John Staughton, Senior Reviewer

Susan Specht Oram delivers the second piece of her Millersville Series with The Thieves, a gripping novel of desperate times, desperate measures, and the lengths we go to protect those we love. When an amateur thief with good intentions has her only and biggest score snatched away by con-artist crooks, she embarks on a deeply unwise mission to snatch it back. Like a long-form chase sequence with a countdown clock attached, this Pacific Northwest hunt for 500K makes for one wild road trip. The story moves fast, which keeps the energy high, but also cuts down on space for […]

A gritty, hard-nosed, and expertly written thriller, A Cult of One by CH Morgan is the fractured family portrait of an investigator hunting monsters – in the shadows and in her own mind. Haunted by the past and driven by a fiery resolve, Genevieve Capa is trying to get through her probationary period as a police officer, but her house-arrested brother has a dangerous scheme to catapult her career to the next level, single-handedly capture a cannibalistic killer on the loose in Montreal. Combining a sinister police procedural with complex character drama and sharply captured dialogue, this is a fast, […]

When militarily advanced aliens make planetfall on Earth for the first time, the world has no choice but to respond with force in Nick Snape’s compelling new work of military sci-fi, Hostile Contact. The planet’s first visitors are far from pacifistic green men, but Snape still finds some philosophical nuance in this near-future war of the worlds. There tends to be heavy reliance on internal monologue – a workaround by the author to tell, rather than show – but the terse military dialogue balances well with informal personal interactions, allowing Snape’s characters to breathe on the page as fully-formed, […]