It is 741. Only one thing stands between Charles the Hammer and the throne—he’s dying. Despite his best efforts, the only thing to reign after Charles’s death is chaos. Son battles son, Christianity battles paganism, and Charles’s daughter flees his court for an enemy’s love.
Based on a true story, Anvil of God is a whirlwind of love, honor, sacrifice, and betrayal that follows a bereaved family’s relentless quest for power and destiny.
About the Author
After a 25-year career working as a press secretary on Capitol Hill, writing a weekly column for a daily newspaper, and managing crisis and public affairs for many of the largest American corporations and institutions, J. Boyce Gleason began writing historical fiction to satisfy his passion for storytelling.
His first novel ANVIL OF GOD, Book One of the Carolingian Chronicles received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, was named Historical Fiction Book of the Year by the Independent Publishers Awards and Mainstream/Literary e-Book of the Year by Writers Digest Magazine. The sequels (Wheel of the Fates & Crown of a King) both received 4.5 ratings or better on Amazon.
With an AB in history from Dartmouth College, Gleason brings a strong understanding of the events that shaped history. He says he writes historical fiction to discover “why.” He and his wife live in Virginia.
I Am Not Your Eve is the story of Teha’amana, Tahitian muse and child-bride to the painter Paul Gauguin. She shares her thoughts as he works on one of his masterpieces, The Spirit of The Dead Keeps Watch, a work so important to Gauguin that it haunts his later self-portrait. As Teha’amana tells her story, other voices of the island rise: Hina goddess of the moon, a lizard watching from the eaves, Gauguin’s mask of Teha’amana carved from one of the trees.
Woven in are the origin myths that cradled Polynesia before French colonists brought the Christian faith. Distant diary entries by Gauguin’s daughter Aline – the same age as her father’s new ‘wife’ – recall the other hemisphere of his life. This is the novel that gives Teha’amana a voice; one that travels with the myths and legends of the island, across history and asks to be heard.
About the Author
Devika Ponnambalam was born in Brunei but now lives in Edinburgh. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the UEA and her latest film was premiered at the 11th Pune Short Film Festival in India.
My review
4* stars
I understand now, what forever means. It means tomorrow.
I rarely read literary fiction, but as an art historian I couldn’t miss I Am Not Your Eve by Devika Ponnambalam. Written in form of memories, letters, diaries, and notes, mixed with ancient myths and legends, the book tells the story of a Tahitian girl, Teha’amana, a muse and “vahine” (wife, woman) of the French artist, post-impressionist Paul Gauguin.
The novel is focused on Teha’amana and other women, surrounding Gauguin: his daughter Aline who’s the same age as his child-bride, Gauguin’s wife and mother of his five children, Mette, who’s waiting for him in Denmark, Teha’amana’s mother, and also goddesses and spirits of the island. The author gives voice to those whom history has forgotten.
Travelling to Tahiti, those days one of many remote French colonies, the artist hoped to find “the dawn of humanity” and, through his works, bring it closer to the European public. In his search for the lost paradise, Gauguin spent two years on the island with his child-bride, painting “savages”, as Aline wrote in her dairies, and creating his “savage Eves”.
As for Aline, she adores her father and, mesmerised by one of his paintings of Teha’amana (The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch, a central part of the novel’s plot), she feels jealous as the “savage” girl keeps her father away from his family. And unlike Aline, Teha’amana is free. But is she really?
The white colonists have brought Christianity to the island and introduced The Good Book (The Bible) to the locals … but also patriarchal power, destruction of the ancient temples, and syphilis. A local priest looks in silence, sanctioning a “marriage” between a middle-aged white man and an 11-year-old girl. Tahitian women are forced to wear European dresses instead of their bright, colourful pareu.
Through the Tahitian myths which are in most cases full of abuse and violence, the author reflects on Teha’amana’s relationship with Gauguin and him “making” (painting) her. The girl shares her thoughts which sometimes are difficult to distinguish from the legends and nightmares. She resists in her own way, though, and this resistance reflects her narrative.
This is my body, my voice.
The author takes on a difficult task: to give an indigenous person a voice without sliding into Western assumptions and stereotypes. I’m not sure whether Ponnambalam has achieved it. As for me, Teha’amana’s voice merges with the voices of long-forgotten spirits of her land. Some scenes read like unrhymed poetry.
Can we separate art from the artist? As an art historian, I appreciate that every artist as well as every historical figure should be considered in the context: a time period they lived in, their background, surroundings, faith, etc. But in the case of Gauguin and Teha’amana it’s impossible which makes this book (as well as Gauguin’s art of his “Tahitian period”) even more sad, controversial, and disturbing.
Ponnambalam’s language is rich and poetic; the descriptions of the island and its history are mesmerising and dreamy. I gave this book only 4 stars because I struggled with the structure. The character’s voices sounded disjoined and difficult to identify. The narrative often switches from past to present tense. Gauguin’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in the novel which can make it difficult to understand for the readers who don’t know much about him and his works.
Throughout the Third Reich, millions of Germans pledged allegiance to Adolf Hitler. In the Bavarian village of Schwarzenfeld, they followed an American citizen.
As he struggles to rekindle the faith of a guilt-ridden Wehrmacht veteran, a morose widow, and her grieving teenage son, Fr. Viktor Koch, C.P. is haunted by self-doubt. What is driving him to stay in the Third Reich? Is he following a higher plan, or the mystic compulsion of his German heritage? Exposed to American ideals, his parishioners grow restless under Nazi rule. Relying upon his ingenuity to keep them out of prison, Fr. Viktor solicits aid from an unlikely intercessor—the Nazi charity worker who confiscated his monastery for state purposes.
In April 1945, American liberators make a gruesome discovery: the SS have left a mass grave of concentration camp victims on Schwarzenfeld’s borders. Enraged by the sight, the infantry commander orders the townspeople to disinter 140 corpses, construct coffins despite material shortages, dig a grave trench, and hold a funeral ceremony—all in 24 hours. If they fail to fulfil this ultimatum, he vows to execute all German men in town.
Fr. Viktor has to pull off a miracle: he must convince his countrymen that his followers are not the enemy. Their humanity is intact. And most of all, they are innocent.
About the Author
Katherine Koch is a renaissance woman from San Antonio, Texas. By day she is a professional web administrator, digital marketing specialist, and graphic designer. By night she is an independent scholar, historian, and writer. She is captivated by stories of the Passionist missionaries in her family, all of whom have a peculiar knack for tumbling into harm’s way during history’s most fascinating time periods.
It’s 1943 on the American home front, and Ella’s pent-up, common-law husband finally decides to leave their farm and enlist. Ella must either depart their seafaring town in coastal Delaware to pursue other dreams inland or try to save their farm. Their grade-school son, Reese, won’t budge, and Ella sees that farmers have a patriotic duty to stay on the land.
The bay and ocean waters before them have been preyed upon by German U-boats, and their village has become a refuge for survivors. When an officer from a surrendered German submarine is sent to her as part of POW farm labor, can Ella embrace the help in order to survive? And what happens when Dieter becomes more than a hand to her, amidst prying eyes and under her beloved but conflicted son’s watch? How will she choose when her explosive husband returns from Europe wounded from infantry duty against the Germans?
In ELLA’S WAR, we travel a journey amongst women and men whose lives are deeply altered by the circumstances of World War II. What heroic or questionable choices must they make to be true to themselves and come through the great conflict?
About the Author
Rusty studied creative writing at the University of Virginia and has been a full-time freelance writer for most of his career. He owns The Writers Studio, a marketing/copywriting practice located just outside of Philadelphia. He led the Advanced Novel Writing Group at the Writers Room/Writers Corner, a writers co-op in Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and is a member of the Rebel Writers, a highly select novelist critique group that was highlighted in Writer’s Digest in the article “Plotting a Novel Group”.
Zara Rose, a World War II naval historian, investigates a mysterious German U-Boat, discovered in the North Sea and carrying a deadly secret–a Nazi super weapon able to split time and space, creating a labyrinth of multiple realities.
From Chapter Six
Glancing around, Zara realised she stood in the middle of a concrete tunnel some fifty to sixty feet high. Its dark walls were almost invisible behind the lines of arm-thick cables, wires, and pipes. The thudding noise of some heavy machinery, the clang of tools, metal on metal, the high-pitched buzzing of high-voltage electricity running through the cables.
What was this place? An underground factory? A dry dock? She noticed a narrow miniature railway track, leading deeper into the tunnel’s throat, used by miners to transport coal and other minerals.
She was walking along the track when a shadow materialised from the darkness ahead of her. The light blinked, crackling and ready to extinguish. A cold draft of air ran along the tunnel, fetching the smell of strong chemicals, forcing Zara to cough. The light subsided, and for a few seconds, she couldn’t see a thing.
With a bright flash, a male figure morphed in front of her. Dressed in greasy overalls and a high-visibility jacket, the man looked painfully familiar.
‘Father?!’ Zara screamed, recognising his deep, dark eyes and neatly trimmed beard in the dimly lit space.
He looked some twenty, twenty-five years younger than she remembered him, but the similarity was unmistakable.
The man dropped the wrench he held in his hand and ran.
Zara screamed again, following him into the depth of the tunnel. ‘Dad? Dad! Stop! Please… Where are you going? Why are you running? Please, wait.’ She screamed. Tears ran down her cheeks, stinging her eyes.
The tunnel seemed like it had no end. The humming and other colliding sounds made her almost deaf. She tripped a couple of times but kept running. The quicker she ran, the further the figure moved away from her.
The air became unbearably hot. It sounded as if some gigantic beast inhaled and exhaled heavily.
The figure had disappeared behind the next turn, and Zara found herself in front of a crossroad with a wide square pillar of concrete in its centre. Wrapped in thick cables and wires, the pillar glowed with an electrical current passing through it.
Where had he gone? And what was she supposed to do now? Zara panicked, noticing another shadow form the silhouette of a man in a black SS tunic with an officer’s cap.
He appeared from nowhere, materialising from the darkness of the tunnel. She tried to distinguish his features, but it was too dark. She stared at him unblinking, but his features seemed ever-shifting. Was he young or old? Large or slim? She couldn’t say. Just a ghostly spirit in an abandoned industrial purgatory.
‘Who are you?’ She finally asked, wiping her tears, surprised how loud her voice sounded, reverberating all across the tunnel.
The shadow grinned. His dazzling, disturbing white smile was so out of place with the grey-brown surrounding. His black cap sat low on his head, his eyes undiscernible.
‘Der Meister.’ He grinned even wider.
With a metallic clang, a sliding door opened in the centre of the pillar. Der Meister made an inviting gesture.
‘What’s there?’ Zara frowned. ‘Behind this door?’
‘Schmerz und Wiedergeburt.’
‘Pain and rebirth?’ Zara mumbled.
The man just kept on grinning, gesturing to the door.
What if her Dad was there? Zara took a step closer but saw only pitch-black oblivion behind.
Der Meister’s smile never rested. His face warping into a motionless, featureless mask.
Zara took a step inside, an unknown force pulling her further in. The metal door slammed shut behind her. A minute of complete darkness followed by another. Only the familiar monotonous humming of a six-cylinder diesel engine surrounded her. The thought came from nowhere.
The white light flashed again, and an immense hall with a vaulted ceiling revealed itself to her. She twisted around, taking in the vista. Human-size glass pods stretched along the walls, spanning from floor to ceiling as far as she could see. A system of wires, cables, and metal pipes gurgled and hissed.
Zara moved closer to the nearest pod. A disembodied scream rippled through her like a shockwave. Through the thick glass, she could see a creature: half-human, half-machine. Its pale grey naked body looked fossilised. The spine protruded through its paper-like skin so much that Zara could distinguish every single vertebra and joint of cartilage.
Unable to perceive whether the creature was a male or a female, nor did its fetus-like position in the pod reveal any clues to Zara. Long, thick needles protruded out of its bald head, connected to pipes in its nose. A snout-like maw grafted on into a pipe. Or was the creature wearing some kind of mask? Despite its closed eyes, the scene left no doubt the creature was alive. Deformed and deteriorated, it looked like a surreal, psychotic, and nightmarish H. R. Giger painting.
She moved from one pod to another in silent horror. The sound of the engines resonated louder and louder.
She swallowed a surge of nausea. Were they charging the engine or did the engine keep them alive?
Some twenty paces in front of her, she noticed a concrete pad in the centre of the walkway. A black amorphous sack hung from the ceiling above it. She could have sworn it wasn’t there when she entered the hall. Coming closer, the sack revealed itself to be covered in pulsating veins and yellowish slime, beating like a phantom organ.
The engines stopped abruptly and the sack burst. With a loud wet splash and a slap of disgorged flesh, the naked body of a man hit the concrete pad. His fetal form was nubile yet athletic, covered in a placental slime. Its skin vibrated a halogen-white glow, highlighting his platinum-blond hair.
Zara couldn’t help but compare this creature to an angel descending into this biomechanical hell.
With a supersonic bang, the hall submerged into darkness.
Aidan Hughes is a wanted man, for a murder he didn’t commit, and now Manchester’s most ruthless gangster wants him dead.
Fresh from his confrontation with The Honey Talker, Aidan seeks anonymity in Ireland, and has settled into a cosy life with girlfriend, Roisin. But when an old colleague, Suzie Regen, reaches out in desperation, he is pulled into a new mystery.
Rumours of a chemist with a penchant for poison and contract killing draw Aidan back into the dark underbelly of Manchester to face this deadly new foe. But has he met his match? And can survive this fatal game?
About the Author
Malcolm grew up in Sheffield, has lived and worked in Australia and the Middle-East but now lives in Cheshire, England. He is a prolific and award-winning author who writes both novels and short fiction. He has, in the past, worked in a variety of genres. Despite the variety, all have a similar DNA containing strong, often flawed but believable characters and telling great stories. His current body of work include the mountaineering thriller, The Last Mountain, a 1950s Spy novel, Contrail and Touched, a haunting novel about love and loneliness. He has now found a niche writing historical fiction usually with an aviation background but also writes historical crime fiction.
The second book in Malcolm Havard’s hard-boiled thriller/noir series set in Manchester (rightfully nicknamed “GUN-Chester” in the late ‘90s) brings a reader back to Aidan Hughes and his unfinished business with Mickey Smith, the most notorious gangster in the city. Aidan, a former journalist and now a wanted man for a murder he didn’t commit, has no choice but to return to the crime capital of the North from his cosy and relatively safe life in rural Ireland to prove his innocence and find out why one of his former colleagues and close friends has betrayed him.
Aidan has no time, though, as Mickey Smith craves vengeance and, this time, it seems like he’s got an even more powerful weapon to use. Now, Aidan needs to team up with his friend Suzie Regen and her new colleague, a young journalist, Paul Adeyemi to solve a new mystery of Der Chemiker, a poisoner whose skills Mickey Smith uses to keep his victims under control and his dirty business going.
The Fatal Formula is a rare occasion when I enjoyed the second book more than the first one (hence, my 5-star review). The pace is fast and well-balanced, just as required for a good thriller. The author brings a few more characters to the plot that makes it even more intricate and twisty with more back story to follow. Aidan shows his new, gritty, more stubborn but confident side.
The book ends on a cliffhanger (sort of) which I absolutely love as it promises more of Aidan’s adventures in the next one. As well as in the first book of the series (The Honey Talker) I enjoyed the northern flavour of the story with accented dialogues and true northern slang.
I highly recommend The Fatal Formula to all fans of crime fiction and fast-paced thrillers with a hint of history.
To read my review of The Honey Talker click this link:
My sci-fi/horror short story is currently available for free on Alien Buddha Press’ blog . If you read and enjoyed it, purchase the whole anthology, full of scary tales.
I have a new guest author on my blog. ML Barrs released her mystery novel Parallel Secrets last month. Today, she’s talking about her writing journey, problems she faced along the way, and useful tools she used to improve her manuscript.
How to Identify Your Writing Problems ML Barrs
It pains me to admit that the first draft of my first published book was confusing. Parallel Secrets takes place during two periods of time almost a decade apart, involves almost a dozen characters and as many story lines, and features plenty of dialogue freely mixed in with internal narrative. I hopped from head-to-head, time-to-time, assuming readers would follow along. Surely they’d get what I meant.
My beta readers set me straight. In my experience, paying attention to feedback from direct and knowledgeable beta readers is the best way to identify overall story and structural deficiencies and missed opportunities.
Once I accepted that I needed to restructure, I got to work.
I do all my writing in Word. The program has great tools. I’d used Word for memos and reports for many years. It was a fairly seamless transition to writing a book, once I learned to use Headers and Navigation Panel to form a fluid outline. Those tools allowed me to easily move chapters around and to spot duplications and omissions.
‘Find and Replace’ is another of Word’s most valuable functions. F&R ruthlessly pointed out many, many opportunities to improve my prose.
Parallel Secrets includes a fair amount of people talking while sitting around drinking various beverages—but I was shocked when I ran ‘Find and Replace’ for certain words like nodded, smiled, shrugged, etc. HUNDREDS of repetitions, sometimes multiples on the same page. The words that? Said? Like? Literally thousands of occurrences in my 85k document.
I looked at each one of those individual words and decided whether they were necessary or best for the job. Very often they weren’t. Whenever I could, I changed dialogue tags to actions. “…said Vicky” appeared in my first draft more than twelve hundred times. One pass through the manuscript easily brought that down to under eight hundred. I used the same technique to check timelines, settings, and character development. A search by name allowed me to review every occurrence of every person in the order they appeared. I found consistency errors, but more often found ways to add to character arcs.
This task forced me to examine my manuscript closely and critically, to tighten up parts and expand others. The devil’s in the details, as the saying goes, and fixing a myriad of details created a much stronger foundation on which to build the intricate and satisfying story that is Parallel Secrets.
About the Book
Genre: Mystery
Date Published: 25th September 2023
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
After a young girl goes missing, former TV crime reporter Vicky Robeson joins the search with the help of her attractive new love interest. They take his RV to a tiny town in rural Missouri that’s filled with odd characters and darker secrets. But Vicky has secrets of her own. She believes this kidnapped girl may be linked to a case she reported on nine years ago, when a mystery child was found walking on levee, bloody and unable to speak. Back then, Vicky failed to follow up clues only she knew. Now, she has a chance to redeem herself. As she uncovers secrets, it becomes clear someone will kill to keep them hidden.
About the Author
ML Barrs ran TV newsrooms for years, guiding and managing the content and production of more than eight hours of live newscasts a day. In her debut novel, Parallel Secrets, protagonist Vicky Robeson shares that kind of experience as well as the author’s passion for justice, especially when it comes to the safety and well-being of children and other vulnerable people. ML Barrs grew up one of thirteen children—the first girl, with three older brothers—a birth order she believes shaped her essence by the time she was eight. A girl’s gotta be a bit pugnacious to get along in that environment. Amid the chaos of fourteen people living in a mobile home (not a double-wide), she turned fifteen, dropped out of school and ran away from home. Being homeless, then working minimum wage jobs quickly grew old. She earned her GED and went to college, where she met and married the father of their two grown children. After a successful career as a television news director and general manager, she decided that what she really wanted to do is write mysteries. Parallel Secrets was published September 2023, and its sequel is in the works.
“I would advise you, young man, to take care around anyone with the surname Firefax. I know not if the rumors be true that they be king killers, but they are, without any doubt, a dangerous family.”
Legend tells of a city of gold on a phantom island. The wealth of that city could end the American Revolution. But the only person who knows the island’s location is the world’s deadliest assassin. And he’s not giving up that secret without a fight . . .
1781. New England.
The world’s oldest family of high-profile assassins, the Firefaxes, have been killing off dignitaries—and being well-compensated to do so—for centuries. The family is thrown into turmoil by their patriarch’s death and the return of their cunning, cruel prodigal, Murdoch. Murdoch is the only one left who knows where the Firefax wealth is, kept on a secret island. But Murdoch’s former protégé, now turned nemesis, Istäni, who is the leader of a British intelligence network, and Murdoch’s former colleagues from a Continental intelligence network are looking for that wealth. These spy networks are bent on tracking down the legendary treasure, whatever the cost, but may have met their match in this wily, dysfunctional family of killers.
About the Author
A.M. Vergara is a physician assistant and paramedic. When not writing, reading, or working in the hospital or on the ambulance, she can be found outside, hiking, camping, riding her mule, foraging for edible mushrooms, field-herping, or playing her banjo.
In a bid to heal from the grief of a personal loss, forensic genealogist, RaeJean Hunter, takes on a straightforward case —identify human remains found on a nearby college campus, believed to be the 180-year-old remains of Mary Rogers, a woman who died mysteriously in 1841 and was believed to have been buried in the nearby cemetery that had washed away. It should be simple enough, a project to get her back in the game.
Unfortunately, it quickly becomes anything but. In fact, it becomes downright dangerous.
Someone doesn’t want RaeJean to investigate the puzzling death of the woman whose death inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” As she follows clues through four states and discovers living family members who both help and hinder her search, she quickly realizes that the secrets of Mary Rogers’ demise were never meant to be exposed.
What lengths will someone go to keep the truth buried in the past? As threats escalate and RaeJean and her family’s lives become endangered, she’s forced to follow every lead and use every skill she has to find the answers she needs before it’s too late. Using DNA from two famous New England families, historical data, modern genealogical techniques, and a little guidance from a seemingly mystical antique desk, RaeJean takes on the cold case despite being given every reason to abandon it.
After all, what truths have been hidden for 180 years that would be worth bribery, kidnapping, and even murder?
RaeJean Hunter is about to find out.
About the Author
ML Condike has published short stories in anthologies that include Strange & Sweet, (2019), Tall Tales and Timeless Stories, (2022), Malice in Dallas, Metroplex Mysteries, Volume 1 (2022), and won first place in the fifteenth annual Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Awards, Mystery/Crime category (2019), and 2nd Place in the Tennessee Williams Short Story Contest, Key West Art & Historical Society (2022). She’s an associate member of Mystery Writers of America Florida Chapter, Sisters in Crime National, Sisters in Crime North Dallas (Treasurer), Granbury Writers’ Bloc, and Key West Writers Guild. As the result of her study of genealogy for her debut novel The Desk from Hoboken, she researched her own family and she discovered she had a direct bloodline to a Patriot. So, most recently she has been inducted into the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR).
SaltandNovels 