The Assays of Ata
Book 1    
K.I.S
March 1, 2024
614 Pages
Genre: Fantasy Romance

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Book Summary:
Bitch.
Bastard.
Orphan.

Ata had become inured to these epithets – her self-directed labels cut much deeper:

Spy.
Liar.
Traitor.

Their accuracy rent to the bone… But all people had their roles to play and hers was one of secrecy and survival-driven destruction.

For the greater good.

Follow Ata’s travails through royal intrigues, violent invasions, and hard-forged alliances as she fights alongside friend and foe for the survival of the continent of Áitarbith. She questions old relationships and forges new ones whilst navigating treacherous courts and brutal battle landscapes, possibly finding love along the way.

In the face of an implacably ruthless enemy, as well as uncertainty as to who can be trusted, the final outcome of this struggle is anything but certain.

This is Book 1 of a trilogy titled The Chronicles of Áitarbith.

Author Bio:
Procrastinator.
Putterer.
Escapist.

Despite growing up in sunny South Africa within walking distance of the wide, sandy beach, K.I.S. was forever carrying a book around and hiding out of sight somewhere, getting lost in the drama on the page. To this day, her idea of perfection is a cup of tea, a comfortable armchair, and a good book (not breaking the bookish, nerdy stereotype at all). To complete this cosy picture, she is also an avid knitter and crocheter, with a definite penchant for cats.

Her first, full-length story was about two ducks that go on a farmyard adventure, bashed out on her mother’s old typewriter at the ripe old age of seven. An English teacher by trade, K.I.S. always envisioned herself as a writer but never got around to actually completing a story after her epic poultry caper… Until now.

Her greatest ambition, like Jo March, is to move beyond the (admittedly ever-supportive) readership of her sisters and family, and share her tales with others.

Author Links:
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Off Season
Clive Fleury

February 14, 2024
Coffeetown Pr
363 pages
Mystery & Crime

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Detective Ramesh Ryan’s career with Sydney’s prestigious Organized Crime Unit is on the up, until he loses a court case against the city’s most powerful drug dealer. In disgrace, the detective is relocated to the tiny Australian beach town of Barton. It is off-season in Barton-when its few criminals usually take a well-earned rest. But not this year! With the detective’s arrival, the town suddenly becomes murder central. Two bodies are discovered in the space of days, both victims of drug overdoses. Then a mysterious foot is found washed up on the beach, and memories are awoken of an unsolved cold case of the teenager who disappeared fifteen years ago. Add to this a blossoming romance, along with a contract taken out on Ryan’s life, and it’s clear that the detective has jumped out of the Sydney frying pan into the Barton fire.

What follows is an action-packed adventure, thrilling at every turn-where truth and lies are almost impossible to separate, and unexpected twists are the order of the day.

Author Bio: 

Clive Fleury is an award-winning writer of books and screenplays and has worked all over the world as a Film/TV director, writer and producer. He has written five books, most recently Off Season, a murder mystery novel. 

Off Season is a fish-out-of-water murder mystery, about a disgraced high-flying detective who is relocated from Sydney to a tiny Australian beach town. Here he discovers that small doesn’t mean peaceful and murder doesn’t take a holiday in the off season. Fans of who dunnit’s, crime thrillers, and cop and detective stories will love this novel.

Clive’s other books include ‘Kill Code’ – a dystopian science fiction novel set in a world facing climate change; ‘Scary Lizzy’ – a novel about an eight year old girl, who befriends an African child ghost – and the teen action adventure book; ‘The Boy Next Door ‘ – a story of what happens when a teenage girl has a crush on her next door neighbor, who isn’t all he seems. He also co-wrote ‘Art Pengriffin and The Curse of The Four’ – a young adult fantasy adventure about a teenage boy who discovers his father was Merlin the Magician.

Author Links: 

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Tales From Grimlock Cove
Oscar Whiting

Whiting Publishing LLC
October 14, 2023
262 pages
Suspense Thriller

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A collections of thrilling, new short stories and novellas. Paranormal tales from the quiet town of Grimlock Cove.

“Unforgettable…” (Kevin P.)

“Too scary to read at night…” (Emily T.)

“I couldn’t put it down…” (Dalita M.S.)

It’s a funny thing how houses of healing make room for the dead. Churches have their graveyards; hospitals have their morgues. After an accident, Dex Maddox fights to regain his hearing, but as he recovers, he finds something sinister at Grimlock Memorial Hospital: a creature is stalking him from the shadows.

Mei finds herself on an empty red-eye flight with only a peculiar flight attendant and an unsettling stranger with a violent past. An otherworldly ally reaches out for her, but will Mei survive the red-eye to nowhere?

As D’Andre scrolls through selfies of his best friend Chonks and his girlfriend Amber, he sees a stranger step into the photos. Death ensues, and D’Andre scrambles to save who he can from the stranger in his phone.

Discover a small town where dreams blur with reality, new worlds open up, and evil steps out of the shadows. These are the tales from Grimlock Cove.

Meet the Author, Oscar Whiting: 

I’m an author of paranormal suspense, horror, and fantasy. I started with poetry, worked as a songwriter, and fell in love with writing speculative fiction. I love traveling, making music, movie nights with my wife and dogs, and game nights with friends.

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A Delicate Marriage  
Margarita Barresi

October 10, 2023
Atmosphere Press
352 pages

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From glittering ballrooms to verdant mountains to poverty-stricken slums, A Delicate Marriage takes the reader on a vivid tour of Puerto Rico forty years after becoming a U.S. colony, a time of great change and political turmoil on the island.

Isabela, a wealthy woman, sacrifices her artistic aspirations to marry Marco, a penniless man dedicated to improving conditions on the island. As the island’s insular government enacts pro-U.S. policies, Marco builds a real estate empire while struggling to maintain his populist principles. Meanwhile, Isabela feels unfulfilled in her traditional role as a wife and mother and becomes disillusioned with Marco’s shifting moral compass. She begins to identify with anti-U.S. factions, leading a dangerous double life that puts her family in peril.

As political violence threatens their paradise, Isabela and Marco question whether their marriage, like the island’s relationship with the U.S., should continue. Margarita Barresi’s debut novel celebrates Puerto Rican culture while delving into themes of class, oppression, and the effects of colonialism through the lens of a marriage.

Author: Margarita Barresi

Raised in Puerto Rico by her grandparents, Margarita Barresi grew up hearing stories about the “good old days”—the genesis for A Delicate Marriage, her first novel. She studied public relations at Boston University, and after a successful career in marketing communications, now devotes her time to writing. Her essays have been published in several literary magazines and compilations. Margarita has two grown daughters and lives in the Boston suburbs with her husband and two Puerto Rican cats, Luna and Rico.

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Dark Obsessions
Delphine McClelland

June 26, 2022
Dorrance Publishing Co. Inc.
278 Pages

| | Amazon

Skylar was a Montgomery and with that came power and prestige among the wealthy in Charlotte, North Carolina. From the outside looking in, she had it all, the perfect life. For Skylar, being a Montgomery, a socialite, was not who she wanted to be. Skylar was different, she was weird and a bit of a dreamer. For as long as she could remember, she had an obsession with the supernatural world. Vampires were her favorite of all the supernatural creatures and she could not get enough of them. She read almost every book, watched every movie, and even wished they were real because she had dreams of becoming one. On the annual Montgomery Family Vacation, Skylar’s world was turned upside down. Her life was further changed the moment she laid eyes on him. He was the most intriguing and striking man that she had ever seen. In one night, he would change Skylar’s world forever.

Kairo was in need of a change. After living for over 300 years and always staying one step ahead of the Council of Truth Seekers, a vigilante group whose sole mission in life was to kill all supernaturals. Kairo needed a new scene away from it all. Along his travels, he heard that Charlotte was becoming an epicenter of fun. It was a city full of life and the perfect place for a vampire to hunt without the watchful eye of the Council. From the moment that Kairo stepped foot in Charlotte things were very different for him. The city made every fiber of his being come alive with an energy unlike anything that he had ever known. Kairo would find the source of that energy no matter what it cost him and when he did, his world would change forever.

Winner in the Romance Paranormal/Supernatural category of The 2022 American Fiction Awards

Author Bio:
Delphine McClelland was born in Statesville, North Carolina where she is a graduate of Statesville Senior High School. After graduating from high school she took her dreams and passions to Knoxville, Tennessee where she attended and graduated from The University of Tennessee with a degree in Anthropology. Her career path was set until life happened and on the advice of a co-worker she took her passion for reading and channeled it into writing her first novel Dark Obsessions. For more about Delphine check out her website at www.delphinemcclelland.com.

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What A Christmas Kerfuffle
Mary Buchanan

June 3, 2022
Mary Wells Buchanan LLC
177 pages

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Liz Bradford learned caution the hard way. Having been burnt once in love’s game, the successful business woman isn’t interested in playing again. Brave and independent, Liz is also well aware of the dangers offered to a woman traveling alone through the modern world. So, when she meets a handsome stranger on the train home, she’s perfectly willing to talk and even flirt… under a name that isn’t her own.

Max Harvelle’s first marriage soured him on the entire institution, but it didn’t turn him into a monk. Meeting the beautiful and intriguing “Sarah” on the train soon has him reconsidering his anti-woman sentiments. The thought of spending more time with her makes the obligatory family Christmas at the Bradford Inn – a place with painful memories for him – look almost promising.

But when conniving ex’s, meddling mothers and a seriously misguided bellhop turned wanna-be detective intrude on the budding relationship, can the romance survive the comedy of errors that follows?

From mistaken identities and greedy former love interests to false murder accusations and interfering, grandbaby-fever driven moms, Max and Liz will have to fight hard, face their fears, and overcome their past pain to find each other and the love they both deserve.

Author
Mary is a retired educator. She graduated from Florida State University and Nova Southeastern University. She worked at the primary, middle, and high school levels. She served as adjunct faculty at the community college and university levels. Throughout her career, she motivated students to follow their dreams and “Make an A every day!”.

When she retired, she focused on her personal goal of writing. Since she lacked culinary skills, Mary created a cookbook designed for people who don’t know how to cook. After its publication, she tackled her next goal. The Wildflowers of Madison County is her first novel. The sweet romance story is the first in the Madison County series.
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The Island Country
Richard Daub

June 23, 2023
Clay Road Press
213 pages

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Long Island, New York, just after World War II, when the country was great for some and not so great for others, home to the Smith family: Philip, a racist Nassau County detective with a secret; his mentally ill wife, Eunice, speeding around the house looking for her coffee can of prescription pills; their oldest son, Philip Jr., aspiring pastor and budding monster; daughter Joyce, with a serious artistic talent that, in the great mall culture, she doesn’t know what to do with; and Oscar, an obese child who wants nothing more than to be a fireman when he grows up.

After surviving her own dysfunctional childhood, Joyce marries Roger, a beeraholic Customs Inspector with whom she would have two Griff, an enterprising lad fully comfortable on the other side of a line, and Stacy, a girl attuned to a dark frequency few can perceive. Decades go by, marriages fall apart, children long to escape, and Joyce struggles to find happiness in her art and life in the only place she would ever know.

Author Bio:

Richard Daub grew up on Long Island, New York, where he pilfered milk crates, loitered in bowling alleys, rumbled in shopping mall parking lots, stocked supermarket frozen foods aisles, played guitar, cruised nightclub parking lots for girls, wrote crappy song lyrics, and longed for the day he’d forever leave “Strong Island”.

He fled the Atlantic Northeast for the Pacific Northwest and, in the late 1990s, worked for a company named after a piranha-filled river that sold books on the World Wide Web, where he met his wife.

In the 2000s he became an inexperienced journalist and quickly rose to international prominence covering the animal pharmaceutical industry.

After toiling in journalism for a number of years and reminding himself that he was but an artist, the author began a career in real estate, selling condos in Harlem until the financial disaster of 2008.

The real estate market having collapsed, he took a factory job and moved with wife and child to Westchester County, New York. After several years of labor, husbanding, and childrearing, he began writing again, waking at 3:00 am until it was time to take the kids to school and go to work, eventually completing The Adventures of Hyperkid, a young adult novel written with his son. He then completed two adult novels, History of von Schatt (1913-1960) and The Island Country, as well as a collection of short stories, The Greater Massapequas—the kind of thing agents and publishers love most, short story collections from unknown writers. Take that to your fiction workshop and smoke it.

History of von Schatt is a novel inspired by a creepy painting hung on in his author’s grandmother’s Long Island home, a portrait of the ship captain grandfather he’d never met, a man so frightening that the author, as a boy, could see fear in the eyes of the grownups whenever they spoke of “The Captain”, who, by then, had been dead two decades, harrowing tales of land and sea they probably never imagined the boy would recall later in life as a toasted journalist.

The Island Country and The Greater Massapequas are drawn from the author’s experience growing up on the desolate, amber-lit streets and mall culture of the Long Island suburbs he longed to get as far from as possible without leaving the country.

He submitted these works to “literary agents”, leeches of a swine publishing industry just as bad, if not worse, than the music industry, the filmmaking industry, and the car rental industry. After recalling that definition of insanity of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, he decided to heed the advice of other successful artists, to make it happen yourself.

The author would eventually realize that he could have written the greatest novel ever and he still would have gotten the same nonresponse. In his exhaustive research, he learned that there are precious few slots for titles from unknown literary writers, especially for those who didn’t hail from one of America’s leading “academic institutions”, or some “workshop” in the middle of a cornfield, or some academia that places undue relevance to the “The” before its name and has fraternities with secret handshakes and professors on the take.

The author, with several completed works in the can and crossing the threshold of fifty, old enough to have written on electric typewriters and word processors and computers with sensitive floppy disks, realized he did not need some promise of commercial success from the leeches and swine, and, that, as an artist, he needed to put his work out there and let the world decide, not some Manhattan socialite.

“It took me fifty years, but now it’s time to do it my way,” said the author recently at a sub-gala affair in south central Westchester County. “I’m not going to live long enough for the publishing industry and its gatekeepers to get their heads out of their ass. It is time to let the world decide.”

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Atlantis
Jonny Thompson

September 21, 2023
Chantry Publishing House
354 pages

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With only twenty-eight days to find a weapon that could change the world as we know it, Master Sailor Clive Davis embarks on a mission that will take him to a place unlike anywhere else in the world. Atlantis is a technologically advanced city built in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean by billionaire philanthropist Grace Alice. Undercover as a civilian deep sea welder Clive must track down the weapon and destroy it before Grace and her team can unleash it on the world. As Clive discovers more about the mysterious city, he begins to question what his true purpose is. With just twenty-eight days to separate fact from fiction, it’s a race against the clock for him and the rest of the world, whether they know it or not.

Author Bio:

Jonny Thompson is a writer and performer living in Ponamogoatitjg/Dartmouth, NS with his partner Hilary and their delightfully entertaining dog Henry. Jonny was born in England and grew up in the traditional lands of the Anishinabewaki and Attiwonderonk nations now St. Marys, Ontario.

Jonny attended Dalhousie University, where he received a BA in Theatre. He’s worked professionally for over 12 years, including 5 years performing young audience puppet shows worldwide with Mermaid Theatre of NS. He’s also worked on various stage and television productions and has written and directed a couple of short films.

Over the past few years, Jonny has been exploring the world of novel writing and he is excited to share with you some of the stories he’s been developing.

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