Great taster at the beginning to spur the reader into turning the page. Such mastery of words, painting glorious pictures. Observant too – with such lines as (about death) ‘…is a clumsy thing of the darkness…discovered in the dawn.’ Terrific. Mystery from the onset, this is a story of action and surprise.
What a fabulous analogy for the range of emotions that drive us humans. Loved the easy to follow style and the relationships to which we can all relate, this in addition to the realistic characters, it can only be a success.
With no preview and a descriptive blurb consisting of only two sentences on Lulu, I took a chance on reading and reviewing Stephan Zimmermann and Bill House’s very short published work, The Dogwood Murders. It’s definitely a chance I’m glad I took as this is a very nice short story, and being that is probably it’s only drawback. It’s so good that it’s a shame that it is so short. This could definitely be developed into a nice novella or longer piece of work. I see it working great in a collection of similar short stories, that had I read, this particular story would have definitely stuck out with me.
Tightening the Knot by Amanda Hamm is all about relationships: Meredith’s relationship with her husband Greg, her sibling, her in-laws, her friends and to a lesser degree her co-workers and students. We know from the book’s blurb that Greg and Meredith go to a Tightening the Knot seminar but they don’t arrive there until Chapter 22. Until then, have fun getting to know Meredith and a whole cast of characters complete with their little quirks.
Today, Nick Popio of Lulu.com announced on the Lulu Blog that they are discontinuing the Published By You (PBY) option. Authors now have to use either the Published by Lulu option and list Lulu as the publisher and use a Lulu owned ISBN, or they have to purchase their own ISBN outside of Lulu to assign toward their book.
If Tim LeHaye and Michael Crichton had ever gotten together to write a book, it would probably end up being something like Anthony Policastro’s Absence of Faith. It’s part medical mystery and part religious thriller all rolled up in a plot of Christianity, Unexplained Phenomenon, New Age Beliefs, and Satanic Occults. It’s a white-knuckle read that would probably drive a Baptist preacher to an early death, and probably have Stephen King saying, “Now why didn’t I think of that?”
I was excited to get my copy of Altered Life, a detective thriller from Keith Dixon. He was nice enough to send me a copy all the way across the pond and I dove into it the same day it arrived. The description on the Lulu page hooked me: ‘Altered Life transplants the attitude and pace of the American private eye story into a contemporary English setting.’
In the year 2000, I worked as an assistant manager at Bookstar in Memphis. Once a month, we scanned every book in the entire store to make sure it was shelved properly and to pull returns which were shipped back to publishers for credit. Returns are books that the home office inventory control department deem as being overstocked or slow sellers. That’s right. The life of a book on your local B&N shelf is regulated like stale pastries being rotated in a bakery. Hardcover books that are about to be released in paperback might also come up as having to be returned, which is how I came upon one book in particular one slow evening. It was a lone hardcover copy of Matthew Stadler’s Allan Stein.
Here at the LL Book Review, we have reviewed a wide variety of books in a little over a year. Fiction, non-fiction, children’s and young adult, memoirs, and mysteries, to philosophical tomes that give us a new way of thinking. One thing all of the books reviewed have in common is they are all written by authors who believe in their work enough to pursue the hard road of self-publishing.
What can I say? It’s been a great year for me as an author and for my book, Stealing Wishes. As many know, I’ve documented my publishing journey over the past year here as the POD Diary. From pulling my hair out while creating my own book cover over a year ago to recording every [...]
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