FYRELOCKE: JACK BOOMERSHINE AND THE PROPHECY UNTOLD by R. Christopher Kobb_Review

Fyrelocke: Jack Boomershine and the Prophecy Untold by R. Christopher Kobb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Review of Fyrelocke

“Fyrelocke: Jack Boomershine and the Prophecy Untold” is a delightfully action-packed, uproarious adventure/fantasy with little or no suspension of disbelief necessary, as potential disbelief is checked at the door. Twelve-year-old inventor/electronics genius Jack and his finance-oriented best friend Chase find themselves mysteriously transported, after a series of text messages on his cell phone guide Jack to recover an amethyst geode, which is definitely a “fyrestone” and may be the inimitable “Fyrelocke.” Due to the magics surrounding this stone, Jack and Chase are transported to England, but it’s certainly not the England tourists usually view.

With smooth writing, good characterization, and a pace faster than any video game, “Fyrelocke” is sure to delight readers from middle-grade on up (even oldsters like this reviewer) and its fans will be hankering for further adventures of Jack, the boy who is nearly too smart for his own good.


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TROUBLEMAKER by Joseph Hansen (a Dave Brandstetter Mystery)_Review

Troublemaker by Joseph Hansen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Review of Troublemaker by Joseph Hansen
5 Stars

I was privileged to read some of the mysteries in this wonderful series years ago, after first publication. Recently I had been remembering them, and wishing I could find them again, so I’m very pleased to find Open Road Media giving a new opportunity for readers to enjoy the mysteries involving Dave Brandstetter, Gay insurance death claims investigator. Dave is a very solid, laid-back type of individual. We hardly ever see him rush, except when a case comes down to the wire and he is in a position to save a life. In this installment, on behalf of the company his father owns and which employs him, Medallion Insurance, he is looking into a sudden death, which may be suicide, accident, or murder. Of course the easiest answer is not always the right one, and Dave will have to go to many locales, interview a plethora of individuals, and eventually peel away many lies and secrets and deceits, intentional and unintentional, in order to discern the correct and accurate answer.

Although this series is predicated on a Gay protagonist, it is not erotica. Dave is half of a committed life partnership, although the individuals he encounters run the gamut from frequent illicit encounters, to “falling in love too easily,” to generosity and kind-heartedness, to easily hoodwinked. Just like our “real world,” it takes all kinds; thankfully our investigator has a steady mind and integrity of character.


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THEYONLY COME OUT AT NIGHT by Frankin Kearney_Review

They Only Come Out at Night by Frankin Kearney
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Character study balanced with uproarious action scenes of horror and carnage characterize this novel, set in the subways and the aboveground locales of New York City. Riding the subways has always included an expectation of crime, including mugging, robbery, and assault. But murders aren’t expected, aren’t as common belowground, as now; suddenly someone –or perhaps something—is targeting lone commuters, those who stay out too late at work or at classes, and so are alone embarking on a subway train or departing one. Next are attacks on subway employees, including a conductor. Eventually it seems no one is safe in the subway; but what could be causing the extraordinary level of violence involved, of murders seeming to require superhuman or beyond human strength and agility? The race is on for law enforcement to target the culprit or culprits, and for the reader to race to the end to find out: Who? What? How? And Why now? One woman, Melissa, lost her mother and nearly lost her father in an unprecedentedly brutal subway assault some years back. Now she fears that the Subway Slayer may also be targeting her, or possibly her boss/boyfriend, or even her father, who had survived the initial attack which killed his wife.

I rate this novel at 18+, due to extreme violence and some sensual encounters.
I reviewed a complimentary e-book copy of this novel, provided in return for my fair and impartial review.


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JO JOE by Sally Wiener Grotta_Review

Jo Joe by Sally Wiener Grotta
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Jo Joe by Sally Wiener Grotta
5 stars

Set in Black Bear, Pennsylvania, a fictional milieu created by authors Sally Wiener Grotta and Daniel Grotta, “Jo Joe” is a multilayered tale of small-community life, bigotry, entrenched religion, and one individual’s need to break free to assert her individuality, in the face of community pressure to either conform or to disappear. Judith Ormand is a Parisian-born product of a black French Jew and a Pennsylvania mountains Moravian. Raised until adolescence in Paris, after the death of her Grand-pere and the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, Judith goes to Black Bear to live with her mother’s folks. Due to her dark skin and professed Judaism, much of the community shuns her, but he is inexplicably defended by Joe, a hulking product of childhood abuse and football star—until he suddenly shuns her as well, leaving her vulnerable to attack and assault.

In her thirties when her beloved Gramma dies, Judith returns to Black Bear for the first time in many years (with the exception of her mother’s funeral earlier), to discover that the home and acreage have been bequeathed to Joe, whom her Gramma always distrusted. Determined to find an answer, the why of this sudden recent change of heart, Judith begins to turn over metaphorical rocks to peer underneath at the secrets such stones hide.

Ms. Grotta effectively portrays the mind-sets of this small Poconos Mountain community, going far beyond the expected “small town-everybody knows everybody’s secrets and business” to delineate the layers of savage racism, indifference and fear of outsiders, cruelty and sadism, the hive-consciousness of mobs, and the ways in which such negatives grind at the individual, producing not joy and light but instead bitterness, resentment, and fear. If we are shaped by our environment, such shaping becomes clear throughout the residents, and former residents, of Black Bear.


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THE HYPOTHESIS OF GIANTS by Melissa Kuch_ Release Day Blitz!

Title: The Hypothesis of Giants (Book One: The Assumption)

Author: Melissa Kuch

Book Description:

For the past fifteen years no one questioned the Sacred Hour in the town of Candlewick. Until one night a mysterious conch shell sounds throughout the Sacred Hour, only to be heard by two young teenagers. Aurora Alvarez is a misfit amongst her peers, desperately trying to fit in but failing to live up to the expectations of her parents and society. She unexpectedly discovers she is fated to ally herself with none other than rebellious Boreas Stockington, who allegedly escaped from the impenetrable Candlewick Prison. These two young teenagers must embark on a perilous adventure where they need to help Otus, a thirty-foot giant, prevent a cataclysmic event from occurring—the Geometric Storm. The journey will take them far from the safety of Wishbone Avenue and into the depths of the unknown and the secrets of the past. However, nothing could prepare these unlikely heroes for facing their own inner demons and the realization that Aurora and Boreas are on this quest together, whether they want to be or not.

Social Media Links:

Website

Twitter:  @kuchmelissa

Facebook

Purchase on Amazon

Author Bio

Melissa Kuch first realized her passion for writing after her first story was read before her third grade class. That childhood passion never diminished and instead cultivated with each passing year. Today, Melissa’s stories and plays continue to inspire and entertain readers from all walks of life. Melissa’s short stories Cloud Pictures in the Sky, To Secure a Husband and Name Change can be found on Amazon.com. The Assumption is the first book in The Hypothesis of Giants series. Book Two, The Change Agent, will be available by 2014. The IDEAL has spoken. For more updates about this series and other works by Melissa Kuch, please visit her website at www.Melissakuch.com You can also follow her on Twitter @kuchmelissa

BORROWING MY MOTHER'S SAINTS by Olga G. Soaje_

Borrowing My Mother's Saints
by Olga G Soaje                                                                       

Published: september 2012
Genre: Contemporary Romance (Chick lit)

Interwoven with humor, romance and vital inspiration, Olga Soaje’s novel takes readers on a dazzling journey through the sudden unraveling of one woman’s life on her quest towards happiness.

Book description:

With a plum job at Nelson and Nelson ad agency, a Manhattan apartment, and a boyfriend named Michael who looks good enough on paper, Julianna is at the peak of her game. That’s when everything starts going south fast. Nancy, her nemesis at work with a fake smile (and other body parts!), has somehow stolen her account. Her boss, Peter, deems her burned out and sends her out the door with her cardboard box. And that’s just the beginning of the rapid-fire onslaught of serious woes.

After Michael dumps her squarely, her mom is diagnosed with breast cancer. Julianna is officially at her wit’s end. However, just as she’s in the deepest despair, enter a cast of characters that Julianna hasn’t seen since her childhood days at home and in her Catholic grade school. Tucked away in her mother’s recipe box is a bounty of saints cards, and soon, those the saints come marching in to represent a source of strength her mother had found in them and a way to develop other career paths she had not considered on her road to happiness. Julianna is greeted with new opportunities, for better and sometimes for worse, that help her forge her own road to a richer, more authentic life.

A warm hug of a book, Borrowing My Mother’s Saints is chock-full of insights, hope, humor, and a dash of modern romance. Inspiring and of-the-moment, this charming, lighthearted look at contemporary life will move you to muster the courage to follow your heart on a path that might just lead you to everyday miracles.

Bio:  Since I can remember I loved to read, always having a book in the car or in my bag just in case I got the opportunity for a few more lines. What I didn't see so clearly was this love for "writing". I sensible studied Business and Finance working determination in my career, until I discovered another type of challenging career called "motherhood". It was in this new job providing a source of love,  education and many,many other hats you have to figure out along the way that I allowed myself the opportunity to write and discovered one on my greatest unexpected joys.

Links to purchase the book

Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Borrowing-My-Mothers-Saints-ebook/dp/B009GSMDA2/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1359508436&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=borrowing+my+mother%27s+saints

Barnes & Noble:

 http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/borrowing-my-mothers-saints-olga-g-soaje/1112760369

Connect with Olga:

facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Olga-Soaje/275855065861387

goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6525945.Olga_Soaje    

Review by Mallory Heart Reviews:

Review of Borrowing My Mother’s Saints by Olga G. Soaje

5 Stars

Although Chick Lit is not my favourite genre, “Borrowing My Mother’s Saints” has a depth and warmth and heartstrings-tugging that kept me interested, intrigued, and enjoying. Julianna (“Julie”) is a Manhattan career girl, eight years in advertising after graduation from NYU, with a “serious relationship” with hard-driving egotistical Michael, and a couple of long-term warm friendships. Julie was raised staunchly Catholic and attended parochial private schools. She fondly remembers her mother’s prayer cards to saints. When something or someone (such as colleague Nancy, who is determined to flow up the career ladder no matter how many others she stomps on) pulls the thread of Julie’s intact life and everything starts to unravel, she begins to remember those saints and to ponder on whom to ask to intercede to fix her life again.

Almost every reader can identify with Julie’s dilemma, and how sometimes it is only when we hit rock bottom that we find a new way out, a new pattern of life, a new path and life purpose. I anticipate future novels from author Olga G. Soaje.

THE MEMORY THIEF by Don Donaldson_Review

The Memory Thief by Don Donaldson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Review of The Memory Thief by Don Donaldson
5 stars

An engrossing, complex, utterly suspenseful mystery, “The Memory Tree” will appeal to readers who like their mysteries with a lot of meat on the bones. Marti Segerson, psychiatrist, arranges to be hired at a mental institution in rural Tennessee, precisely in order to get close to Vernon Odessa, the killer who slaughtered Marti’s older sister Lee when Marti was just a child. Marti has to go through and around Administrator Oren Quinn, a scientist who is sociopathic enough to be committed himself, and who is quite possibly performing memory experiments which would be both illegal and unethical, utilizing the patients at Gibson.

Convoluted but never confusing, suspenseful and emotional, “The Memory Thief” is a rereader, and a fine introduction to the novels of Don Donaldson, an accomplished and riveting writer.


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RAVELED by Anne McAneny_Review

Raveled by Anne McAneny
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Review of Raveled by Anne McAneny
5 stars

Allison Fennimore is a woman with a bitter, wry wit, and she comes by it naturally, given her circumstances. Now a bartender in New York, when she was fifteen her father was charged, tried, and convicted of two killings. Even where circumstances couldn’t quite convict, the small town of Lavitte, North Carolina, did so; and Artie Fennimore did some prison time and then died. Allison’s older brother Kevin, deep in alcoholism, recently was involuntarily sentenced to rehab after an accident in which an also intoxicated adolescent, recklessly driving, died. Now Kevin wants their father’s name cleared, or at least, the lies of Lavitte exposed; and since he is in mandatory rehab and can’t do so himself, he wants Allison to return to Lavitte and find out, while she’s simultaneously arranging to put their mother, suffering from dementia, in assisted living, and sell Mother’s residence.

Author Anne McAneny has a true gift for delineating small town life, peeling away the layers and turning over the stones that conceal the ugly truths: a long-term Mayor with likely crime connections in New Jersey; neighbors and other citizens who leap to convict by gossip; and the life expectancy of rumours, which seems to be eternal. Her characters are delineated sentence by sentence, and almost immediately, they are sufficiently realized to be people we know or could know, not just fictional individuals drawn on a printed page. I highly recommend this engrossing mystery.


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BLOOD ECHO by Melissa Simonson_Blog Tour & Review

BLOOD ECHO by Melissa Simonson

Review of Blood Echo-reviewed by Mallory Heart Reviews

Review of Blood Echo by Melissa Simonson

4 stars

Iris and Estella are hard-charging, party-animal, trust-fund babies, good-looking, well-dressed and styling. That’s the façade, but underneath are two souls marching through a wasteland, a void, empty shells encasing empty hearts—until—Estella’s self-mutilation reaches the extreme, and she dies at her own hand. Now it’s just one empty shell, Iris, surrounded by people who almost without exception don’t understand her, or Estella. When a close family member of Estella’s is brutally slain, with cocaine dumped on the corpse in some sort of message—to the police? To the remaining family? To Iris?—focus turns to Iris, whose addiction, just as Estella’s, often ran rampant and obsessive.

The characters and settings of this novel put me in mind of those of Noel Coward and Edward Albee: upscale, society scions, disenchanted, and eternally bored and jaded. Their disenchantment is well illustrated, and their backgrounds well-delineated and easy to visualize in the reader’s imagination.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Echo-ebook/dp/B00C7FCBIK

Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/blood-echo-melissa-simonson/1114957479?ean=2940016747651

Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Blood-Echo/book-CHsjtORUbUev5MO5c-3f_g/page1.html?s=BlUwsxcHEkaf6Yq9-cDqGw&r=1

Here are the book, author, and tour pages on our site:

http://redadeptpublishing.com/blood-echo/

http://redadeptpublishing.com/melissa-simonson/

http://redadeptpublishing.com/echo-tour/

Here is Melissa’s Blog:            

http://lissasimonson.wordpress.com/

Here is the Rafflecopter code:

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/0510ed12/" rel="nofollow">a Rafflecopter giveaway

KINSLEY CIRCLE by Kevin Cowan_Review: When the Paranormal Won't Take No For An Answer

Kinsley Circle by Kevin Cowan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Review of Kinsley Circle by Kevin Cowan
3 Stars

On an isolated rural road in Virginia is a cul-de-sac inhabited by only three homes. The oldest, belonging to George and Alice Kinsley, has been there for 42 years; the other two homes, only 20 years. Chief of Police Paul Thompson, his wife, and two children live in one; Attorney Ellen Reinhart and her husband, psychologist professor/administrator David reside in the other home. The Kinsleys are unfortunately childless, but have always very much enjoyed Nancy and Thomas, the Thompson offspring.

Alice’s sudden death in her sleep propels George into a self-imposed state of isolation and sleeplessness; but when he begins claiming to hear wolves and dogs howling in the woods in the wee hours of the night, a tremendous change in his personality takes place, almost as if he had become possessed. The neighbors are deeply concerned, and anxious to get George committed for therapy—but what if this is not a case that psychiatry can answer? Circumstances go from bad to worse as whatever has changed George is now causing strife and disruption among the remaining neighbors.

The emphasis of this story is that the paranormal does exist; whether a given individual believes or is a skeptic doesn’t matter. The residents of Kinsley Circle consider themselves skeptics: one is a career law-enforcement official, another a trained Ph.D. psychologist. Both believe in the scientific approach. But when what you hear but can’t see occurs, for hours, every night at the exact same times, and the auditory “hallucinations” soon are accompanied by visual “hallucinations,” something has to be done—even if it means admitting that  “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” [Hamlet, William Shakespeare]


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LORD KELVIN'S MACHINE by James Blaylock_Review

Lord Kelvin's Machine by James P. Blaylock
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reviewing for Hearts on Fire Reviews;

I found this entry in James Blaylock’s Langdon St. Eves series, set in Victorian London and throughout England, and seriously Steampunk, to be much more gritty than either “Homunculus” or “The Aylesford Skull.” Now granted, in the latter, the evil mastermind hunchback Ignatius Narbondo did kidnap St. Ives’ son; but still, St. Ives maintained his composure for much (if certainly not all) of the time, and so did the reader. In “Lord Kelvin’s Machine,” Narbondo (never satisfied with the evil he’s done, always wanting more) has abducted St. Ives’ beloved wife Alice, the light of his very life, and now St. Ives has no composure. In fact, he is bound and determined (and armed) to destroy Narbondo forever, if only he can reclaim Alice—and even if he can’t. The reader’s hook in this novel is incredibly taut and compelling, almost more than the reader can stand at a given moment (stand it I did, however) and there is no pause for contemplation here.

Another reason for what I term the unexpected grittiness in this novel is the understandable evolution of the character of our staunch protagonist, Langdon St. Ives, once the poet-physicist and explorer, man of intellectual and exploratory adventure, a man who despite the depredations wreaked upon him and upon the world in general by the evil Narbondo, could still find the glass to be “half full” rather than “half empty,” because he had sufficient love, light, and joy in his life to so ground him. Now, pursuant to a terrible tragedy, he is at the point of wondering why he even tries to save the world from Narbondo—certainly this world holds nothing for him, he is lost and a wandering soul. Only duty and honour keep him moving. This is not a state to which I’d ever wanted to see Mr. St. Ives reduced—but it is a state which makes for rousing and constant adventure, and will rivet readers just as much as it has this reviewer.


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