Thought provoking and thrilling - the reviews are in!

Crooked Lines by Jeffrey Meyer

Crooked Lines follows Jeffrey's award-winning debut historical fiction novel, A Call to China, heralded by Kirkus Reviews as "An engrossing fictional exploration of family, culture, and what it means to belong in both China and America." Set in the late 2020s, Jeffrey's latest visionary work of fiction has also been reviewed by Kirkus Reviews, who calls the novel, "A thought-provoking novel with a clergyman who evolves into an intriguing hero."

​Read an excerpt of the full review below:

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"A philosophical bishop gets dragged into a dangerous world in this thriller."  -Kirkus Reviews
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Meyer, the author of A Call to China (2017), cleverly models his story on the famous 16th-century Chinese narrative Journey to the West, in which a monk, accompanied by three colorful companions, takes a lengthy pilgrimage to India to recover Buddhist sutras. In this novel, set in the near future, that monk becomes Brendan Donovan, the kindly but naïve Catholic bishop of Charlotte, North Carolina. He wakes up one day, after two months in a coma, as the only survivor of a terrorist car bombing.  . . . Meyer serves up an enjoyable cautionary tale that makes an ancient story plausible for the modern era. Using Brendan’s plight, the author examines how difficult it would be to go completely off the grid and how well-meaning people can unintentionally put themselves in danger.  . . . Indeed, the result is as much a character study as it is a suspenseful thriller—and it’s one that will make readers think twice about those in power.
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Read the full review at www.kirkusreviews.com

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Courses of the Cursed by Vince Bailey

Vince Bailey's second installment in the award-winning Curtis Jefferson series is available August 1st. African American youth Curtis Jefferson is still serving his one-year term at Fort Grant, where a horrific massacre still haunts the inhabitants. In the second book of the Curtis Jefferson series, our hero continues to be challenged by his nemesis, Harvey Huish, while a café owner struggles with a premonition that her nephew will be the victim of a treacherous plot. The parallel stories share a common theme: the curse of Fort Grant. Vince Bailey’s award-winning Path of the Half Moon—the first book in the Curtis Jefferson series—was the Winner of the Arizona Authors’ Association Literary Award and the Chanticleer International Book Awards for Paranormal and Supernatural Fiction. 

Read an excerpt of the full review below.

"A rollicking, Western-flavored frightfest"  -Kirkus Reviews

Werewolves and worse haunt the Arizona desert in this supernatural thriller.
Bailey’s yarn, the second installment of his Curtis Jefferson trilogy, braids together loosely connected episodes involving macabre goings-on in rural southern Arizona, circa 1964. Framing the novel is the story of Curtis Jefferson, a Black teenager unjustly imprisoned for arson in the Fort Grant reform school, the former site of a U.S. Army outpost where 144 Apache women and children were massacred by vigilantes in 1871. Among the challenges Curtis faces are a violent, racist fellow inmate, periodic stampedes of ghost riders, and a werewolf that lunges at him when he briefly manages to escape. . . . However, the characters are sharply drawn and vibrant, especially Ezra, whose infectious zest for deviltry (“Ah, the sound of human wailing and the gnashing of teeth—sweet music to my ears”) dominates the proceedings—although he meets his match in captivating spitfire Isabel. Bailey’s vigorous, if sometimes purplish, prose will keep readers turning pages: “Zombie equestrians—a murderous posse on a mission from hell—were abroad again in the night!”

Read the full review at www.kirkusreviews.com

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