Self-Discovery

Ten years after escaping a life of servitude behind the Veil, Wren is dragged back into the shimmering, cruel world of the fae. Her captor is Fionn, a silver-tongued bastard prince from her past who remembers the magic in her blood better than she does herself. Fionn is crafting a masterpiece of manipulation to usurp the throne, and he needs Wren’s rare, touch-based mind-reading to harvest the secrets of his treacherous brothers. Forced into a secret coven of gifted women, Wren must master forgotten, ancient magic to survive a world where every smile is a snare. Caught between her hatred for the monsters who stole her life and a growing, dangerous desire for the prince who promises to change everything, Wren must decide if she is Fionn’s greatest weapon, his equal partner, or merely the latest sacrifice in his climb to the crown.

Julian Pappas, the son of Greek immigrants, knows loss.  His twin brother enlists in the U.S. Army and dies in the final months of World War II under ambiguous circumstances.  The politics of the Sixties leave him estranged from his oldest daughter.  His beloved wife Thea dies just as they are planning their retirement.  In his final years of life, in a Milwaukee nursing home, Julian is paired with a Polish widower who has experienced loss and suffering even more devastating than his own. Somehow, a friendship evolves – cruelly disrupted by the Covid pandemic.  In the end, approaching his 99th birthday, Julian comes to appreciate that, even now, life is still capable of delivering happy surprises.

Vika is enjoying the off-season when there are no tourists to crowd her bookshop. But an early pink-blossomed tree and a viral ghost video kick up something older. With Ben’s practical magic and her basset hound's uncanny nose, Vika sets out to solve the mystery of the orchard bride. Dahlia Vale is no tragic bride. She once was a powerful witch who stayed behind to protect what she loved. But, now her binding is loosening, the knot she protects is unraveling. The violence of the past is seeping through. To save the orchard, Vika must untangle the truth that the town erased, but first she must win Dahlia’s trust. As shadows of the past bleed into the present, the knot Dahlia protects is unraveling. When it does, the past will come through hungry.

Shana isn’t just any squirrel—she’s a spunky, bilingual, Puerto Rican squirrel on a mission to become a famous Christmas squirrel! With quirky friends and wild adventures along the way, Shana is sure she knows exactly who she is and who she's meant to be … until she discovers a truth that changes everything. A joyful holiday story about identity, belonging, and the magic of embracing who you are.

*Notes on the Trouble Line* is a literary crime novel about a streetwise young horseracing handicapper who becomes entangled with rival race-fixing mobsters. In the summer of 1982, twenty-one-year-old Michael Kipness claims he won big just in time to flee New York City. The truth: he stole money from his grandfather's mob associates. With enough cash for a stake and a cross-country train ticket, Michael heads west seeking refuge with his friend and mentor, Alfred, who is dying of AIDS. Alfred sees Michael clearly - a troubled young man whose gifts as a handicapper (attention to detail, memory, imagination, disciple) make him a brilliant storyteller. He challenges Michael to pursue his passion for the races and to tell his story honestly. At Seattle's Longacres racetrack Michael discovers his gift for reading horses makes him valuable to dangerous men. A notorious race-fixer wants Michael’s help fixing races. A local gangster with a taste for violence claims Michael’s expertise for himself. Back in New York the men Michael stole from want their money and revenge. The FBI wants him to inform against them all. The danger Michael faces is both physical and moral. He must use his nerve and his ability to read a trouble line to outmaneuver the men who are determined to control his destiny. Along the way, he meets Lisa, an intuitive counterpart who sees Michael is ways he is yet to see himself. Caught between loyalty, survival and the longing to make one clean bet, he must discover what honesty means in a world built on secrets and bad odds. My first novel, *Gloria*, was published by Simon and Schuster and several foreign houses, including Rizzoli, Belfond, MacMillan and Goldman. It received praise from the *New York Times*, *Washington Post*, and the *Los Angeles Times*, among many others. I’ve won several literary awards, including the Rinehart Prize for Fiction from George Mason University. *Notes on the Trouble Line* is set in the authentic world of 1980s horse racing. It will appeal to readers of Stewart O'Nan's *City of Secrets*, Frederick Exley's *A Fan's Notes*, and Don DeLillo’s *Underworld.*

**Phoenix** - *Inner Strength, Resilience, & Renewal*  We all have a story, but many choose to tell only the highlights — the palatable parts. Snippets accepted by the public. The rest is tucked away in silence. But what if we told the whole truth? Not just the chapters we survived, but the ones that nearly ended us. Not just the memories softened by time, but the moments that seared themselves into our nervous system and shaped who we have become. The path that led here didn't move in a straight line. Sometimes the past arrives uninvited in the middle of what we think is an ordinary moment. Sometimes what is happening now only makes sense when you find its origins in the past. And if you pay close enough attention, you'll see how the present has been echoing history all along. We will cross continents and class lines, silence and spectacle through the journey of my life. We'll live through poverty and brush elbows with power, dive into spiritual initiation and survive institutional neglect, through moments where survival felt accidental and others where it felt deliberate. Motherhood, medicine, money, and myth all played their part. None of it fit neatly. And eventually there will be a place, a moment when timelines converge and everything changes. This isn't a story wrapped in inspiration or stitched together with perfect lessons. It's not a sanitized version of suffering that leaves the hard parts on the cutting room floor. It's the whole thing, the shards, scars, shadows, and all. A testimony not to tragedy, but to transformation. Because I was never supposed to be here, not like this. According to the statistics, the curve, the therapists, and the odds… I should have disappeared. But I didn't. Instead, I walked through fire until I became it. And somewhere in the ashes, my soul learned to sing. This is my story.

After centuries of searching, Chloe is certain she is the only person on Earth with magic. Working as a surgeon, she uses her hidden magic to save a critically injured child, but even so the girl dies. Chloe screams her loneliness and despair to the void of space. By answer, strangers appear and drag her through space and time, but their magic goes wrong and she is marooned on an uninhabited planet. As she tries to make her way to human civilization, she is rescued by a man wielding world-ending magic. She learns that she is a Ramarik, the magically powerful sub-species of humans that rule the galaxy. She is identified as a missing child that was conceived for a political purpose, but presumed dead after her kidnapping to the origin planet of Earth started a civil war. Her unexpected reappearance in the future was orchestrated by the fascist leaders of one of the ruling political parties. As she navigates a new language and unfamiliar customs, their intentions toward her seem increasingly nefarious. Her rescuer, the enigmatic leader of a rival party, seems to want to help her, but he is limited by law, customs, and belief in the effectiveness of the Ramarik’s democratic institutions. Caught between worsening panic attacks from her experiences and the emergence within her of a type of magic wrapped up in sex and mind control, Chloe must decide if she trusts herself enough to fulfill her magical potential and if she’s brave enough to open her heart.

In a world of gaslit opulence and rigid etiquette, Blythe is a haunting anomaly—a brilliant spiritualist whose soul is trapped between life and death within an automaton body. Her only link to the living is Tarn “Madcap” Carrigan, a sorcerer-alchemist extraordinaire whose penchant for scandal is always one bad day away from another fatal mystery. With otherworldly secrets and new magic to discover, Blythe and Tarn are bound by an inseparable partnership.

"King of this, King of that, All I know is he'd better come claim his Child!"         Aurora may be pregnant, but at the same time, she may not.   All the palace knows is that she claims she is with child, King Ron's, to be precise.   It doesn't sound possible.   They have never seen the man with their own two eyes.   The existence of a legend like Ron is even questioned: Is he even real?   But Aurora will find him one way or another.   And he will claim his child.

Après Ski \[ah-prey-skee\] His life is a total mess; hers isn’t. He’s never once been accused of overachieving and she doesn’t date losers. So when a potentially life-changing promotion is dumped on his lap, it appears his laid-back snow bumming days might be over, that is if he wants to prove he’s serious about her. *It might help if everyone would just be honest, but that doesn’t seem to be a running theme here*. Can Winston Mac change his ways before it’s too late? Before Erica is swept off her feet by country music’s hottest badboy at the most exclusive mountain party known to man? Will his old college rival spoil all the fun by setting him up and stealing the promotion out from under him? Will a knockout Norwegian supermodel show up just to test him in ways he didn’t think possible? *Love-triangle, anyone?* Or will his people-pleasing ways, ADHD and debilitating caffeine addiction get the better of him, forcing him to accept his role as a world-class loser? *Let’s hope not.*