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Vassal of El

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He tried to forget his past, but it wouldn’t forget him

At sixteen, Torren was violently torn from his family and his people and left for dead, a cripple in more ways than one. For the next few years, he traveled alone, making few friends.

Then, one night, a terrified young woman fleeing for her life stumbles into his camp, and his life once again takes new direction. As he reluctantly takes responsibility for getting her to safety, his past comes back to haunt him in a way that is painfully ironic. Against both his will and his better judgment, he must return to the place he had thought lost to him forever if he is to make good on his promise to keep his charge safe from harm.

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Riders of the Purple Sage

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Riders of the Purple Sage is a Western novel by Zane Grey. Considered by many critics to have played a significant role in shaping the formula of the popular Western genre, the novel has been called “the most popular western novel of all time.”

Riders of the Purple Sage tells the story of Jane Withersteen and her battle to overcome her persecution by members of the polygamous Mormon Church, a leader of which, Elder Tull, wants to marry her. Withersteen is supported by a number of Gentile friends, including Bern Venters and Lassiter, a famous gunman and killer of Mormons. Throughout most of the novel she struggles with her “blindness” in seeing the evil nature of her church and its leaders, trying to keep both Venters and Lassiter from killing her adversaries, who are slowly ruining her.

Through the adoption of a child, Fay, she abandons her false beliefs and discovers her true love. A second plot strand tells of Venters and his escape to the wilderness with a girl named Bess, “the rustler’s girl,” whom he has accidentally shot. While caring for her, Venters falls in love with the girl, and together they escape to the East, while Lassiter, Fay, and Jane, are pursued by both Mormons and rustlers.

Original cover background image by Larry Lamsa.

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Blackbird Fly

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The sudden death of her husband turns Merle Bennett’s life upside down. She finds herself doing what she least expected, decamping to France for the summer to fix up the ancestral home. The village in southwest France should be idyllic: warm sunshine, vineyards, and walls of golden stone. As the past unravels, colliding with modern tensions and the filthy trials of renovation, the summer takes on a dark cast, full of secrets best left buried.

In her first stand-alone suspense novel, Lise McClendon reaches deep into the past to find a France untouched by the outside world of tourism and fashion. Writing in a “lyrical, often humorous style,” she brings both the pain and rewards of rebirth and the rich French countryside to life.

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Bound for Eternity

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Disappearing artifacts, jealous colleagues, and dead bodies—who says a museum curator’s job is easy?

After transporting a newly acquired Egyptian mummy to a local clinic for an X-ray, curator Lisa Donahue safely returns the ancient relic to the Boston University Museum of Archaeology and History. Upon returning to the museum after hours, the widowed young mother is shocked to discover the bloodied body of a colleague in the mummy’s vacated case. The two-thousand-year-old mummy contains an enigmatic clue that will help Lisa solve the murder and keep her job. But she must move fast—before someone turns her into a permanent exhibit.

Original cover image by mamamusings.

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Death of a Nationalist

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Madrid 1939. Carlos Tejada Alonso y Lean is a Sergeant in the Guardia Civil, a rank rare for a man not yet thirty, but Tejada is an unusual recruit. The bitter civil war between the Nationalists and the Republicans has interrupted his legal studies in Salamanca. Second son of a conservative Southern family of landowners, he is an enthusiast for the Catholic Franquista cause, a dedicated, and now triumphant, Nationalist. This war has drawn international attention. In a dress rehearsal for World War II, fascists support the Nationalists, while communists have come to the aid of the Republicans. Atrocities have devastated both sides. It is at this moment, when the Republicans have surrendered, and the Guardia Civil has begun to impose order in the ruins of Madrid, that Tejada finds the body of his best friend, a hero of the siege of Toledo, shot to death on a street named Amor de Dios. Naturally, a Red is suspected. And it is easy for Tejada to assume that the woman caught kneeling over the body is the killer. But when his doubts are aroused, he cannot help seeking justice.

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Defining Diana

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Defining Diana is Book 1 of the Steele Chronicles.

Found naked and alone in a locked room. The beautiful woman was in perfect health – except she was dead…

It’s 2043 and much has changed: nuclear war, biotechnology and all-powerful corporations have ruled the world… Now science is taking DNA manipulation to new, unrestricted levels.

Superintendent Frank Steele is an old-fashioned cop. He commands a small, elite police unit that is handed all of the bizarre and baffling cases no one else can solve. He knows the money, the murders, missing persons and gruesome body shops are all connected. He knows it starts with the girl…

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Getting Sassy

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With her nearly broke and practically homeless mother about to land on her doorstep, Robyn Guthrie learns that desperation can play havoc with a daughter’s scruples. Otherwise, why would she even consider kidnapping a goat and holding it for ransom?

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High Season

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Frank Coffin had been a well-respected Baltimore homicide detective. But when he started having panic attacks at crime scenes, he was forced to go home to Cape Cod, where the worst crimes were usually break-ins, bicycle thefts, and domestic disputes. That is, until a vacationing televangelist turns up dead on the beach wearing a wig, a muumuu, and one size-twelve pump. Not to mention the raspberry-colored taffeta scarf strangling his neck.

Frank and his partner, Officer Lola Winters, begin checking out the drag bars and isolated trysting spots the reverend might have frequented. However, when the body count starts to rise, it becomes alarmingly clear that a killer with an agenda is at large in Provincetown. And Coffin’s fears—like unwelcome summer tourists—have returned in full force…

Cover image adapted from a photo by Andrew Bossi.

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In the Mean Time

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A history teacher begins his unorthodox senior course with clips from an ominous surveillance video, causing a student’s home life to deteriorate along with the lessons.

A girl with a second head that changes into different historical and fictional identities tries to find her father while figuring out how to handle Mom and the book club.

A blog documents society’s slow, unexplained, but inexorable end, or is it only a collection of pixel-sized paranoia?

A once-awkward teen holes up in a kiddie-themed amusement park after the end of the world, and schemes to take Cinderella’s Castle by force.

This collection by Paul G. Tremblay (author of The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland) features fifteen stories of fear and paranoia, stories of apocalypses both societal and personal, and stories of longing and coping.

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It’s Behind You

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A story about fame, megalomania and murder.

Carina Hemsley, former soap star of ‘Winkle Bay’ was a hugely popular actress in her day – until her ego took over and ‘Cora Smart’, her character, was axed off.

Now, after years away from the lime-light, she’s appearing as the Good Fairy in panto, terrorising the cast and crew of a tatty third-rate northern theatre and drinking and smoking herself to death. Audiences are down and the outlook isn’t good… until she starts receiving death threats in the post. Along with the police, the media circus descends, boosting her public profile and putting bums on seats in the theatre.

Follow Carina and her not-so-merry troupers as they face an onslaught of assassination, romance and intrigue, but as Carina says, ‘The Show Must Go On!’

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