Month: June 2024

A Novel By Riley Adaris

Delilah has to go through the most horrible experience anyone can imagine: her wife, Nan, feels unwell, falls on the floor and dies, right in front of her eyes. Del frantically calls for an ambulance while trying her best at CPR. She recently took a first aid course, but one thing is practicing with a dummy, another is doing it on a real person, and if that person is related to you, it’s even more challenging.
Unfortunately, there is not much that her or the paramedics can do, and Nan is pronounced dead at the scene. It’s devastating. It’s made even worse by the fact that Del became a widower in her early 30s after only a few years of wedding: in her world, ‘forever’ is still a big, meaningful word.
Friends and family gather around Del in her darkest hour, and she does all she can to go through it. One night, though, after having had a bit too much to drink to cope with the pain, she wakes up in her living room, in the dark and with the ashes of her beloved wife on the floor. But, to her great surprise, she is not alone. Sitting on the armchair there is an old guy, named Naylor ‘Nelly’ Maltby, who thinks he is at this place called the Twelve Elms, a nursing home nearby.
The situation doesn’t make sense to either of them, so they decide to go out for breakfast and try to pierce together what happened and what is actually going on. Maybe, they say to each other, with some talking we can find what links us and make it right. But in the middle of their peaceful meal, two women approach them, accuse them of being a fraud and definitely not funny. When Del stares at Nelly looking for an explanation, he tells her that the two women were his daughter and granddaughter but he has no clue why they said what they said. While ranting, they also mentioned that the real Nelly died 6 moths before, but he is right there, flesh and blood, old, yes, but still breathing and walking and talking and eating.
It will take us readers quite some time to start piecing the pieces together: Nan and Nelly died on the same day, they have both been cremated in the same crematorium and they both had the same initials, NSM, just in a different order. Because of this, their ashes have been swapped, and Nelly’s ashes ended up in Nan’s urn. Due to the mix-up, Nelly couldn’t pass over, and that’s why he woke up in Del’s living room in the middle of the night when the urn was opened again.
The pass over has also been hindered by some more unfinished business: when Nelly was young, he joined the Navy; there, he met Jack, his bunkmate but also his lover. Being gay was against the law back then, but they promised to each other to find a way to keep in touch after their discharge. Only, that didn’t happen, for many different reasons, although they never forgot about each other.
I enjoyed the overall idea, it gives a nice twist to a very hurtful and delicate theme, and I appreciated the ending (sad, but the only possible ending), but I was less keen on the execution, which I found ok but definitely with room for improvement. The narrative remains superficial most of the times, never going deep into what makes the characters tick. The plot is not always well developed, with plot holes or loose threads at times, which are not essential for the story itself, but it’s good custom to tie them before the final full stop. Perhaps not the most original story, but still a good creative effort.

Ashes to Ashes is available for purchase at: https://amzn.to/3RPte5t

Book One of The Mantis Gland Series!

The scene is set in Teslon City, we are in the year 250 of the Advance Era. In this timeline, life as we know it went on until World War III, at which point societies collapsed, royal families ceased to exist and continents lost their reason to be, beside their borders. People turned against each other, family vs. family, blood vs. blood, and the world as we know it ceased to exist.
From this chaos, The Oselian society arose, and with it a new ‘us-them’ division; this time, though, it isn’t about race or religion or sexual orientation, but more about ‘us’, humans, and ‘them’, Shifts, a more evolved type of human being, born with a photonova, or mantis, gland right in between the two cerebral hemispheres. This gland makes the Shifts channel the cosmic energy for their purposes and gives them otherworldly abilities, like super fast speed or teleport. It starts to develop when Shifts enter puberty, meaning they look like ‘normal’ children until they start to show signs of supernatural powers. A specific part of society, who found out that eating the mantis gland gives the eater enhanced speed, strength, agility and health, began to hunt the Shifts to eat this gland, eventually forming a cult-like congregation named the Messiahs. Agrell is one of them.
She was raised by mystical stories of her initiation, and how it would be such a special day and how incredible her life will be after that moment. What she doesn’t know, though, is what she has to do to live this incredible life, and when she realises she has to eat this gland from her cousin’s head, who’s just been cracked open, she is shocked. As if in a dream, she swallows it, but after she can’t cope with what she saw and did, and the following day she flees home.
In a different part of the city, Ilya, 19, is going back home. She lives in a makeshift shack in a shanty part of the city, along with two other boys riddled by blood corruption, a virus that more often than not is fatal. They are both nearing the end, Ilya has no expectations, she saw others before and she recognises the signs. She can only wait and hope they will go peacefully. They’ll do, not long after she comes back home, and Ilya is once again alone. She is a Shift, and when her parents realised it, they took her at the city borders and abandoned her. In the shantytown where she lives there are many more like her and the two boys.
Dozi lives alone at the edge of the Spritehood, Teslon city neighbourhood inhabited by Demifae, another group of enhanced humans. She left her village at the age of 11, looking for something more in life. She doesn’t hate Shifts, but she wants to become a Demifae. Eventually, Agrell, Ilya and Dozi will cross each other’s path, meet other people and set themselves on an almost impossible quest, but, spoiler alert, one of them will not make it.
The book itself is a good read: it’s imaginative, the narrative is fine and moves forward, the idea behind it is interesting. However, there are some faults: the timeline is confused and not always linear (Ilya, for example, is in the present, when the two boys living with her are dying, then she tells about the past and how she ended up there, but it’s not clear what happened first and what next), the characters are flat and don’t develop throughout the book. Lastly, despite being advertised as an LGBTQ+ book, there are no elements that can classify it as such, at least not in the first instalment. There are more, though, so this remains to be seen.
I found particularly commendable the specularity between some situations and characteristics of the Teslon world and ours, like how when Shifts transform they are often abandoned, just like many teenagers are disowned by their family when they come out as gay, or how the main mission of the Messiahs is to create a better world by eliminating all the Shifts, one by one, that compares to homophobic slurs, conversion therapy and discrimination towards LGBTQ+ people in our society, in the past but in the present too. I would have liked a deeper jab at this, but I hope it will happen in the next chapters of the series.

The Mantis Variant is available for purchase at: https://amzn.to/4cmeXpc

Book One of the Amazzi Warriors and Queens Series!

City of Thera, year 1672 BC. The Temple of Potnia is on fire, and Kynna, a young priestess of the Temple, and her grandmother only option is to flee the island. They think they will be safe if they reach the Mycenaeans, but they are wrong: first, they are stuffed, with many more women, in a wagon, are treated like animals and eventually they stop. But instead of being in Mycenaeans’ territory, they are at Marjan’s estate, where women and children are traded like slaves.
Kynna and her grandmother, just like the other women there, are subjected to rough treatment and oppression, until Kynna can’t take it any longer. One night, after another round of beating from Marjan himself, Kynna finds a way to fight him, and she stops him long enough to give time to herself and her grandmother to run away.
In Kynna’s veins there is Amazzi blood, fighting comes to her quite natural, but her lineage is also one of the reasons why she was being held captive: Amazzi women are warriors, not submissive women who would do anything for their men and whose only reason to exist is to bear children and clean the house. They are fierce, proud and capable warriors, and because of that, they won’t simply do what is expected of them. All the contrary, they will always fight. This is why there are people like Marjan, who capture, enslave, trade and beat them into submission.
Myrine is also an Amazzi. She is a serving warrior in Apasas, under General Ikippe, and her life goal is to enter the Leopard Unit, a highly trained elite force. The first step toward this goal is to become a trainer, and soon she is selected by the General herself to cover one of the two trainer positions available in her unit. While out on patrol, in the hunting meadows of her village, she discovers Kynna and her grandmother, both in a terrible shape. She takes them both back to the village and asks her grandmother to help nurse them back to health. Kynna’s healing is quicker than her grandmother, and, incapable of simply sitting on her hands, she starts training too. She is an Amazzi, after all, and despite she has years of preparation to catch-up, she does her best but she is not a natural and in an ideal setting her preparation would take a very long time.
Kynna and Myrine become very close to each other, to the point that their friendship is on the verge of becoming something more. But will being both Amazzi and getting along like a house on fire be enough to keep them together? Kynna dreams of a family of her own, Myrine wants to be a General. Can love be enough to grow old together?

‘The Women of Apasas’ is a very good story, despite some confusion of points of view – some chapters are told from Myrine or Kynna’s perspective, other in third person.
The plot is thick and realistic, well developed and paced, the characters have a deepness to them and are almost 3D, to the point that they pop out of the page. Despite the Ancient Greece setting, Reign also takes into consideration very modern personal challenges, such as being attracted by boys and girls at the same time.
Dialogues are good, but they probably could have done with some more polishing, and the final cliffhanger definitely leaves the reader with the need for more. I would also have done with ‘less telling, more showing’, like more descriptions of the environment around the characters, connecting scenes where I could see how the feelings of the two girls for each other were growing deeper, instead of just being told in a few lines of dialogue.
This aside, I am really looking forward to tackling Book Two very soon.

‘The Women of Apasas’ is available for purchase at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Women-Apasas-Elizabeth-Reign-ebook/dp/B097PTMKLB.

Book Two of the Marionette Series (New Release!)

As he steps into The Capitol headquarters, now an unlikely consultant to investigator (and childhood sweetheart) Holland Lyle, Fitch Farrow’s newfound freedom after his recent trial is short lived. While he’s officially tasked to help fight crime and his own gang the Bloody Hex, Capitol’s leader Maximus (in name and in deed) has other plans for him, to ensure his political vision for the city’s future comes to fruition. Fitch is given the seemingly impossible task to murder eight people in four weeks: despite his attempt to project a cleaner, crime-free image, he is still Marionette after all, he used to kill for a living… Swearing allegiance to The Capitol while still being involved with his gang is no mean feat and, as it turns out, his former boss Grimm would like to keep those eight people alive, involving Fitch and his brother Donovan in a cunning kidnapping plan inevitably doomed to fail. With too many strings to pull simultaneously and too many secrets to hide – especially from Holland Lyle – Fitch’s endurance will be put to the test, as he comes to terms with the fact that he cannot escape who he’s become…

Marionette was born here. An identity carved out of terror and pain so deep and dark it swallowed everything that came before.

‘Capitol Matters’ is as well written as its preceding instalment ‘Pulling Strings’, in Cameron’s direct, frill-free style, with characters voices consistently maintained throughout. When it comes to Cameron’s writing, there is a roughness and honesty to it that is as recognisable as a signature on paper. The story itself flows seamlessly and at a natural and consistent pace: while there are no major plot twists, events keep coming at you in a perfect mix of action, reflection and revelations.

We absolutely loved how the author has developed her main character Fitch Farrow, of whom we see the increasingly ‘human’ nature (he is a witch with telekinetic powers), as he slowly comes to realise that, while he cannot escape the life he lives, it is one he hasn’t chosen for himself. In this context, the love/hate relationship with his ‘spiritual’ father Grimm – a description that is hardly fitting given Grimm was the one introducing Fitch to a life of crime and murder – is particularly well developed, as Fitch is torn between wanting to free himself from this cruel man’s grip while also acknowledging that Grimm essentially made him. You cannot help but root for Fitch once again, and be as bitterly disappointed as he is when he suddenly realises he’s always been a pawn in someone else’s chess game. The best part of all this is – and it is down to Cameron’s skilful writing – that the author never tells us all these things directly, but they do come out organically through masterfully written dialogues.

We thoroughly enjoyed the book and read it in a few days, although we cannot help but wonder where the story is actually going… with two books published and two more to go, we feel that even if a series of actions take place within each book (there would not be a plot otherwise) not much is actually happening, making it a little hard to engage with the wider story and see where Cameron could take us next, or if two more books are even enough to complete the story arc.
However, this is not a good enough reason to abandon the journey Cameron is taking us on and we look forward to reading the remainder of the series.

On a parting note: to fully understand the story in all its nuances, we advise you to read Book One first. Check out our review of ‘Pulling Strings’ here.

‘Capitol Matters’ is available for purchase at: https://amzn.to/3RaszLs.

/This book contains graphic content and is best suited for adult readers./