While these things may help build a readership, they won’t sell books in the short term…or even the long term. A lot of social media is tweeting into the wind, and blogging can sometimes gain a following of five loyal followers, three of whom live in your house. The same goes for email lists: you can only run […]
To create an enthralling account of a significant crime, author James J. Dunn has embellished events that emphasize our legal history in the riveting Kidnapping the Prince of Albany: The Real Story of the 1933 Kidnapping of John “Butch” O’Connell, Jr.
When John “Butch” O’Connell was kidnapped in 1933, the United States was a more lawless place. Prohibition was coming to an end, meaning less money for bootleggers, but as much or more for legitimate manufacturers. Among those former bootleggers in Albany, New York now going legit was the powerful clan led by Dan O’Connell, notorious mobster and political mover […]
It’s 2025 at a typical American high school, Hawthorn High, 120 miles from Bloomington, Indiana. Senior “Science Brain” Britain Kitridge signs up to volunteer for a fellow student’s campaign, and yes, maybe she has a little crush on him, but who doesn’t? Matthew Boltanski is near perfect: athletic, handsome, self-confident, impervious, and as Britain determines, very well funded, but by who and why? She starts asking too many questions and is ‘disciplined’ in […]
Author Neill McKee vividly describes his escalating culture shock as he encounters “the East” in its many aspects: sights, smells and, notably, sweltering temperatures. In the sleepy village of Kota Belud, he learns Malay and teaches various subjects in English to students barely fluent in that language, often with no textbooks. Humorously imagining exotic Borneo as the model for Tolkien’s Middle Earth, he and his friends found the […]
Wilfong’s chronicle moves gently through her thought processes as she deals with the diagnosis. A dedicated Buddhist and meditation teacher, she believes that death, disease, and dying are messengers alerting us to find ourselves. After a successful surgery and radiation, and […]
In Is God in That Bottle Cap? A Search for Truth, a lawyer writes about spirituality in an engaging combination of autobiography and philosophical treatise.
Beginning as a child who resisted having to eat fish on Friday, to his adulthood as a world-traveler who sees that God is found not so much in precepts as in experience, John D. Sambalino has always been seeking truth, and so conveys a sense of exploration that is fortunately free from self-congratulation. The first glimmers of this search came with his interest in martial arts and the understanding that such physical practices have […]
In All Fall Down, the epic conclusion to Richard Snodgrass’s Furnass Towers Trilogy, the characters and families that loyal readers have come to know so well all come together for one final piece of the puzzle – centered dramatically around the murder of Dickie Sutcliff.
The Sutcliff family, specifically Dickie and his brother Harry Todd, have featured heavily in this trilogy, being at the center of the real estate market in the mill town of Furnass. However, over those many decades and deals, Dickie has certainly made enemies along the way, so when he turns up dead, it is […]
These short works occupy one page each, most examining what Odey calls “flawed human experience.” The five-part “Letters to Ada” laments that after a beginning in which “the whole world felt like a fairytale,” it becomes clear that “Fate had dealt us the worst of the deck.” “Our Guardian Angel” poignantly recalls an infant brother’s passing. In “That We May Live Again” a woman scorned turns to “a bottle in hand and a strange man for company.”
Odey uses language deftly […]