Category: Release Of the Week

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Featured New Release Of The Week: Buyer’s Remorse by DJ Jamison

This week, we’re checking in on the real estate market in Fields, Kansas, specifically as it relates to commercial real estate suitable for a new deli. This week, we feature Buyer’s Remorse by DJ Jamison.

This book is the second in Jamison’s “Real Estate Relations” series and features leads who were secondary characters in the first book, Full Disclosure. In Full Disclosure, we meet Lee when he has to flee into an even more secretive form of witness protection after he is nearly killed thanks to a mole inside the US Marshall’s Service. He flees to Fields, Kansas with his guard, Reid, and they go undercover as boyfriends. Complicating this is that Reid begins to develop feelings for his new real estate agent, Camden… who happens to be best friends with fellow real estate agent Miguel.

In the beginning of Buyer’s Remorse, three years have passed since the events of Full Disclosure, and Lee is coming back to Fields of his own volition in an attempt to finally leave his past fully in his past. He brings his mom and sister along with him, and together the three of them intend to start a new deli. Complicating matters are Lee’s feelings for Miguel… and the fact that they find a dead body in the first building Miguel shows Lee.

This is an excellent second chance romance, one that really does a good job of exploring just how far a person will go to get forgiveness and move on from their mistakes. The mystery is better built, with even more perilous stakes for the couple than the first book – it seems that Miguel and Lee are constantly in danger of arrest, while Reid and Camden never really felt like they were in danger until the moment they were. The romance also struck me as more realistic in this book.

One thing I will note, in case it isn’t obvious: Yes, Lee and Miguel (and Reid and Camden) are both men, and yes, this is a romance book that largely adheres to the trappings of its genre. Meaning that yes, there is M/M sex in this book. If that is something that you can’t handle for whatever reason, just skip this book.

That said, this book is a very solid romance, and Jamison really set the stage to go in at least a couple of different directions with the next book in the series – one of which would be very intriguing indeed. Do yourself a favor and pick it up.

As always, the Amazon/ Goodreads and Youtube reviews are after the jump.
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Featured New Release Of The Week: Infinite Blue by Darren and Simon Groth

This week, we find ourselves reading a great new adult romance with a tinge of science fiction. This week, we feature Infinite Blue by Darren and Simon Groth.

This book starts with an imperiled teenager – he is caught in a riptide, can’t get out, and is getting too tired to continue. A world class swimmer happens to be nearby and saves him… and they begin dating.

We next cut to a scene some months later, when the couple has been together for a few months already. And here, so early in this book, we get our first whispers of some science fiction elements – even while the story ostensibly remains about the couple and their work. (His art, her swimming). Soon enough in this less than 200 page book, our swimmer encounters a life changing tragedy and must find her way out of it – including whether or not she can remain with her boyfriend.

This is a great, quick read that shows the depth of love no matter the age of the adults involved and as such is quite a heavy read, even though quick. And that ending… left me breathless. Absolutely pick this book up, I for one am very much looking forward to future projects from the Groth Brothers.

And as always, the Goodreads/ Amazon and Youtube reviews below the jump.
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Featured New Release of the Week: The Waiting Room by Emily Bleeker

This week, we look at Emily Bleeker’s The Waiting Room. I’ve known Emily for a few years now, first getting curious about her when I saw her debut book WRECKAGE all over the place. Since then, we’ve become Facebook friends and brought each other into a few groups that we were each in.

In The Waiting Room, we encounter three characters – Veronica Shelton – our primary protagonist-, another woman, and a man. All three will come to intersect in this explosive examination of womens’ mental health and in particular the damage losing a child can wreak on the female psyche. Veronica is dealing with the death of her husband months earlier, just weeks after she gave birth to their daughter. And she has post partum depression so severe that she can’t even touch her daughter, so her mother has moved in to help take care of the baby. This part of the book is perhaps the darkest, most difficult section – but also a very real examination of this issue, at least as real as this man can imagine it would be. And it is this grounding that gives this tale its early gravitas, much like the titular wreck in Bleeker’s debut novel Wreckage just a couple of years ago.

But as we have come to expect with any Bleeker book – this being her fourth -, things are not always as they seem, and that begins becoming apparent about halfway into the book, when Veronica discovers that not only has someone been in her house taking pictures of her baby, but now her baby is missing – and her mother refuses to help her find her baby. This is about the point that the book summary stops, so I’ll reveal nothing further about the story other than to note that the story gains is true heft and power in the back half of the book. The front half, dealing with post partum depression, is deep in itself, but the front part of the book is more the edge of a continental shelf in the ocean, and the back half is the abyssal plain – far deeper and at times even more fascinating.

One particular line stood out in the book, and out of context it gives away nothing, so I’ll share it here because I like it so much: “Sometimes you run away from the flames, and other times you stay and help put out the fire.” In the end, that line effectively comes to summarize the entire book without really giving anything away about the back half.

Yet again, Bleeker has hit another home run, an absolute 5 star read no matter your scale. Very highly recommended, and I’m genuinely glad I was among the first to preorder.

And as always, the Goodreads/ Amazon:
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Featured New Release of the Week: Coldfall Wood by Steven Savile

This week, we look at the latest release from another long time friend, Coldfall Wood by Steven Savile.

This book is the sequel to Savile’s late 2017 release, Glass Town, and picks up just some time after the end of that book, immediately dealing with the repercussions of that book – which will reverberate throughout this one. That said, this book can be read first – as I did – as everything that is crucially important from Glass Town is explained again in this book.

The front half of Coldfall Wood is basically setup and transition from Glass Town into the meat of the story of Coldfall Wood. We get a lot of detail about the origins of several new characters, and finally around the halfway point these new characters start to actually work on their mission. And what a mission it is – to destroy modern London and return her to her more natural state. The book actually does an excellent job of showing that everyone is the hero in their own story, that there are few indeed truly bad people. It also has some fairly blatant pro-environmental themes, though those are deftly pit against the idea of “well, we need to change things… but we also can’t just kill the people that are currently here or increase their suffering”.

Fans of fantasy books or Anglophiles generally should truly love this book, as it tends to be an excellent fantasy tale solidly centered on London and British myths of the Horned God, the once and future king, the Wild Hunt, and the surrounding myths.

And now, the “but”. I personally struggled mightily with this book, and both Savile and I thought I might. I’m not a fan of fantasy. As in, almost at all. Particularly the sword and sorcery level that this book gets into. I’m fine with real world stories with fantasy themes where the fantasy is almost a macguffin and/ or just hinted at to establish an overall mythology for a given series, but I just can’t handle the sword and sorcery level fantasy. I never have been able to get into it in text form, going back to some of my earliest reading experiences. So this book was extremely difficult for me – I was barely halfway into this book that Goodreads lists as 336 pages after 7 hours of reading. To put that in perspective, I normally read books twice that long in less time – and indeed did so just this past weekend with another author friend who I’ve known nearly as long as Savile and met in the same place I met him.

So this book just wasn’t for me, but it was extremely well written and a compelling story generally – one I personally would love to see in movie format, as I think it could do well in that medium. (And again, I have a history of being able to enjoy fantasy stories there – I’ve never been able to read more than a paragraph of Lord of the Rings, yet I *love* those movies.) Because of this, I gave Coldfall Wood 4 stars.

As always, here is my Goodreads/ Amazon review:
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Featured New Release of the Week: Learning to Speak God from Scratch by Jonathan Merritt

This week, we return to a book we featured in #HypeTrain last month – Jonathan Merritt’s Learning to Speak God from Scratch.

This time though, I want to take a bit of a different tack on my writing regarding this book. You see, I was recently reminded of a quote from Jonathan’s dad, former Southern Baptist Convention President Dr. James Merritt, that I had heard about a year ish before I found how awesome Jonathan himself was when I read his 2012 book A Faith of Our Own. This particular line actually speaks to the discussion Jonathan has in Learning to Speak God From Scratch, and is:

The Church can influence the nation more through supplication than the Congress can through legislation.

Now, Jonathan doesn’t discuss the word “supplication” in this book. But this is where it gets interesting… because he *does* discuss “prayer“, and Merriam-Webster defines “supplication” as “to make a humble entreaty; especially : to pray to God“. So “supplication” is just fancy Christian speak for… prayer.

Another term Dr. Merritt likes to use in his sermons is “justification“. Again, Jonathan never has a chapter devoted to that particular word. But “justification” means “the act, process, or state of being justified by God“, and Jonathan *does* devote chapters to words like “God“, “Sin“, “Lost“, and “Confession“.

Still another term you’ll often hear Jonathan’s dad use is “sanctification“. And yet again, Jonathan never uses that word as the basis of a chapter in this book. But it means “the state of growing in divine grace as a result of Christian commitment after baptism or conversion“, and Jonathan devotes chapters to words like “Grace“, “Mystery“, “Brokenness“, and “Neighbor“.

Indeed, the entire point of this experiment in learning to speak God from scratch is to take the everyday Christian terms like “lost” and “creed” and “pride” and use them to unpack their truths and help us understand better both these words themselves and the more theologically-oriented “cation” words. And in so doing, Jonathan has created quite possibly one of the defining works in seeking to bridge the conversation gap between Christians and non-Christians.
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Featured New Release of the Week: The Black and The Blue by Matthew Horace

This week we branch out into our first nonfiction book, again from NetGalley. Today, we’re looking at The Black and The Blue: A Cop Reveals the Crimes, Racism, and Injustice in America’s Law Enforcement by Matthew Horace.

Now, this one was a bit interesting for me. You see, even up until the week before I started this site, I had been active in fighting police brutality for most of the last decade. Indeed, I was fighting police brutality before America had heard names like “Walter Scott”, “Michael Brown”, “Tamir Rice”, and numerous others. My story truly began with some cops illegally questioning me – a smart yet unpopular “weird” lower middle class white kid in the suburbs – without so much as a parent or school counselor, much less a lawyer, present. But my story really picked up when I began hearing names like “Kathryn Johnston” and “Jonathan Ayers”, then I was following online as some online acquaintances were harassed as they drove across America searching for liberty. They would found CopBlock.org soon after, and for the next several years I would be involved in that project locally, regionally, and even nationally at various levels. As recently as earlier this year, I finally created my own website to track all instances of people killed by police in America yet allow some basic reporting on the issue, something no other website did anywhere near the level I did.

So make no mistake about it, while I gave up that life completely when I came into this new world of book blogging and putting my efforts into books and publishing, I have a very strong and still quite recent history of doing everything I can to illuminate and bring awareness to the issue of police brutality in America.

Which is why coming into this book was so interesting for me. For someone like me to sit there and read the words of not just a cop, but someone who actively trained other cops for years, knowing all that I know? It was actually an interesting and at least somewhat pleasant experience.

Structure wise, this book probably wasn’t as comprehensive as I would have liked, and I indeed recommend the far superior book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police by Radley Balko, written over a year before #BlackLivesMatter became a thing, from that side. This book instead takes a personal look at a few instances from Horace’s own career as a cop, from his days on the streets of Baltimore to his ascendancy into the upper echelons of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms while also spending a good chunk of the book examining Chicago, Ferguson, and New Orleans in detail. There are a few grammar issues, mostly misplaced words similar to the clearly intended word.

Overall narrative wise, the book flows well and is an interesting and fairly easy read. The transitions are fairly seamless, and the sections allowing cops from all levels to discuss different topics worked well with the chapter they were placed with. The story was much more balanced than I expected from someone in Horace’s position, while still lacking in certain key areas to my tastes – but surely too much attention in certain areas for the tastes of someone more pro-cop than myself.

Overall this is in fact a book I recommend, just at the 3 star level and with recommending that Balko’s book be read as well. To me, it really does add a voice that can be missing from these conversations at times, and while Horace never does what is really needed, he does in fact seem like someone at least willing to hear all sides – even if he has his own preconceived notions that will not change regardless.

And the obligatory Goodreads/ Amazon review:

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Featured New Release of the Week: The Same Blood by M. Azmitia

This week we’re branching out further than I knew when I picked up this book from NetGalley due to its release date and the fact that it sounded interesting. Today, we look at The Same Blood by M. Azmitia, releasing on August 1, 2018.

I went into this book expecting a novel about a girl who is struggling with the death of her twin sister and subsequent revelations about herself. And I was highly surprised to find not a novel, but a long form narrative poem – a type of literature I hadn’t read since college, when I had to read Beowulf for a world lit class. In 2001.

Even with the unexpected writing device though, this book offers a strong tail of a young teen’s struggles – perhaps made more effective due to its writing and printing style, though I still believe that a stronger tale could have been told in a more traditional novel form. Overall, its examination of mental health, guilt, addiction, longing for home, and the struggles of Puerto Ricans generally and specifically after Hurricane Irma destroyed large swaths of the island last year are strong and worthy of considerable thought – which seems to be the overall goal of the author.

My only complaint this week is of a more technical issue – apparently the publisher only made a certain file type available via NetGalley, and that forced me to get creative to actually be able to read and review this book. Instead of reading it on my Kindle Oasis, as normal, I had to download the Overdrive app to my laptop and read this book on my dual monitor setup there. The book itself was perfectly fine for what it was, and a very recommended read – if for no other reason than a bit of diversity in story format.

And the Goodreads/ Amazon review:
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Featured New Release of the Week: The Space Between by Dete Meserve

This week we’re going to another new-to-me Lake Union author, Dete Meserve and looking at her book, The Space Between.

This book was intriguing from the outset. We first meet Sarah Mayfield when she is in DC presenting the findings of her NASA team – an earth shattering discovery of an asteroid in Earth’s orbit hidden by the sun. This particular BookAHolic lives just a couple hours or so north of Cape Canaveral and absolutely loves going down there, as well as almost anything to do with space generally – I’ve read the memoirs of two separate former International Space Station Commanders this year alone, in addition to the memoirs of a legendary NASA Flight Director. So I was excited about this book nearly instantly, from the first time I even heard about it – much less once I started reading it!

And then Ms. Meserve goes in and spins a form of a Gone Girl type of tale around Ms. Mayfield as soon as Ms. Mayfield gets back home to her family. Her husband is missing, there is a brand new gun in their nightstand, and his last words to his son were to make sure the doors were locked. What follows is the type of tale fans of Gone Girl will love, but also fans of NASA and tech generally – Ms. Meserve has done her research, because Ms. Mayfield is very geeky indeed!

My *only* complaint about this book is that despite being someone who virtually never figures out a mystery before the central character does, in this book I figured out who the person ultimately responsible was about 60% or so of the way in, and I was right on the high points if not the particulars by the end of the book. Still, one of those books I truly did not want to put down, and very highly recommended.

As always, the Goodreads/ Amazon review:
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Featured New Release Of The Week: The Art of Inheriting Secrets by Barbara O’Neal

This week, we’re going to the first book I’ve read from a new to me author, Barbara O’Neal, whose publisher (Lake Union) I’ve come to trust. This week, we’re looking at The Art of Inheriting Secrets by Barbara O’Neal.

I’ve never met nor interacted online with Ms. O’Neal, and admittedly the setting of this book was one that I have absolutely no familiarity with at all other than the occasional TV show or movie, and who knows when those things are actually accurate? But the central character herself proved as relatable as can be expected for a first person female perspective being read by a male. Olivia Shaw’s mother has died, and she left behind some substantial secrets – the most obvious of which being that she had a full estate and title in England that Olivia has now inherited and must decide how to handle. She’s also dealing with having been out of work for a few weeks already due to breaking her leg, and once we meet up with her in England on the first page, she’s already dealing with the fact that her relationship with her fiancée doesn’t feel as close as it once did.

As Olivia gets introduced to the land she inherited and the land and people nearby, we come to know more about her, them… and her mother’s far darker secret, along with a tragic secret from her grandmother. And pretty much everyone tends to grow on at least this reader, from the charming townspeople to the knowing Baron of a nearby estate who takes Olivia under his wing. We see a fair amount of character development over the months covered in the story as Olivia struggles to learn to become the new Countess of Rosemere, and we fall in love with the land at the same time she does.

Overall a very strong tale, if not quite the same as I’d come to expect from Lake Union and indeed not a type of tale I would normally pick up on my own. Definitely a worthy read, and I’m very glad I picked it up, even if I was more concerned with the publish date than any other factor when I originally chose to read it. Now that it is out, you should absolutely pick this up and read it at the first opportunity you have. You won’t be disappointed.

And once again, I leave you with my Goodreads/ Amazon review:
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Featured New Release of the Week: Death Warmed Over by Kent Holloway

New blog, new features. One of them I want to do every week will be to feature a new book that I’ve either read that particular book or at least read another book from that author.

For the inaugural edition of this feature, I want to talk about the newest release from one of my author friends that I’ve known for several years and who happens to live in the next county down from me at the moment. This book is Death Warmed Over by Kent Holloway.

I did have the privilege of reading this book as an ARC a couple of weeks ago, and I found it to be a refreshing yet familiar tale in the vein of the TV show Lucifer or even the movie Meet Joe Black. Indeed, it almost feels like Kent took those two as inspirations to tell his own tale, and Meet Joe Black is actually referenced in the book itself.

Here, we meet Silas Mot, who as it turns out currently holds the title of Death. But he has a problem – people are dying that are not actually scheduled to die, and he doesn’t know how. So he enlists the local police department and in particular its blonde female Chief to assist him in his investigation even as they work to solve the murder for their own purposes. Mott is presented as the suave, sharply dressed, playful yet serious Death that fans of Lucifer will instantly recognize, though his power set is a bit different – more in line with traditional interpretations of the Grim Reaper than with Tom Ellis’ portrayal of the Angel of Light.

This is the second book published under Holloway’s new publishing company he founded with his friend David Golemon – Golemon’s latest Event Group book being the first. As such, the slightly higher than I typically pay price point of $4.99 is understandable, and really it isn’t out of the normal range of independent Kindle books, if a bit on the high side of that. Still, well worth the money – I bought a copy even though I was given one for free. That’s how much I enjoyed this book.

I’ll leave you with my GoodReads/ Amazon review (I always just copy the GoodReads into Amazon):
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