Thicket is a story about the sacrificial nature of love.
The Dictionary of Missing Time
The Dictionary of Missing Time, by Susan Eileen, is a memoir of addiction, family, relationships, mental health, and recovery organized through a clever personal lexicon. Each chapter takes its title from an expression Eileen has coined or adopted, such as “A Reverse Kafka,” “Memory Burn,” “Irish Goodbye,” and “Confident Humility,” then uses that phrase as an entry point into a particular period of her life. The dictionary framework gives shape to a story that ranges from a financially strained childhood in Ohio through marriage, motherhood, teaching, substance abuse, difficult relationships, legal trouble, and sobriety. Early in the book, Eileen describes her life as “a series of rambunctious events,” an apt description of a memoir that moves through painful and comic experiences with considerable energy.
Eileen’s voice is the book’s defining strength. She writes with candor about behavior that could easily be softened in retrospect, including drinking, pill abuse, financial instability, people-pleasing, damaged relationships, and the ways addiction consumed both her time and her attention. Her humor gives the book accessibility without erasing the seriousness of what she describes. The invented expressions are often funny, but they also function as compact explanations for recurring patterns of behavior. As the memoir progresses, these terms become a way for Eileen to name experiences she once struggled to understand. That approach is particularly effective because language itself becomes part of the recovery process: defining an experience allows her to examine it, connect it to the past, and decide what role it should have in her future.
The book also succeeds in presenting sobriety as a continuing process of self-examination. Eileen traces improvements in her work habits, finances, home life, boundaries, relationships, and ability to tolerate difficult emotions, while also examining transfer addiction and the patterns she carried from childhood and marriage into later relationships. Some of the memoir’s most thoughtful passages concern time, particularly the years and mental energy absorbed by addiction. Her observation that “Time can never be retrieved” gives the title its deeper significance. Recovery, in this telling, involves recognizing that lost time while becoming more deliberate about the time that remains. The result is a narrative concerned as much with identity, habits, and emotional maturity as with abstinence itself.
By the end, The Dictionary of Missing Time has become a record of reconstruction. Eileen arrives at a life built around simplicity, creative work, family, healthier boundaries, volunteering, and a more measured sense of self. Her idea of “confident humility,” defined as keeping one’s ego in proper proportion, neatly captures the balance she spends much of the book trying to establish. The closing sentiment, “I’ve built a life I don’t need a vacation from,” gives the memoir an especially fitting conclusion because it measures recovery through ordinary contentment. Eileen has created a personal recovery memoir with an unusual organizing principle, a conversational voice, and a clear interest in how people can use language, reflection, and self-knowledge to make sense of a complicated life.
Pages: 268 | ASIN : B0CTN1NJWW
My Love Of History
The Chronicles of Rekule follows an ancient Olympian whose discovery of a mysterious crystal awakens elemental powers and pulls him into forbidden love, prophecy, and a struggle to master his own impulses. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
When I was a child, around 12 years old, I was riding my bike downhill on a gravel road. I took the curve too sharp and wiped out- skidding down the gravel hill, and stopping just as I reached the edge of the road, holding my bike in one hand, and stopping myself with the other hand. I limped back to my house with a nasty bloody raspberry on my knee and a nasty gash in my hand. A couple days later, I realized I still had a rock in the palm of my hand. I plucked it out. It was a crazy feeling and I was blown away by how big the rock was that I hadn’t even known about, just that there was an odd pressure that shouldn’t be there. It was the sharp pain that made me dig and find it.
That memory has stayed with me, and it was what sparked the idea for the story several years later.
Rekule’s powers seem to magnify his emotional strengths and weaknesses as much as his physical abilities. How did you develop that connection between magic, personality, and temptation?
Great question. I wanted to show the power the crystal had over its wielder. How it pulled out their desire and pushed them to extremes. Almost a price to pay for using it, because it changed who you were for better or worse.
How did you decide which mythological figures, such as Thanatos, Uranus, Atlas, and Prometheus, to reinvent for this story?
I wanted to write a book that takes place in the present day. That book turned out to be the fourth book in this series. Once I started outlining the book, I realized that I wanted to understand how and why these crystals and people came to be. I started looking back to the past due to my love of history and Greek mythology. Everything fell into place from there.
As The Chronicles of Rekule continues, what aspects of this hidden ancient civilization and the origins of Greek mythology are you most excited for readers to discover?
In book two — The Fall of Labruula — we will get to meet Zeus, Hades, Cronus, Rhea, and Poseidon, along with others you already know. I do not want to give away any spoilers, but there will be giants in book two.
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Mystery at the Hidden River
J. Clifford Barnes’s Mystery at the Hidden River is a warm, engaging mystery built around an unusual kind of amateur detective. Jace Carter is a retired civil engineer in his mid-60s who’d be perfectly content tending his garden, drinking good coffee, and enjoying a quiet life on the Northern California coast. Instead, the suspicious death of fellow engineer Dustin Macky draws him into an investigation where his professional knowledge becomes every bit as valuable as traditional police work. Hydrology calculations, engineering files, building permits, geological hazards, and development plans all become clues, giving the story a personality that feels grounded in the way real people actually solve complicated problems.
Jace is the heart of the book. He’s practical, observant, good-humored, and refreshingly comfortable with who he is. His narration makes room for sandwiches, fishing trips, gardening, coffee, storm preparation, and the everyday inconveniences of retirement alongside murder and criminal conspiracy. Those details give Inglesee, Seacrest, and the Hidden River area the comfortable familiarity of places the reader can picture living in. They also make the danger more effective when it arrives. An enormous atmospheric river, a threatened harbor, an escaped suspect, a firebombing, and a corporate scheme all become more immediate because they’re happening to someone who’d really rather be repairing a planter box or reading in his easy chair.
The mystery itself grows naturally from Dustin Macky’s engineering work. What begins with a dead man and a disordered stack of hydrologic calculations expands into the threat posed by the Buck Starr Landslide, an illegal growing operation, a powerful development company with designs on Hidden River Harbor, and a suspicious harbor board member with connections that run deeper than anyone first realizes. Barnes keeps these threads moving through Jace’s particular way of thinking. He notices inconsistencies, understands what technical information means in practical terms, and often finds solutions because he knows how government agencies, contractors, engineers, and local institutions actually function. That gives the investigation an appealing nuts-and-bolts quality while still leaving room for danger, misdirection, and a satisfying escalation toward the solution.
What makes Mystery at the Hidden River especially enjoyable is the combination of small-town mystery, procedural problem-solving, coastal atmosphere, and an older protagonist who discovers that retirement hasn’t made him any less useful. Jace doesn’t become a different person in order to solve the case. His experience, patience, curiosity, and accumulated knowledge are exactly what make him effective. By the end, the investigation has pushed him into serious danger, exposed a much larger criminal operation, and even forced him to rethink how he can keep helping law enforcement without making himself an easy target. His resulting notion of becoming an “undercover volunteer sleuth” feels like both a satisfying conclusion and an inviting promise of more adventures ahead. Mystery at the Hidden River turns the practical wisdom of a retired engineer into the secret weapon of a smart, personable mystery you’ll want to follow wherever Jace Carter goes next.
Pages: 88 | ASIN : B0HBT7SK9Y
Loyalty Becomes Something Dangerous
Vanished Twin follows a Tampa detective as he investigates a ritualistic serial killer whose gruesome crimes reveal dark secrets of childhood abuse, family trauma, and twisted sibling loyalty. What inspired you to write the second Detective Alex Archer novel?
When I started writing Vanished Twin, I wanted to challenge Detective Alex Archer with a case that was darker, more personal, and emotionally comlex than anything he had faced before. I was inspired by true crime stories that reveal how deeply childhood experiences can influence adult behavior. The concept of ritualistic murders connected to long-buried family trauma gave me an opportunity to create a mystery that was not only suspenseful but also psychologically layered. At its heart, the novel asks how far someone might go to protect the people they love and what happens when loyalty becomes something dangerous.
What did you want to do differently in this book compared with the first Alex Archer novel?
One of my biggest goals with Vanished Twin was to make the story darker and more emotionally complex than the first Alex Archer novel. While the first book, The Devil ‘s Snow, focused primarily on solving a crime, this novel dives deeper into the psychological motivations behind violence and the lasting impact of childhood trauma. I wanted the mystery to be more than a hunt for a killer. I wanted it to become an exploration of family bonds, buried secrets, and the ways people are shaped by their past. I also wanted to challenge Alex Archer on a more personal level. In Vanished Twin, the investigation forces him to confront difficult moral questions and navigate the emotional fallout experienced by victims, families, and even perpetrators. The result is a story that balances suspense and action with a deper examination of human relationships and the consequences of long-hidden wounds.
Why did you choose Catholic imagery and Satanism as elements of the killer’s ritual?
I chose Catholic imaagery and Satanism because they provided a powerful way to explore the novel’s themes of faith, corruption, and trauma. The killer twists religious symbols to reflect his damaged worldview, turning what should represent hope and redemption into something dark and terrifying. It also gave Alex Archer a deeper mystery to unravel beyond the murders themselves.
What did writing this second installment teach you that you did not know while writing the first?
Writing Vanished Twin taught me that the most compelling mysteries are driven by character as much as plot. While writing the first Alex Archer novel, The Devil’s Snow, I focused on the investigation itself, In the second book, I learned how much more powerful a story becomes when the emotional journeys of the detective, victims, and even the killer are woven into the mystery. That deeper character focus made the suspense more meaningful and the stakes more personal.
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Trying to rebuild his life, Archer joins the Tampa Police Department, where his instincts quickly reawaken. A relentless investigator willing to bend protocol when necessary, Archer soon becomes the department’s go-to detective for high-risk cases.
What begins as a series of gun-store robberies soon uncovers a far more dangerous threat: the activation of a Taliban sleeper cell determined to unleash terror on American soil. As the investigation deepens, Archer becomes the personal target of Saif Abdulla, an Afghan national haunted by his own trauma after losing his village during Operation Enduring Freedom.
As disturbing personalized clues draw Archer deeper into the conspiracy, the terror cell launches escalating attacks designed to spread fear and chaos across the country—all leading toward a catastrophic event promising devastation far beyond 9/11.
Fast-paced, gritty, and emotionally charged, The Devil’s Snow blends police procedural realism with psychological suspense and post-9/11 terrorism thriller intensity.
Code Gray & Baker Act Response
Code Gray and Baker-Act Response by Youssef H. is a practical training manual built around the realities of healthcare security work. Its focus is specific: how security officers can respond to aggression, behavioral crises, threats, and other Code Gray situations while protecting patients, staff, visitors, and themselves. The book grounds that work in the unusual pressures of a healthcare setting, where someone acting aggressively may also be frightened, injured, intoxicated, confused, grieving, or experiencing a psychiatric or medical crisis. That perspective gives the manual a consistent sense of purpose. Security is presented as a supporting part of patient care, with officers responsible for safety and scene control while clinical staff make medical decisions and law enforcement handles criminal enforcement when necessary.
The strongest part of the book is its emphasis on judgment before force. De-escalation, calm communication, reactionary distance, situational awareness, teamwork, and observation appear throughout the manual because they form the core of the approach. Officers are repeatedly encouraged to recognize escalating behavior, control the environment, keep communication simple, and use physical intervention only when it’s reasonably necessary to stop an immediate threat. The healthcare context makes those lessons especially important because physical intervention can affect oxygen lines, IVs, recent surgical injuries, medications, and other medical concerns. The book also pays close attention to what happens after control is gained, including medical reassessment, documentation, evidence preservation, and stopping force as soon as the justification for it ends.
The Florida legal material gives the manual another useful dimension. It separates the Baker Act, Marchman Act, criminal arrest, and medical restraint into distinct processes. One of the book’s most important recurring ideas is that a security officer observes behavior and supports authorized decisions. The discussion of false imprisonment, lawful authority, objective reporting, and the limits of a private security officer’s role reinforces that point. The writing is deliberately repetitive in places, but that repetition works much like training does: the same principles are revisited until the reader can connect them to different circumstances. The book’s preference for describing observable conduct rather than assigning labels is particularly practical for incident reports and communication with clinical or law-enforcement personnel.
The twenty scenarios are where the material becomes easiest to picture and apply. They cover situations such as a patient assaulting a nurse, a confused elderly patient striking staff, a psychiatric patient threatening self-harm, a barricaded patient, fights in hallways, aggressive family members, unlawful detention requests from staff, an intoxicated patient trying to leave, and an attempted entry into a nursery. Each scenario moves from the event to an officer response and then explains why the choices matter, which makes the book well suited to roll-call discussions, orientation, refresher training, and tabletop exercises. The final reminders neatly capture the philosophy running through the entire manual: arrive calm, assess first, protect people, reduce chaos, communicate clearly, use only necessary force, coordinate with clinical staff, document facts, and never turn security work into punishment. I’d recommend this most strongly to new and working healthcare security officers in Florida, along with supervisors and trainers who need a straightforward scenario-based resource for discussing judgment, legal boundaries, and de-escalation with their teams.
Pages: 114 | ASIN : B0HGDM8SQD
Building Continuity Across Books
Encountering Empire follows an eighteen-year-old Irish leader as he journeys from Ériu to Hispania, confronting Rome’s expansion, pirates, political intrigue, and unfamiliar cultures while reflecting on a life shaped by courage, strategy, and survival. What is the most rewarding aspect of writing a series?
Building continuity across books – political, cultural, and personal. The research – and ensuring each volume deepens the world rather than repeating it. I have learned a lot in the process and taken the opportunity to experience the world of the scela by visiting the many archaeological sites that still exist.
Which historical sources were especially valuable while developing the novel?
My most influential sources include P.W. Joyce’s A Social History of Ancient Ireland; Barry Raftery’s Pagan Celtic Ireland; and work by J.P. Mallory, John Peddie, and Lionel Casson. I also draw on J.K. O’Doherty’s Derriana for regional context and perspective. Beyond these, the research base is broad – archaeology, maritime history, Roman military studies, and early Irish literature.
Did you think of the novel as an imagined oral history or archive while writing it?
Yes. The framing device with Calgach and Padar is deliberate. The narrative is shaped as remembered experience – layered accounts, disagreements, omissions, and inherited stories. It mirrors how early societies preserved history.
What do you hope readers understand differently about Rome and the Celtic world?
That Rome was not monolithic, and the Celtic world was not primitive. Both were complex, adaptive, and interconnected. Power moved through trade, obligation, hospitality, and information – not only through conquest.
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The Trouble With Hector
The Trouble with Hector, by Bonnie Denmark, is a playful children’s book about a boy who spends his carefully saved $3.98 on a lizard who has already been returned to the pet shop nineteen times. Hector quickly proves to be affectionate, unusual, and a little combustible. When he’s worried, hungry, or sad, his breath heats up until sparks and flames start flying, which turns ordinary moments at home and school into escalating comic disasters. The story moves at a lively pace, and Denmark’s rhyming text gives it the kind of bounce that should work especially well when read aloud.
What gives the story some emotional weight is the boy’s loyalty to Hector. He doesn’t give up on his pet when things get difficult. Instead, he tries meditation and yoga with him, comforts him after he’s sent out of the classroom, sneaks him food, and eventually builds him a cozy treehouse when Hector can’t stay indoors anymore. That relationship keeps the book warm even while the jokes get bigger and smokier. There’s also a nice childlike logic to the whole setup: of course a bargain-bin mystery lizard might breathe fire, and of course the kid who bought him would still think he was worth every cent.
Mina Sešek’s illustrations are a major part of the picture book’s personality. Hector’s bulging eyes, curled tail, purplish-and-green markings, and increasingly sooty face make him expressive even before the text tells us what he’s feeling. The images also carry plenty of visual humor, from the pet-shop sign warning customers to “BUY AT YOUR OWN RISK” to the burned curtain, smoking seesaw, and school-lunch chaos. The soft, hand-drawn look and generous use of pinks, greens, oranges, and muted pastels give the book a friendly visual warmth that keeps Hector’s fire-breathing from ever feeling threatening. I especially like how the later treehouse scenes open up the setting and give the story a cozy, almost storybook-hideaway feeling.
The ending gives Hector’s fiery problem an unexpectedly sweet solution when he meets a girl lizard and immediately settles down. From there, the book closes on an affectionate joke: Hector may be calm now, but he’s still occasionally useful for roasting marshmallows. It’s a charming finish that fits the book’s lighthearted tone and brings the story back to the bond between the boy and his very strange pet. The Trouble with Hector is an energetic and funny picture book with a memorable creature at its center, a warm sense of friendship, and illustrations that give kids plenty to notice beyond the words.
Pages: 32 | ASIN : B0GSSLG3HF
