Expanded from a Writers of the Future Award–winning short story, Hankins’s fast-paced supernatural adventure and Grimsworld series launch balances the mythic and the mundane. On a routine pickup, the Grim Reaper is tricked into exchanging bodies with IRS auditor Frank Totmann. Now trapped in Frank’s failing middle-aged body while Frank runs off with his identity and scythe, Grim must find a way to reverse the process before Hell’s Auditor becomes aware of the mishap and comes to punish him. Ignorant of the ways of flesh, Grim contends with a mortal body’s embarrassing needs (cue the poop jokes), fumbles his way through Frank’s job, and desperately tries to make contact with the demon who inadvertently made the switch possible. Meanwhile, infernal forces move forward on a fiendish plot eons in the making, people stop dying with no one to collect their souls, and Grim runs into the ex he hasn’t seen in millennia. Flashbacks hint at a much larger scope to the setting and Grim’s complicated past as, in the present, he learns the hard way what it means to be human. The humor feels somewhat sitcomy, but the premise and subsequent mistaken identity hijinks are good fun. This is sure to entertain. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Finkle (Keys to an Empty House) offers a whimsical take on the locked-room mystery in this entertaining supernatural whodunit. New Yorker Daniel Freund, a writer who collects rare editions of The Great Gatsby, is delighted to find one he doesn’t own in a pile on a brownstone stoop. He brings it back to his apartment, where the book starts displaying magical qualities: certain words begin to glow, and an invisible presence guides Freund’s hand to phrases that seem to allude to an unsolved murder. Wondering if the paranormal activity is a beyond the grave message from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Freund visits the brownstone where he found the edition. There, he learns that his new Gatsby belonged to septuagenarian venture capitalist Fulton Cutler, who recently shot himself inside his locked apartment. Convinced that Cutler was murdered, Freund investigates who might have wanted him dead, and tries to deduce how they committed the seemingly impossible crime. Eventually, he teams up with a pair of retired detectives to crack the case. Finkle effectively suspends disbelief en route to a clever solution. It’s a gleeful good time. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Cox (A Christmas at Highbury) serves up a charming retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma set during the Great Depression. Melody Merriweather resents having to leave college to run the Merc, her family’s general store in Merriweather, Wis. But with her father recovering from a heart attack, she doesn’t have much choice. At first, Melody tries to modernize the store by offering luxury items, but no one in town can afford them. After learning that her father lost the family’s fortune in bad investments, she hatches a plan to save the store and their home by brewing and selling cider. For help, she turns to the store’s handsome but aloof butcher, Cal Fraiser, innocent shopgirl Harriet Mueller, and her father’s partner, the huffy old Mrs. Haufbrau. Neither the cider nor Melody’s attempts at matchmaking on Harriet’s behalf go as planned, and she soon discovers that her family’s situation is even worse than she’d thought. While Cox glosses over the darker aspects of the Great Depression—the townsfolk pinch pennies, but no one is in dire straits—she’s crafted a believable Midwest town filled with colorful characters. Silly and spoiled at first, Melody matures over the course of the novel and learns the importance of putting herself in others’ shoes. Readers are in for a treat. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Sherwood-Fabre (the Early Case Files of Sherlock Holmes series) delivers a solid collection of stories featuring Doyle’s detective. Canonical entries include a creative fleshing-out of one of Watson’s untold tales (“The Most Winning Woman”), and a sequel to Doyle’s “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax,” which finds Carfax, a former client of Holmes’s, returning to seek help recovering jewels stolen by the criminals who kidnapped her in the original story. The author pulls off a shrewd and satisfying locked-room mystery with “The Adventure of Kisin’s Curse,” in which Holmes must ascertain how the assistant to an explorer was poisoned in a sealed room. Holmes’s deductive talents are captured with aplomb in “The Adventure of Lafitte’s Missing Treasure,” in which the detective tackles the case of an American woman’s missing husband, who disappeared while on a quest for a legendary pirate’s treasure. Throughout, Sherwood-Fabre plays it safe, delivering comfort-food pastiches that rely heavily on established tropes. Sherlockians will be pleased. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 03/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Organized crime, police corruption, and ethnic tensions put increasing pressure on an Italian American family in this thrilling multigenerational saga. In 1914, 16-year-old Domenic Bassini leaves Italy for America. On board the ship, he protects young stowaway Ermino Lentini and has an intense affair with Francesca Bernardelli under the nose of her industrialist husband, Cologero. Settling into Boston’s North End, Domenic lands a coveted construction job, and for the most part manages to stay out of trouble, though he invites ire from the Irish American police after backing Ermino in a fight with the son of a cop. As the years go by, Ermino grows into an ambitious mobster while Domenic marries and has a son, Dommy, whose football career at Harvard is interrupted by WWII. Dommy returns to Boston as a war hero, becomes a cop, and refuses to go along with the department’s widespread corruption and graft. When Dommy’s moral rectitude has grave consequences, Domenic faces an impossible decision, one that reunites him with Cologero, Ermino, and Francesca in an explosive climax. Trubiano’s rendering of the period tends to feel like a Wikipedia entry, with dutiful if superfluous nods to anarchist Bartolemo Vanzetti and the Boston Molasses Flood, but the novel finds its rhythm once Dommy enters the police force. This loving portrait of a bygone Boston is worth a look. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 02/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

An orphaned teen takes on powerful men in this rousing series launch from Lane (the Ramsbolt series). Charlotte Morris and her younger brother, Emmett, hail from the coal mining town of Stoke, Pa., where her miner father agitated for better working conditions. After both of their parents die from illnesses related to pollution from the coal mine in 1900, Charlotte and Emmett go to live with foster parents in North East, Md. The Ryans, alcoholic Finn and stern Regina, offer the siblings a cold welcome and put them to work with fishing and other chores. When Charlotte sees the town’s mayor on a train platform meeting with the owner of Stoke’s mine, she suspects the mayor of corruption and starts connecting the dots between the pollution in Stoke and the massive fish die-off in North East. Gathering allies, including a group of suffragists, Charlotte concocts a plan to continue her late father’s labor activism and expose the truth behind the environmental devastation. Her crusade is complicated by increasing tension with Emmett, who chafes against Charlotte’s protectiveness, and Charlotte struggles with whom to trust. The pacing and character work are a bit rough, but Lane succeeds at making Charlotte a heroine to root for. Those who appreciate muckraking social realism in the vein of Mary Doria Russell’s Women of Copper Country ought to check this out. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Hawkins (Downpour) spins the familiar into the grotesque in this chilling collection of 13 horror shorts. The author excels at putting dark twists on everyday domestic circumstances. A painter escapes an unhappy marriage with some supernatural aid in “Moonrise Over Water with Sargassum, 2022. Oil On Canvas.” In “Green Eyes,” a child cares for her ailing mother even after the woman’s death. An uncanny children’s TV show takes center stage in “The Stumblyum Imperative,” while in “A Candle for the Birthday Boy,” a six-year-old’s birthday party goes horribly wrong. The exceptional gore—narrators perform revolting actions such as probing “the glistening yellow-gray” of their own exposed fat, which “yields beneath [their] touch like molded gelatin” (“Storms of the Present”)—makes looking away impossible. Not all the stories are quite as successful, however. If, as in “Interlude,” about a little boy whose parents think he has a rash, the buildup is too mundane in its purposeful misdirection, what should be a delightful shock ending turns into a cheap trick. Still, plenty of entertainment lies within these pages. Readers will be thinking about Hawkins’s skin-crawling fables long after they turn off the lights. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Beaumont (Shadow of Doubt) delivers an intriguing tale of WWII espionage and the last days of the Cold War. In 1943, Mae Webster, a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, meets and falls for Lt. Jack Knight, New Zealand war photographer. After learning Jack’s security clearance is higher than hers, she suspects he’s a spy. They get married the next April, and after Paris is liberated, Jack travels there to take photos, including one that appears to capture a Bletchley colleague passing an envelope to a Soviet agent. Mae never sees Jack again. In a parallel narrative set in fall 1989, Mae tells her granddaughter Rachel Talbot, a London-based photojournalist, that she’s seen a television clip of the Stasi officer she believes was responsible for Jack’s death. The mystery of what happened to Jack in Paris gradually unfolds as Rachel investigates the officer while on assignment in Berlin, covering the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall. Beaumont skillfully links Jack’s and Rachel’s stories as each character’s search for the truth leads them into mortal danger. Readers will be enthralled. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

A British woman attracts the attention of a French marquis in the chaste but alluring fourth installment of the multiauthor Georgians in Paris series (after Sofi Laporte’s The Vicomte’s Masquerade) from Goutet (A Whimsical Notion). Sophie Twisden meets Basile Gervain, Marquis de Verdelle, while visiting Paris with her grandmother in 1774. Basile’s flirtation with Sophie annoys her pompous British escort, Sheldon Cholmsley, who’s courting her. Sheldon and Sophie are both in for a shock when, soon thereafter, Basile—seeking to ward off the unwanted attentions of another woman—publicly announces his engagement to Sophie. Sophie goes along with it, hoping to similarly shake herself free of Sheldon’s advances. The stakes of their fake engagement intensify, however, when their relationship catches the interest of Marie Antoinette. Now their ruse must withstand both her scrutiny and their own shifting feelings. Goutet transports readers to the glittering aristocratic world of pre-revolutionary France, spotlighting the soapy gossip and machinations of society’s elite. Historical romance fans looking for a vacation from Regency England will find this hits the spot. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 01/31/2025 | Details & Permalink

Giroux revisits the dilapidated Massachusetts town of his previous novel, Ring on Deli, for this charming if meandering romp. Wild boars still roam Pennacook, and frequent flooding has turned the town’s roads into canals. Middle schooler Wendy Zhou is walking her dog when she discovers a rundown building hidden in the woods. As one of the children who staff the local newspaper, the Pennacook Beat, she asks frequently inebriated editor Graham Brundt, an adult, if she can look into the mystery. Meanwhile, the townspeople are divided over what to do about the flooding, with some supporting an unnamed entity’s proposal to plop a geodesic dome over the town, while others,­ led by Selectman Archie Simmons­, call for the town to weigh its options and bring them to a vote. After a suspicious accident puts Archie in a coma, the rest of the board puts the town up for sale. Giroux intercuts the present-day action with chapters set in 2032, in which Wendy, now a college student, interviews a now sober Graham and draws connections between the previous events. Though the time jumps are gratuitous, Giroux keenly portrays a young girl’s growing awareness of the corruption and hubris of adults. This comic novel has surprising depth. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 01/20/2025 | Details & Permalink