by Adam Cosco Rating: **** In an effort to reset their relationship, thirty-four-year-old AI developer Eli and his girlfriend, Selene, decide to spend some time outside of Los Angeles at a remote cabin, but barely a few hours into their break, Eli finds Selene dead in haunting circumstances. Broken by grief, seeking answers, and immersing himself in the AI program he and Selene created, Eli discovers that Selene was involved with a shadowy cult tied to her past, one that pro

by Mark N. Drake Rating: ***** The sixth installment * in Drake’s Glennison Darkisle series begins in Spring 1925, and Jack and Josine’s relationship is strained after events in the Grainger Case. Josine briefly returns to America to visit family, and Jack is invited to join a university archaeological dig on Ben Cattrick Hill back on Darkisle in July. While waiting, he decides to investigate a niggling connection between a painting in Charles Deverby’s art collection and t

by Phil Smart Rating: **** In April 1815, former Royal Navy Commander Stephen Cowen chooses to start a new life in India with his wife, Elspeth, and their three children. When a powerful storm hits their boat, The Cumberland, the Cowen children—sixteen-year-old Nathaniel, fourteen-year-old Andrew, and twelve-year-old Beatrice—are swept overboard, believed to have drowned. However, safely inside The Cumberland’s longboat, the children wash ashore on the East African coast, whe

by Jonathan Chalstrey Rating: *** Heart follows the adventures of Hernando Bustamante, a sixteenth-century surgeon. Apprenticed at sixteen to the renowned Doctor Bartolo in Seville, he is forced to flee to Italy by the Spanish Inquisition, where he becomes a professor of medicine at Bologna University. But when Hernando falls in love with Euphemia, a nun, he is expelled from Bologna and takes up a position as an assistant surgeon in Padua. Yet fate conspires again, and Busta

by Nino Gugunishvili Rating: **** There Was a Garden Once is a concise collection of twenty-four autobiographical musings and essays, some just a couple of pages long. Interwoven with humorous reflections on everyday life are deeper meditations on grief and aging. Gugunishvili’s latest compilation * is a little book of delights, leaving the reader smiling despite the plaintive tone of several narratives. Gugunishvili writes with a natural, chatty intimacy that never feels f

by John A. Heldt Rating: ***** The Winding Road continues the Maclean Brothers' time-traveling saga from the first installment, The Patriots * . Despite the entreaties of his fiancée, Abigail Ward, Noah rides out to enlist in the Continental Army, ready for war in the late eighteenth century, yet armed with a secret cache of modern weaponry. Jake stays behind with the Wards, helping however he can while growing inseparable from their younger daughter, Rachel, Abby’s sister.

by Jennifer Wizbowski Rating: ***** Set in early eighteenth-century Venice, Poinsettia Girl unfolds the story of Agata della Pietà, who, at age ten, was placed by her dying Nonna , Guilelma, at the Ospedale de la Pietà , an orphanage that placed emphasis on nurturing musical talent and housed its own prestigious and mysterious conservatoire, the Figlie del Coro , for whom Vivaldi was a teacher and composer. Agata is supremely gifted, not only as a soprano but also as a copyi

by Jim Bates Rating: **** Science fiction/dystopian mash-up The Defectives is set in the 27 th century. Cockroach-esque creatures, the Tracliodytes conquered Earth in the 22 nd Century, and humans were driven underground to live in cities deep beneath the Earth’s surface. Over the next five hundred years, they segregated into the “ Rich and Powerful ” and the “ Defectives ”, and life for the latter is brutal under the diktats of the Supreme Commander, Reginald Botta. When

by Robert Wilson Rating: **** Told in four parts over the course of the 1970s, The Love You Take is a late coming-of-age novel focusing primarily on Andy Watson, from small-town Strasburg in Virginia as he matures from college student to married father. Surrounded by a select group of eclectic friends, all of whom have their vulnerabilities and moments of self-reckoning, Andy navigates the decade of Nixon, Vietnam, and socio-political unrest while wrestling with the responsi

by Lagnard Benz Rating: **** Don’t Study at University is a self-help book with a difference, offering much more than the title suggests, covering extensive, often esoteric ground. Benz essentially lays out a manifesto, backed by personal experience and thorough research, that scrutinizes traditional educational methods and, consequently, expected career/life trajectories. He rigorously questions and, in many cases, debunks prescribed belief systems, urging the reader to do l