Review by Matt Schiariti

New York City Detective Frank Mallory always gets the weird cases. He and his partner, Alberto ‘Gunner’ Gennaro get pulled into another one when the body of a teenager is found brutally murdered.  What makes it weird?  ‘This one came with notes.’  Among the remains, note cards featuring the insane ramblings of a madman are found, the body set up as if on display.  Another weird one for the odd couple duo from the Bronx.  Things will get even stranger when more bodies are found, each with their own set of note cards, each with a strange message.  Dante’s Inferno?  Demons?  A veteran fixer for ‘The Company’ finding himself the targeted for elimination?  How do they tie up?  Mallory and Gunner work the case.  They do The Job.  But when things get personal for Mallory, the man who believes in facts and facts alone may have to tap into something bigger than himself to catch a madman.

This book was fantastic.  It was one of those pleasant surprises that crop up every once in a while.  I didn’t know what to expect going in.  I’d never heard of the author before, and the Dante’s Inferno trope in the book blurb left me wondering if I’d enjoy it or not.  But I did enjoy it.  I enjoyed it a lot.

Mallory and Gunner are a fun pair of characters.  The former is a dedicated family man, son of a cop, Yankees fan, music lover, even keeled.  The latter is rough around the edges, a confirmed horndog, likes to crack wise, and is more prone to believe in the unexplainable than his partner.  They complement each other nicely, each with their own strengths, and their banter alone is worth the price of admission.  The back and forth is oftentimes laugh out loud funny.

Ryan’s writing style is fluid and descriptive.  He knows when to keep the fat trimmed and when to put in extra detail.  Reading City of Woe, I could feel myself in NYC.  His descriptions of sights, sounds, places, and people made me feel as if I were following right behind Mallory and Gunner.  Ryan also knows when to get downright creepy.  Some of the breadcrumbs left behind for the cops to find are disturbing.  The pacing is excellent and the plot is tight.  Seriously, this is one addictive page turner.  There is a bit of the supernatural to be found.  That makes it a bit different than the standard police procedural/thriller and also made me want to turn pages to see where it was he was taking the story.

So, what are you getting when you pick up City of Woe?  A fast-paced, engaging, well-plotted, and smoothly written mystery with a bit of supernatural garnish, featuring fantastic, lifelike characters that jump off the page, and excellent dialogue.  At 350+ pages, it’s not short by any stretch of the imagination, but you may just want to try and read it in one sitting; it’s that compulsive and that fun.

Ryan’s now on my radar and I’d love to read more Mallory and Gunner novels.  Great stuff.

Title:  City of Woe

Author:  Christopher Ryan

Genre:  Paranormal Mystery

Publication:  CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (July 17, 2012)

Price:  $2.99 (Nook), $7.99 (Kindle), $8.99 (paperback)

Author’s Website:  http://chrisryanwrites.wordpress.com/

Review by Matt Schiariti

Hot on the heels of the explosive conclusion of Eville, Serene, Moody, and Alex find themselves on the road, evading prosecution from the powers that be.  Of course, nothing is ever easy for Alex or the trio, not so long as Serene is involved.  They’ll find themselves not only chased by Union of Elder Lords officers, the enigmatic Cyclops Daniel Hammet and his mute Spaniard partner, Vega, but the vampire mafia (the Cosa Nosferatu), goblin mercs, and a dangerous assassin as well.  The trio’s journey will take Alex and his newfound friends into even stranger new worlds and more perilous danger.  Par for the course when in the employ of Serene Necrosia.

Eville’s Most Wanted has a different feel than its predecessor.  The over-the-top dialogue and crazy cast of characters, both old and new, are still evident, but this installment in what seems to be at least a trilogy has a more urgent, action-oriented, and serious undercurrent to it.  The constant friction between Alex, the wise-cracking, moody, and ever-stubborn Serene is prevalent but since they’re being chased by mysterious, ill-meaning powers, it gives the book a bit of a darker feel.  The stakes have been raised and the dangers for the trio have been increased.

Peterson’s verbose and descriptive style is on display once again in this installment, usually to good effect but there was a time or two where I thought things carried on a little too long for my liking.  There was an action sequence (a siege of sorts) that took nearly twenty pages to tell and took me a bit out of the story.   This would be one of my very few disenchantments with the book.  I felt that the pacing suffered a bit in the middle because of this.  It’s a minor issue and in no means a deal-breaker.  In addition, Most Wanted didn’t quite have the ‘quirky newness’ that Eville had.  Alex is no longer the sole point of view character, as Peterson puts us into the heads of Vampire lords who work behind the scenes, as well as the cycloptic investigator as he works to track down Necrosia and company.  Of course these scenes were handled well and featured great dialogue and characterization but I still missed the crazy experiments gone awry that made Eville laugh out loud funny.

Minor issues aside, Eville’s Most Wanted is another imaginative and well-told story from a very talented author.  The cast is great and the story is engrossing and features a nice mix of new locales, lore, back story, and an odd (in a good way) mix of characters both old and new.  It definitely left me wanting to read the next installment and I look forward to seeing what kind of trouble Moody, Serene and Alex get into next.

Title:  Eville’s Most Wanted

Author:  Holand Peterson

Genre:  Science Fiction/Fantasy

Publication:  CreateSpace IPP (April 24, 2012)

Price:  $2.99 (Kindle), $11.99 (paperback)

Author’s Website:  http://www.holandpeterson.com/

Review by Matt Schiariti

Alex Hobbs is a man down on his luck.  Summarily kicked out of the house by unloving parents at an early age, things aren’t getting any better for him now.  He’s just lost his job at the video store, his girlfriend has dumped him, and a thoughtless neighbor’s cooking turkey exploded and burned down his apartment.  To say he’s had a bad stretch of luck is an understatement.  He turns to an employment agency to find work…ANY work.  The strange man at the agency gives what seems to Alex as the best opportunity he’s heard in a long time; a research assistant for a brilliant scientist.  Alex jumps at the chance, willing to do almost anything…

Enter Serene Necrosia, the brilliant if not completely eccentric scientist looking to fill the vacant research assistant’s job.  Thing is, she’s kind of been killing off her staff in what has been an epic rate of attrition for quite some time…purely by accident of course.  Alex Hobbs seems the perfect man to fit the bill.  Necrosia, along with her Hunchback housekeeper, cook, and jack of all trades, the caustic female Quasimoody, will expose Alex to the crazy and magical town of Eville, where creatures of myth and legend walk around in broad daylight…and sometimes only at night.  Adjusting to the strange, magical town won’t be Alex’s only problem.  He’ll have grow used to giant spiders, disembodied brains who speak through Etch-Ah-Sketches and something not of this earth.  A guy’s gotta eat, right?

Eville is one of the most imaginative and all-around fun books I’ve read in a VERY long time.  Peterson has created a pocket universe in which the very extraordinary goes hand in hand with the very ordinary.  He brings to life hunchbacks, werewolves, Elder Lords, vampires, the full gamut of the strange and archetypal supernatural creatures and gives them a place to go about their business.  But that’s only part of it.  The best parts, the parts of this book that shine the most happen right inside the Necrosia Mansion.  Lab equipment out of a black and white horror movie, disembodied brains, strange noises, dark corridors…the bulk of the book takes place in the weird and wonderful setting of the generations’ old house.

It’s not the settings that make this book stand out, though.  It’s the dialogue and the characters that make Eville such a fun ride.  The interplay between Alex, ‘Moody’, Serene, and the rest of the minor players is nothing short of fantastic and make the book what it is.  Moody is constantly busting Alex’s chops with witty and biting one-liners.  Serene’s dialogue is so over the top campy and at times is flat out hysterical.  In a word, the dialogue and character interactions in Eville are golden.  So much fun it’s not even, well, funny.

Peterson’s style is overly flamboyant as well and tends to be wordy but it works for this book.  When telling a story that involves such an odd and colorful cast of characters, I don’t think a bare bones writing style would have worked nearly as well.  The passages are descriptive, the action flows well, and the scenes are all described in vivid detail.

It’s difficult to classify Eville.  Is it a comedy?  It IS laugh out funny, so I’d say yes.  Is it an adventure of sorts?  For Alex, the proverbial fish out of normal waters, I’d also say yes.  It blends so many genres that I’d be hard pressed to stick a tag on it…except for this:  it’s fantastic and as fun as anything I’ve ever read.  As it turns out there’s a sequel and I immediately purchased it after turning the last page.

If you’re looking for a wild, fun, well-told ride, with great writing and some of the most interesting characters speaking some of the best dialogue you’re likely to come across, you shouldn’t overlook Eville.  Non-stop fun.

Title:  Eville

Author:  Holand Peterson

Genre:  Science Fiction/Fantasy

Publication:  CreateSpace (August 1, 2011)

Price:  $2.99 (Kindle), $10.79 (paperback)

Author’s Website:  http://www.holandpeterson.com/

This was a “grab you by the seat of your pants” kind of story.  It was engaging from the beginning, starting off with an action sequence that also had emotional depth.  The characters felt like real people, and their reactions and relationships were genuine.  Cherry’s life felt real to me, and I was rooting for her the whole way through.

The one thing I would’ve liked was more background information about the world and Cherry’s family in particular.  I will definitely be keeping up with the rest of the series and I hope that more is revealed in due time!  This is one of the most intriguing and well-written paranormal/urban fantasy stories I’ve read lately.

Title:  Runaway Dead (A Cherry Garcia Investigation)

Author:  Leanne Fitzpatrick

Genre:  Paranormal Fantasy

Publication:  Leanne Fitzpatrick (January 6, 2013)

Price:  $0.99 (Kindle)

Review by Matt Schiariti

John Ray: prodigal son of the infamous Tony Ray crime family.  He’d always wanted to be cut from a different cloth.  He was the one they were most proud of.  The straight shooter, the legitimate one.  Top honors in school, university degree.  He’d left home for over two decades, looking to wipe the grime of the family name off of himself.  To take things one step further, he turned his father’s high-end used car business into a completely legit and successful operation.  John Ray thought he’d separated himself from the old ‘family business’.  That is, until a dead prostitute is found in the trunk of one his cars along with 50K in counterfeit money, and his best friend and employee, Freddie, is suspected of the crime.  Not only does John take it upon himself to clear his best friend’s name, but he’s also trying to prove that the fake money wasn’t his.   It doesn’t help his cause any that his father was well known for running counterfeit money back in his heyday.  There’s only one person in the police force who believes him:  Denise Denton.  When his brother was murdered, she was the only one there for him.  Two years later, they’re sleeping together.  Life for her isn’t about to get any easier either when she’s the only alibi he’s got.  When you’re around John Ray, his past has a habit of rubbing off on you.

This book wasn’t quite what I was expecting.  I was actually thinking it was going to be a police procedural, dealing heavily with the case from the police side of the fence, especially since the main love interest, Denise, is a police officer.  What it turned out to be, however, was more of an amateur sleuthing novel.

John Ray is the central figure in the story.  The majority of it gets told from his perspective.  As a result, there isn’t much police procedure involved.  In fact, just about all of the investigation is done by John himself.  The police only seemed to enter into the equation for the odd interrogation session here and there and when John gives them information he finds as he sniffs around trying to clear his friend of the murder.  Denise is totally taken out of the situation for obvious conflict-of-interest reasons.

Insofar as the characters go, John is fleshed out well enough, being that he’s the central character.  Frankly, anybody familiar with The Godfather, especially Michael, should be able to see the parallels here.  The one good son in a crime family, trying to make good in spite of his family’s sordid past and name, yet still finding himself thrown into the middle of it. Sins of the father, etc., etc.  But I found the problem to be with the secondary characters.  They’re just kind of ‘there’.  Denise being a cop doesn’t enter into the story much, and she doesn’t get enough page time for her character to develop.  The same can be said for the two lead officers on the case, Baron and Steele.  They’re just kind of ‘there’, for lack of a better word.  Connie, John’s distant relative and employee at Tony Ray’s Motors, does benefit from more page time, and as such is probably the most fleshed out of all the backup players.

While the writing is solid overall, it’s told in the present tense.  I won’t say that I dislike present tense but in the interest of full disclosure, I’m not entirely comfortable reading it.  That is my own personal preference, though, and shouldn’t be taken as a knock against the author.  To continue with the writing, I found that sometimes it was difficult to tell who the point-of-view character was in certain scenes.  While it wasn’t rampant, the POV did get loose from time to time in mid-scene and I wasn’t always sure whose eyes I was supposed to be seeing things through.

The plot was solid with a good dash of twists and turns.  The whodunit aspect was handled well and the ending was pretty satisfying.  There aren’t any fast ones being pulled here and when everything is solved, it makes complete sense.  It’s nice not to have any trickery thrown in.

So, all in all a solid read.  Did I love it?  No, but I enjoyed it more often than not, despite some things that weren’t to my liking.  Primarily, I would have liked to have seen more from the police investigative side and more from Denise’s perspective.

Title:  Hope Road

Author:  John Barlow

Genre:  Mystery/Thriller

Publication:  Storm Books (December 13, 2011)

Price:  $3.99 (Kindle)

Author’s Website:  http://www.johnbarlow.net/

Twilight of the Drifter is rich with Southern-backwoods atmosphere, which does lend an intriguing sort of Gothic romance to the story.  Unfortunately the writing is also very disjointed and stream-of-consciousness, which makes the plot hard to follow- not an advantage in a mystery novel!  I can understand why the author choose this style, as the main character is clearly looking for an On The Road experience, but it would be better suited to literary fiction than to a genre novel.

Despite a promising, suspenseful beginning, I was unable to get into this book at all.  I never really got to know the characters or their backstories, and their dialogue was so jargon-filled that much of the time I couldn’t even understand what they were saying.  To be completely honest, after I was finished with the book I couldn’t have told you for certain what happened in it.

If you’re really interested in Southern culture and history, this might be worth a read for the atmosphere alone, but in my opinion it’s too confusing to be a satisfying mystery.

Title:  Twilight of the Drifter

Author:  Shelly Frome

Genre:  Mystery

Publication:  Sunbury Press, Inc. (November 28, 2011)

Price:  $4.99 (Kindle), $16.95 (paperback)

Review by Jeannelle D’Isa

I missed the boat with this one, I think. I wanted to enjoy it! It’s well-marketed. It’s got a non-garish cover (CRUCIAL). It has a book trailer! I am hip and modern and I am learning to accept book trailers. But The Englishman and the Butterfly never flew for me. Ryan Asmussen’s debut is a heartfelt, possibly straight-faced love paean to Academia As Was, the East Coast Ivory Tower of Old Where Old Equals 2004, the Canon Before the Dark Days When All English Departments Were Cut, the Misty Past When You Could Have an Affair with the Department Secretary Because [record scratch!] Humanities Faculties Had Secretaries.

Like my intro paragraph, however, Asmussen has a lot to learn about pacing. The book meanders up to its actual plot points like a freshman bumming a cigarette on the quad; the chapters are alternately turgid with imagery and careening along with the barest descriptors. And there’s poetry in it. The villain writes poetry (there is a dark, tortured, villainous soul lurking among the tweed weskits); Henry writes poetry. Julia, the love interest, does not, thank God, write poetry as she cycles through the men of the department in a way that ought to be empowered but just comes off unfulfilled. Look, I don’t mind poetry — sometimes I write it — but your novel is not a showcase for your free verse unless you’re reimagining Rimbaud. Keep calm and put out a chapbook. (Asmussen is, in fact, a published poet. I am not trying to ding him on style with this one. It just didn’t work for me.)

Henry, Asmussen’s protagonist and the titular Englishman, is a bit of authorial wish fulfillment, and this description of Henry could be his author’s. “His writing is lucid, compelling at times… what he lacks in definite imagination on the page, he makes up for in doggedness. His tenaciousness, his very work ethic, is profound.” Henry s a professor of enough reknown to be invited across the pond, but he is not charismatic or compelling enough for me to imagine he’s done the necessary networking to get there. He is usually astonished to be upright and breathing. When there is a love interest to be interested in, he manages to fluff his staid feathers a bit, but it all becomes shambolic and it seems to be his fault; when a dark shadow creeps with murderous intent, Henry is sedated into inaction and misses the whole thing. Maybe that was supposed to be a metaphor? This man of keen mind at the prime of his life is missing everything, good and bad? Oh. Eh. Well, he’s off to a cabin in the woods to ruminate on it all/hide from police. Police? Wait, what the hell, weren’t we just –

Yes. I know. Me too.

(Henry, ever the assiduously applied academic, does spend his time in hiding reading his colleague’s work in progress. We are treated to reams of it, which doesn’t help with that pacing thing.)

The Englishman and the Butterfly does get bonus points for inexplicable man-on-bovine brutality, realistic descriptions of Boston traffic, and death by MBTA-related squishing. It is available on Kindle for, at this writing, about a dollar more than it’s worth, and that may be worth it to you. There is no gratuitous sex or unbearable gore, and there are few typographical errors. However, I think I will sum Asmussen up in Asmussen’s own words:

“His work will never grace the fabled pages of The New Yorker. Frank Kermode will never champion it…Stanley Fish will never decode it for his adoring
students…There will be no interviews, no writer-in-residences.”

Brother, preach.

Title:  The Englishman and the Butterfly

Author:  Ryan Asmussen

Genre:  Contemporary Fiction

Publication:  Amazon Digital Services, Inc.

Price:  $3.19 (Kindle)

Author’s Website:  http://www.ryanasmussen.com/

Review by Lisa Metlak

This short story is best read at night . . . with the lights out . . . so it can scare the hell out of you.

Morgan’s secret is not that he’s addicted to Words with Friends.  Morgan’s secret is slowly driving him mad.  He had an accident.  He hit a “deer” – that is his official story.  What is haunting him is the “dear” he hit.  And it’s haunting him through Words with Friends.  Someone knows, and Morgan thinks he has figured out who it is.  When he takes drastic measures to keep his secret, he finds out that some games are best left unplayed.

This short story reminded me of the books of scary short stories I used to read long ago.  You don’t need to have a thousand-page Stephen King novel to scare the wits out of you.  I figured out what Morgan had done very early in the story, but it was the slow, methodical journey to crazy that had me curled up in a protective position on the couch reading.  Mr. Schiariti painted a vivid picture of a man driven mad by guilt, and I loved every word of it.

I’m pretty good at determining the plot and ending early in a book, but this one really kept me guessing until the end.  I hope the author is planning on writing more short stories like this.

Title:  Words With Fiends:  A Short Story

Author:  Matt Schiariti

Genre:  Horror

Publication:  Amazon Digital Services, Inc.

Price:  $0.99 (ebook, all formats)

Author’s Website:  http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6873499.Matt_Schiariti

Review by Matt Schiariti

In the distant future, after what was known as the Water Wars, only one city is left standing:  Orion.  It’s a technological marvel, run by the Cerulean Dreams Corporation.  There is no crime, there is no greed.  The vast corporate entity that is Cerulean Dreams oversees the wellbeing of all Orion’s citizens through an advanced neural network.  People want for nothing.  They don’t even have to opt when to sleep.  They’re told when to sleep.  It sounds like utopia.  But all is not what it seems.

Enter Marlowe and Dana.  Marlow is ex-military, ex-police.  Young women have been going missing in Orion.  Nobody wants to address the disappearances.  Nobody wants to admit there’s a problem in the city without crime.  When he digs further he meets Dana, a young and enigmatic woman who’s frightened and on the run.  She’s on the run from what she calls ‘The Lurking’ because she knows ‘The Truth’.  Her plight becomes Marlowe’s as they attempt the breach the massive wall that surrounds Orion and leads to the vast, deadly desert beyond.  The leader of Cerulean Dreams wants Dana back at all costs and enlists the services of a mysterious and cunning assassin named Armon.  With the assassin hot on their heels, Marlowe and Dana will leave everything they know and brave the arid wastes.  They’ll search for answers and they’ll find them.  But what they find is beyond anything they could have imagined.

I wanted to like this book.  I really wanted to like this book.  As soon as I read the description, I wanted to dive right in.  For a while, I was pleased with the story.  As it opens up in Orion, we’re introduced to the city, its strange futuristic way of life, and the shadowy corporation that runs it.  The author hints at the bigger story but doesn’t give anything away, just placing little hints at the larger picture here and there.  I thought I was in for a very good and wild ride…

And then they left the city.  The latter two thirds of the book are primarily Marlowe and Dana traversing through the desert and what they encounter there.  It’s not a bad thing, but it’s just very, very slow.  That, and it takes what’s set up to be a very fun and exciting science fiction novel and turns it into a quest in which very little happens.  Is there a destination?  Yes.  Do they encounter people out in the barren wasteland?  Yes.  Is the assassin chasing them?  Yes.  It’s just a matter of pacing and setting.  They leave the most interesting location in the story, Orion, very early on.  That’s when I found the story getting bogged down.

Of course, characters are the heart of any good story, and I had issues with them as well.  While I found the writing to be good overall, I found the characters to all read the same.  Once they leave the city, everyone begins to talk more formally, especially Marlowe.  Their dialogue seems overly dramatic and, for lack of a better word, stiff.  ‘I will not.  You shall not, my friend.  I cannot, shaman.’, etc. When everyone speaks that way, all the characters’ voices blend into one; no one character stands out from the rest.  This is really a personal nitpick for me.  When people don’t speak using contractions, it doesn’t sound natural to me.  And when nobody does, it just exacerbates the issue.

I will say that the book is plotted pretty tightly.  No glaring plot bugaboos or anything like that.  But the climax and ending were a little ‘anticlimactic’.

At the end of the day, I was let down by this.  I was completely psyched to read it but between the stilted dialogue, abandoning the coolest set piece of the book entirely too early, and a lackluster showdown/climax sequence, I’m afraid this one gest a low rating from me.

Title:  Cerulean Dreams

Author:  Dan O’Brien

Genre:  Science Fiction

Publication:  The Dan O’Brien Project; 2nd Edition (October 2, 2011)

Price:  $4.99 (Kindle), $17 (paperback)

Author’s Website:  http://thedanobrienproject.blogspot.com/

Jen Minkman

All Hannah needs is a nice and quiet vacation after her first year of teaching French at a high school. She joins her brother Ben for the summer in their mom’s log cabin in Arizona. There, she meets Josh again, Ben’s childhood friend from the Navajo reservation. The little boy from the rez has grown up fast, and Hannah can’t help but feeling more for him than just friendship.

But fate apparently has something else in store for her. And it’s not peace and quiet. Night after night, Hannah is plagued by strange nightmares about the past of Navajo Nation and terrifying shadows chasing her. They seem to come closer – and why is Josh always present in her dreams?  –Synopsis from Amazon.com

What made you want to write about the Navajo Nation?

I have a soft spot for Native American spirituality, but of course the entire scope of Native American spirituality and history is far too extensive to cram into one novel. So I had to pick a tribe. I chose Navajo Nation because I wanted my book to be set near a lake, so Lake Powell fit the bill.

There’s a lot of history woven into the story; how much research did you have to do and how did you go about it?

I had to research SO much. Sometimes, I would literally look up stuff in books and on the internet after every sentence I wrote, because I wanted to make sure I had it right. The first draft of the book contained even more history, but I cut most of that out again to make sure it wouldn’t slow down the story too much. I bought books, movies, dictionaries and spent hours and hours studying the Navajo culture every evening while listening to Radio Powwow and burning Navajo incense. I wasn’t in a relationship back then – that really helped.

Your book deals a bit with issues of Native American independence.  What are your own feelings, if any, on the subject?

I guess I would have liked for American history to have run a different course. I do feel that the Navajo culture would have changed significantly even if the European colonists had been more humane, but I think they truly lost something there that will never come back again. Despite the fact that Navajo Nation is independent and has its own government, I think they could have been better off without US influence. Without alcohol, drugs, or uranium mines, the place would have looked quite different today.

What made you decide to publish independently?

Well, in my own country, I am traditionally published. But the chances of being translated into English as a Dutch writer are very, very slim. So I decided to translate my books myself so I could reach a wider audience of readers worldwide. Since most of the Anglophone publishing world works with agents, I chose to self-publish because that would be a quicker way to get my book on the market. Besides, I already took the long and winding road to traditional publication once – I wasn’t exactly looking forward to walking that road again!

Who or what are the biggest influences on your writing?

Reading other books and watching good movies. Sometimes I see something on TV or in the cinema that inspires me (without me ‘stealing’ the idea, they are just flashes of inspiration!) and some books I read evoke so much emotion in me that I strive to write something that will similarly evoke those emotions in other people. I guess I am a very emotionally-driven writer, but I always try to make my stories touching, not sentimental.

You have a day job as a secondary-school English teacher.  How do you fit writing into your schedule?

I work four days a week, so the other three days are reserved for writing. Also, once I’m running with an idea for a book, I can’t stop myself from writing in the evenings when all the work is done. My husband works a night schedule four nights a week, so after he leaves at 9.30 pm, I still have a few hours I can use to write my stories in peace and quiet!

Is this your first English-language book?

It is my first novel in English. I also published a small poetry volume in English, in April 2012.

Do you have plans to translate any more books into English?

Yes, actually, I am planning to translate each and every book I write from now on. Not only is it a good way to get known across the border, it is also a very good method to revise your own manuscripts. When you’re translating a story, sometimes you suddenly realize that certain dialogues or scenes just don’t work, so you cut them out or change them.

Find Alexis Arendt’s review of Shadow of Time on Goodreads.