Thrillers and Suspense

Fortunate

Fortunate
Title: Fortunate
ASIN: B00DGQ9DJO
Publisher:
Published: June 17, 2013
Author's Twitter: @AndrewJHSharp
Locked into a lonely future by a cruel twist of fate, Beth reaches breaking point, leaves her husband, and flees to faraway Zimbabwe. But there she finds herself at the centre of a deadly struggle for the ownership of a farm. From a guest of honour at the President’s table to a disastrous decision that betrays a good man, her fresh start threatens to end in catastrophe. Does the land and its painted rocks hold clues to atonement and re-found love?

Assessed 

Worlds Within Worlds

Worlds Within Worlds
Title: Worlds Within Worlds
ASIN: B00PMPNSIO
Publisher:
Published: November 28, 2014
Author's Twitter: @TahliaNewland
Imagine living in a multi-layered reality of separate but complimentary worlds—physical, mental, spiritual and technological—when a bully you thought safely tucked away in the cyberworld suddenly appears in your physical world looking suspiciously like your worst nightmare. Can you stuff him back into your computer? And if not, can the Magan Lord’s daughter from the fantasy book you’re editing, your dreams of a rabid beast, your visions of a Tibetan Yogi and your reawakened memories help you maintain your sanity and survive the darkest night of your life? Find out in the double award-winning metaphysical thriller Worlds Within Worlds when all this happens to author, editor and reviewer Prunella Smith. This inspirational, transrealist work—a mix of psychological thriller, fantasy and romance—has been awarded the Awesome Indies Seal of Excellence and a BRAG Medallion of Excellence in Independent Fiction. Worlds Within Worlds has a unique perspective on the nature of creativity. Its touch is light, its humour distinctive but it reaches deep into the nature of human experience.

Assessed 

The Losing Role

The Losing Role
Title: The Losing Role
ASIN: B003D7LVRS
Tags: ,
Published: March 19, 2010
In the last winter of WWII a failed German actor, Max Kaspar, is forced to join an absurdly desperate secret mission in which he must impersonate an enemy American officer. So Max cooks up his own fanatical plan — he’ll use his false identity to escape tyranny and war and flee to the America he’d once abandoned. The Losing Role is based on an actual false flag operation during 1944’s Battle of the Bulge that’s been made infamous in legend but in reality was a doomed farce. In all the tragic details and with some dark humor, this is the story of an aspiring talent who got in over his head and tried to break free. 2013 B.R.A.G. Medallion Honoree

Assessed for Awesome Indies

The CyberBardos

The CyberBardos
Title: The CyberBardos
ASIN: B00LICLCJ2
Publishers: ,
Published: July 2, 2014
“It felt like the universe was looking at me. He said he and I were as one.” The mysterious I AM sends morning greetings through media devices to all citizens of the world. The messages unleash humanity’s greatest hopes and most terrifying fears. Concerned the message may have an alien source, governments debate shutting down the World Net. To add to the cultural commotion, Jesus, a self-created entity, has escaped from the virtual New Jerusalem to spread the message, “I am the one behind the envelope.” Wizard cyberreality designer Sunshine Borden and high- tech toy saleswoman Rama Schuur go to extreme measures to discover the source of these messages. What they find is so unexpected that their lives will be forever transformed. Simultaneously, a killer driven by an internal voice hunts down those he believes allowed I AM to enter our world. A continuation of the futuristic thriller I Am the Other, The CyberBardos is a novel about the search for existential meaning, McKenna’s transcendental object at the end of time, mystical sex, and unexpected love.

Assessed for Awesome Indies Book Awards

The Lupane Legacy

Lupane Legacy, The
A story of international intrigue, of the ghosts of Africa’s history, of tangled family ties, of betrayal, revenge, and redemption, and of two people finding a new start. In 1983 Patrick Khumalo, a five-year-old boy out gathering firewood for his mother in rural Zimbabwe, is the only survivor of one of Robert Mugabe’s notorious Gukurahundi massacres. White Rhodesian settlers who live nearby take the traumatized child in and raise him with their own children. In 2012, Patrick is an archivist for Robert Mugabe’s government. Everyone knows him as the ideal public servant, removed from politics and passion. But Patrick has a secret life, into which he draws Constance, the impulsive, idealistic girl he grew up with, now a classical violinist living in Austria. On the other side of the world, in Washington, D.C., ex-Marine Joshua Denham is trying to find his feet in civilian life as a newly wealthy man with political aspirations. At an Austrian Embassy concert where his cousin Constance is performing, a woman who’s been haunting him for the past year—a private banker he last saw in Kyrgyzstan—sits down at the end of his row. Perhaps he’s found what he was looking for . . . but Devon isn’t quite what she seems. Constance is acting strangely, too. After she leaves abruptly for the airport, Joshua gets a desperate call from her estranged father, Roger: Constance is in trouble. Joshua flies to meet Roger in South Africa, only to find that Roger has his own dark secret. Devon finds herself drawn after them to an abandoned farmhouse in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland District, and an explosive reckoning with the ghosts of the Rhodesian Bush War. The Lupane Legacy, the first in a series of novels of international suspense and intrigue, is a thriller for the thinking reader, a nuanced exploration of the history of postcolonial Africa as well as of Beltway politics and diplomacy. It’s a story of tangled family ties, of betrayal, revenge, and redemption, and of two people finding their way toward each other, and a new beginning.

Assessed for Awesome Indies

Forgive Me, Alex

Forgive Me, Alex
Title: Forgive Me, Alex
ASIN: B006NTNQP8
Published: December 18, 2011
Author:
Author's Twitter: @Lane_Diamond
Two men, two methods, two motivations, one darkness--step inside the twisted mind of a killer, and of the man determined to end him at any cost. Tony Hooper stands in shadow across the street, one amongst many in the crowd of curiosity-hounds gathered to watch a monster's release. Seventeen years after Mitchell Norton, "the devil," terrorized Algonquin, Illinois on a spree of kidnapping, torture and murder, the authorities release the butcher from psychiatric prison. Tony longs to charge across the street to destroy Norton--no remorse--as if stepping on a cockroach. Only sheer force of will prevents his doing so.

Assessed for 

Hand of Chaos

Hand of Chaos
Title: Hand of Chaos
ASIN: B00F64S25A
Published: November 24, 2013
Author:
Author's Twitter: @jayhamlet
A necromancer is out for revenge, leaving a trail of bodies around DC. Can Anna and her dysfunctional team of occult-powered government agents stop him before it's too late? Exhausted, cynical, and confused, Anna is always there to report for duty. She’s part of a clandestine government team that defends the nation against supernatural terrorism — a job that understandably leaves her life in shambles and drives her to drink a little more than she should. Toss in a fear of intimacy with a desire to have friends and lovers like a normal person and, well, Anna is a troubled soul wrapped in a special agent with arcane, magical powers. Waking up hungover at five-thirty in the morning with a zombie-infested apartment building in the heart of DC to deal with, she knows she’s got the makings of the worst morning possible. Her team is its own challenge. A battle-scarred Nigerian shaman, a bookish shape-shifter, an inept summoner, and a brilliant but cantankerous wizard round it all out. Her partner, an immortal and cursed Paladin, is the only person she knows more jaded than herself. Their target, Ethan Morgan, is one pissed off necromancer. His brother was KIA by his own government, the victim of an experimental magical weapon they decided to test on the battlefield. Now bent on revenge and sponsored by one of hell’s most powerful demons, Ethan has a plan of his own to make us all pay.

Assessed for Awesome Indies

I AM the Other

I AM the Other
Title: I AM the Other
ASIN: B00JKML2EW
Published: April 8, 2014
A series of messages are sent from an unknown source and leaders in government, religion and technology attempt to decipher the messages while trying covertly to use the messages to their advantage. John Tennyson, President of the United States is concerned about national security yet for Sunshine Borden, the world-class programmer, it represents a technological puzzle to be solved. In the midst of this confusion, a killer stalks victims and forces Sunshine to leave his laboratory to track him down.

Assessed for Awesome Indies

Listed on the previous Awesome Indies Website in the “Rough Cuts” Category.

This was a special page for fiction in the rough and included uncut diamonds found during the assessment process. These books did not receive “Awesome Indies Approval”  but were considered to have a spark of brilliance, perhaps in their ideas, world-building, or some new approach. The issues that kept them from the “Approved” list are things that most readers would not notice as the good qualities overshadow any inadequacies. Awesome Indies stated: (quote) “Rough Cuts are here because the author cannot afford the cost of the line editor needed to tidy it up, and we don’t want genius to be missed because the author hasn’t a huge budget.”

 

Tea Cups & Tiger Claws

TEA CUPS & TIGER CLAWS
Title: TEA CUPS & TIGER CLAWS
ASIN: B00HKN1J3M
Published: January 8, 2014
Author:
First comes the miracle and then comes the madness. The miracle is the birth of identical triplets, and the madness is all about money, of course. The year is 1916 and the newborn baby girls have become pint-size celebrities. Unfortunately, this small portion of fame soon leads to a much larger portion of greed, and the triplets are split up—parceled out to the highest bidders. Two of the girls go to live in a hilltop mansion. The third girl isn’t so lucky. She ends up with a shady family that lives in an abandoned work camp. That’s how their lives begin: two on top, one on the bottom, and all three in the same small town. And when their worlds collide, as they must, the consequences are extreme. “Tea Cups & Tiger Claws” spans three generations and takes the reader from a shantytown to a gilded mansion, from sacrificial love to the darkest of human impulses.

Assessed