Sweetest Darkness is the kind of book that makes you remember why you love to read. It features an unusual locale, interesting characters and a terrific twisty story, all set in motion by Leslie Lutz’s wonderfully crafted writing. Protagonist Quinn O’Brien and his compatriots come off the page as real people with actual fears, real-world […]
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J.B. Abbott has a winner on their debut cozy mystery. Katie’s a great protagonist. She’s just getting over the death of her Mom when her Dad becomes the prime suspect in a murder that shocks the Pacific Northwest hamlet of Cedar Bay. Having assumed her mother’s old job at the local jigsaw puzzle company, Katie
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Robot illustration AI generated by Adobe Illustrator – AI seems to have as much trouble with fingers as a lot of artists I know. A colleague of mine is quite the creative – he’s done screenplays and published a non-fiction book. He does 3D modeling work and is a heck of a video artist and
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By way of full disclosure – Larry Enmon is a friend. He’s given grand advice on my own work as a fellow member of the DFW Writers Workshop, so yeah, this review might be a bit biased. That said, Larry writes really satisfying old-school thrillers and Biowatch is no exception. Troy Bishop is a solid
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The Burning Tree is one of those rare books that is a terrific story that is so well told you find yourself enveloped by the world and the characters and their adventure. Helen Dent has masterfully crafted a tale with a voice that fits the place and the people who populate the hamlet of Bishop’s
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With apologies to Charles Addams Thing breathed a contented sigh as Esmeralda buffed the nail on his ring finger. As a disembodied hand, he didn’t exactly know how sighing worked, but the fat muscle at the base of his thumb relaxed, and he counted that as a sigh. Esmie chatted while she worked. She knew
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For the past several years, I’ve been on the steering committee for DFWCon, the DFW Writers Conference, put on by the members of the DFW Writers Workshop. Before the pandemic, we’d get 350-400 attendees and had some great keynote speakers. Each year, it takes us several months of weekly meetings to gather agents to take
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I’ve been an art guy my whole life. Ad art guy on my high school newspaper. Award-winning cartoonist on my college paper. Illustrator. Art director. Bar napkin artist. I’ve almost always drawn. So when the book deal came through, I asked if I could submit some cover designs for consideration as a part of the
Last Friday morning, I received the call every writer dreams of answering. I’d been trading emails with a publisher over the previous month. This time the phone rang. “We want to buy your book.” “Our editor loved it, and when she loves something, we listen.” “Her words were ‘I want to read more from this
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I recently had a publisher ask me to submit the manuscript of a novel I’ve been pitching. This book has been years in coming. It feels like I’ve worked on it forever. The characters have practically become family members. It’s been through dozens of drafts and rewrites. Writers always hear that, but nobody wants to