In Ben Burgess Jr.’s Wounded, Samantha Miller is a beautiful stripper who preys upon women - specifically straight or married women – walking on the dangerous path of violence, seduction, and exploitation. Her precarious ways are due to her troubled past when she was molested...

Linda Ruth Horowitz book While the Sands Whisper has great multi-media appeal. Through the eyes of Ayishah (her main character) – a freelance American-Israeli documentary photographer – the reader enjoys a stunning series of vignettes reminiscent of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. In While the...

Whispers Through Time by Barry Homan is an uplifting story about spirituality. This is the story of Jill Palmer, a mother of two teenage boys, divorced and working as medical transcriber and hostess. She lived an ordinary life, and the last thing she was looking...

A sad and beautiful coming-of-age story of a child and her country, NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel, We Need New Names, takes us to Zimbabwe during the Mugabe era. Here, 10-year-old Darling copes with extreme poverty, hunger, and near-homelessness in her ironically-named shantytown, Paradise. We join the...

When we first meet Hannah, she is fighting traffic on her way to her grandmother's funeral. She is bringing her grandmother's embalmed canary, which, according to family legend, alerted her grandfather to toxic fumes in the coal mine her grandmother owned. Hannah is dreading the...

“Whether I Live or Die” is a novel that juxtaposes two stories; one is about a woman who cannot seem to find the strength of character in her relationships with men and life in general and the other story is that of a rookie policewoman...

“Why She Left Us” by David Dennis is comprised of the diary pages of five people and five different accounts of the times leading to September 1985. The characters’ memories provide the basis for this romantic fiction. Monica, an 18-year old self-described psychopath, alone with...

Kate Faraday always felt a bit of shame where her parents were concerned. It was tough growing up with an alcoholic father and a mother who suffered from mental illness. Added to the dysfunction was the fact that her parents lived in separate houses, but...

"Words Falling Like Water" is a very interesting, frustrating, funny, and heartbreaking story all wrapped up into one. First time author Sonya Vaughn explains how the failing auto industry has suffered and how that suffering has impacted the people worldwide. There are examples given within...

"Walking Fish" by Joanne Bodin is gritty yet touching contemporary fiction. Artist Talia, a nonconformist by any standards, has had a difficult life. Losing custody of her daughter Sophie when she was five following an unpleasant divorce, Talia has been shut out of her child's...