Category: self-published

Book Five of the ‘Ro & Angel Trent’ Series by Peter Draper. Out Friday, 29th!!

“Taking the King’s shilling” originally meant entering the Navy. And since this wasn’t always done voluntarily, clear drinking glasses of which one could see the bottom were invented, as one of the tricks used to make men “take the King’s shilling” was to slip it into their ales and let them grasp it once they finished their drinks. At that point it was too late to turn back. But how does all this relate to our story?

Angel and Ro’s new journey begins in a pub named ‘The King’s Shilling’: Marvin, head of security, is there to meet them. But since it’s too loud, they agree to meet again the following day in a quieter environment over breakfast. In addition to salmon and eggs, Ro also receives a box that belonged to her now defunct mother. Inside there are some postal orders and a piece of paper with three names on it, the deed to a house, a small envelope with a lock of hair.
When Angel and Ro go and visit the house, they are pleasantly surprised by how well kept the garden is, including immaculate flower beds. Impossible, they think, the house has been abandoned for at least 40 years. But as the lovely neighbour Edith kindly explains, there’s a woman who comes once a week to tend to the house and a man who takes care of the garden once a month. The kind and lovely neighbour, however, is not as straight-forward as it seems, and, among the many things she forgot to mention, there is also the minor fact that she actually died of childbirth with her baby in 1987. Something’s definitely ‘pen and ink’ here!

This new instalment of the Angel & Ro saga is the best one so far. There is the usual mix of mystery and sarcasm, dressed up with love triangles and gulped with a hearty swig of grog, but this time there are no deaths (or, at least, not for “unnatural” causes), no guns or criminal behaviour involved. All the contrary. This is a cosy mystery that surfaces from the past with a nice, heart-warming resolution. It’s an intimate story that preserves the essence of Draper’s writing and style but strikes more profound chords within the reader. A really good book and a nice intermission in the saga.

‘Taking The King’s Shilling’ is available for purchase (from this Friday) at: https://bit.ly/3OlTKkS

A Supernatural Tale By River Wolf

Jones is fundamentally a reject: he is not popular in the community as he wasn’t in school, he is unable to create significant interactions with his peers, even less if they are girls, he listens to dark metal music and all its sub-genres that no-one besides him seems to know of or care for. He has a menial job at the local recycling depot, lives in a social housing estate that offers shelters to lowlives and mentally challenged people. There is nothing about him that can possibly attract people.
One night, after purchasing an old stereo at his favourite second-hand shop, he finds a weird radio show, that seems to be broadcasting murders from the future. It can’t be real, right? How can anyone know what will happen in the next few hours, including names, events and locations, and broadcasting it on radio? But curiosity can be a powerful motivation and Jones decides to go to the place he heard of on the radio, to find himself in the right place at the right time and prevent a killing. Here starts Jones’ journey into his supernatural psychic power, which will end with an explosive event and a very tight epilogue.

We are not completely convinced by this book, especially the beginning: Jones is a nice and relatable character, but there is a very big chunk that only describes what a loser he is. After the third chapter, this only becomes repetitive and doesn’t add much to the story. The same goes for the long diversion on music and genres and sub-genres and names of bands that might be real or fictional. Loved the idea, though: it embodies the genre perfectly and has great potential – the voice that Jones hears on the radio belonging to an old lady who is in a hospice in a vegetative state, and owned the power before him – but it’s not fully developed in its current state.

‘Secrets And Demons’ is available for purchase at: https://amzn.to/4djtr8O

A Contemporary Sapphic Novel By Samantha L. Valentine

Casey, from London, and Holly, from Australia, meet at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, both of them admiring the same painting. They start talking and find out they are both temporarily based in Berlin. They also have a lot in common and they get along easily. What’s wrong with dating for a bit? But their reciprocal feelings grow to the point they start making plans for the future. Sometimes, though, love is not enough, and Casey leaves abruptly.
Flash forward 11 years. Life moved on and Casey is with Eva, her fiancée, shopping for their wedding, while Holly is at home in Australia with Tom, her partner, and Jack, her stepson. Neither Casey nor Holly are happy with their relationships and they both (unexpectedly) end up in front of the same painting that made them meet years before. Older and unhappy, they finally have some time to discuss what happened and where they are in life right now, and while life moves on around them, so do their feelings for each other.
Despite being a rom-com with a predictable ending (girl gets girl eventually), I have to say it’s a quite good read. The prose is neat, clear and well paced, the plot is full of events and twists and the characters are well designed, all of them, including the mean ones. It’s a modern fairytale for adults: who doesn’t dream of a romantic chase around half of the world? It’s one of those easy page-turners that you can read during life’s ‘little downtime moments’ (waiting for the bus, queuing for coffee, killing time before your delivery arrives), because it’s very easy to get back into and it moves so fast that it does hook you up time and time again. Highly recommended!

‘Meet Me In Belin’ is available for purchase at: https://amzn.to/3ZvHqoQ

A sci-fi triller by the author of ‘Project Eight Ball’.

John Turiano and quantum experiments and research are back! This time, though, there are no time jumps – yet…
The story begins in an uncomplicated way: Marie is waiting in a bar for her best friend Kimbra, who is running late. This is quite out of character for Kimbra, but the two have been besties since 6th grade, so she can’t turn her down. But when, after 2 glasses of wine, Kimbra doesn’t show up, Marie decides to call it a night. She is not sure how to feel: upset? Angry? Disappointed? It doesn’t matter. It’s already late, no point waiting any longer, better head home, go to sleep and sort it out tomorrow.
Problem is: there are no more tomorrows for Marie, because that same night she is killed in her own apartment by a mysterious intruder.
Kimbra is very upset by the news, even more so when she is questioned by the police: Marie was in that bar waiting for her, and the messages came from Kimbra’s phone. The problem is that, after a quick search around her house, Kimbra realises that she is not in possession of her phone anymore. And this opens the door to a whole new line of enquiry: did Marie have any enemies? Why someone went as far as stealing Kimbra’s phone to lay a trap for her? A scorned lover perhaps? A jealous co-worker? The possibilities at this point are endless, but Detective Rizzo, in charge of the enquiry, will use Kimbra’s help to explore them all and give Marie justice.
The road is not straightforward, and more than one ghost of their school past will resurface, until the mystery is unravelled. Or is it?

Turiano is back in full force, and he is testing his skills with this thriller with a hint of sci-fi. The cliffhanger end leaves the door open to more, but for now the only sci-fi element is constituted by Kimbra’s line of work – she runs psychological tests at the Quantum Thunder Company and uses one of the tests subjects, who can read minds and connect with people’s pasts, to answer to a few questions about Marie’s death. ‘Dark Presence’ a well-constructed, action-packed thriller, with some very interesting plot twists and plenty of space for a welcome sequel. Turiano’s writing has significantly improved from his last work; the plot is linear, concise but never boring. A great creative effort overall, an intriguing story that was a pleasure to read. Looking forward to more!

‘Dark Presence’ is available for purchase at: https://amzn.to/40eqpQn

A Fast-Paced, Engaging Adventure Novel by Kieran Fanning

The Arrival by Kieran Fanning is a fast-paced, engaging adventure which asks us to consider some interesting theological questions, not least – if the second coming of Jesus were to happen, would anyone believe it?

Sarah is a teenager who would rather be spending time with her friends at the cinema than with her out-of-touch archaeologist father, but when she is sent to visit him and he takes her to a tunnel drilling site which has revealed a remarkable new discovery, she is pulled into a mystery that she becomes desperate to solve. Declan, a local boy who lives in the village next to the site, is lonely and struggling for friends. When he is dared to steal a hard hat from the tunnel site he then find himself mixed up in the strange series of events that begin to unfurl as this new discovery takes on a life of it’s own and becomes something entirely new.

The story moves along at a great pace, and pulls you in from the outset. From the moment the strange archaeological find is discovered, the story twists and turns in a very engaging way. The characters are all well-drawn; the way that Fanning pulls together and intertwines Sarah and Declan’s threads is very adept. I found Sarah and Declan to both be relatable and believable, and I was invested in their stories as they go on their incredible journeys that lead to the dramatic conclusion. There are elements of the spiritual, the supernatural, and the theological in the story and these work well within the context of the story. Fanning’s writing is tight and well-constructed, and respects its readers by embedding intelligent themes and ideas.

Ultimately, the book leaves us with more questions than answers, and, I must admit, at the end I was hoping for a little more by way of explanation for all the different elements of the puzzle. But, without giving too much away, there is clearly room for a sequel, and so perhaps that is where we will find these answers.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and the questions that it asks of its readers. A mystery that offers a fast-paced, flowing narrative, and keeps you hooked til the end, this story is highly recommended.

‘The Arrival’ is available for purchase at: https://amzn.to/4bOXJzE

/Review By Robin Stevens/

A Brand New Novel From the Author of the ‘King of Gravesend’ Series

When we thought that Ro and Angel could finally have some well deserved downtime, a mysterious accident upturns their conviction.
The story begins in the UK, with William Mitchell, who has been killed in his cell, and his cellmate, Uwak DeLeon, who is found dead too. How could this be related to Ro and Angel’s life in the Philippines? It will take some time, but it will get clear.
At the moment of the prison accident, Ro and Angel are busy with some old friends, the Kurti family, who has just landed from Albania. Their daughter, Besi, is undergoing surgery in the Philippines so, after the initial happiness of being reunited and having a nice holiday ahead of them, there is the more pressant issue of logistic to tackle: the hospital check-in and the pre-op checks.
In the meantime, in the UK, Rosie Go, daughter of Dennis Go, a rich Taiwanese business man involved in human trafficking, slavery, gambling and drugs, is landing at Heathrow Airport. With the death of DeLeon, the UK side of the business is now exposed and requires immediate action. But what looks like an easy job for Rosie, turns out to be a bigger and more dangerous headache than what it looked like and Rosie’s head is on the line, literally. How will she get herself out of this mess, and how are Ro and Angel involved in all this?
It’s always a pleasure to meet Ro&co. again! Book after book, Draper managed to create and polish these characters to the point that they all pop out the pages, seeming so real that you feel part of the story too. Despite their bizarre adventures, they never lose their edge nor their sharp sense of humour. Dialogues are impeccable, vivid and realistic, never dull and with a nice flow. The plot is always well crafted, balanced between the two storylines (the good ones on one side and the bad ones on the other), giving both of them the right visibility, moving both of them forward at the same pace and never revealing too much or not enough of either side.
Reading one of Draper’s book is always a pleasure, it’s like going back home after a long journey: you know you won’t stay for long, but the pleasure you get is enough to last you until next time.
We don’t know anything about his future intentions (at the present moment), but it’s not the first time that he surprises us with the news a new book not long before it’s release!

A queer, historical fantasy, romance book set in an alternative 1899 NYC

Calix Addington is left holding a book bought by his playboy-esque friend, Lawton, at a book auction. Lawton falls foul of some seedy characters and hands the book off to Calix as they flee.
The book is set in New York City in 1899, and Calix goes on to form a magical triumvirate with previously estranged couple Ethaniel and Aubrey as they attempt to unravel what the magical book portends.
This book was well outside my usual genres, and I found its whimsy something of a struggle. Starling didn’t draw me into the characters’ arcs, perhaps because of the nature of the book, a hybrid historical fantasy with gay male characters. Of the three main characters, I found Ethaniel the most likeable, while Calix and Aubrey both had annoying personas. Calix was too naïve and trusting, while I never quite understood Aubrey’s life.
The magic throughout the book had no form, purpose, or provenance. It was ethereal,
something to do with patterns in cloth perhaps, but with no raison d’etre. It existed because it existed, and I finished the book with no clear idea how it worked or why it needed to be in world.
Similarly, the romance that develops between the three main characters felt contrived, haphazard, and somewhat strange. I accept that the way it developed might be normal in gay male circles, and I imagine it will appeal to lovers of the “why choose” trope, perhaps.
Starling must be an educated person, because the book left me floundering many times for the meanings of some of the words, and I’m fairly intelligent. Thank goodness for Kindle’s lookup feature, although even that didn’t know what “effulgent” meant, and I had to Google it. At times, the prose felt too clever for its own good, but there’s no doubt that Starling has a way with words. Most of the time, the writing felt of a superior quality to the run-of-the-mill fare that exists everywhere, although that was occasionally turned on its head by clumsy phrases such as “whom before,” coupled with a few typos that stood out more because of the high quality of the writing.
The book ends on a blatant cliffhanger with a note that it will continue in Book 2. For lovers of eclectic, intellectual gay magical fiction, this might be worth a look. In the end, it was too far out of my comfort zone to say I enjoyed it, but the writing is of a high standard for the most part, and that might be enough to make it more enjoyable to readers more comfortable with the genre.

‘Coup du coeur’ is available for purchase at: https://bit.ly/3L7mIDn.

(Review by Hayley Price)

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.