Time Sniffers
by C. S. Lakin
(1 Review)
In the near future, a desperate race for new sources of energy pushes Bria Harrison's mother - Nobel Prize-winning scientist - to experiment with unstable compounds to harness dark energy. The result is disastrous... Bria refuses to believe her mother is dead, even though dust chokes the site where the top-secret laboratory once stood. A strange symbol keeps showing up: on the dry erase board, in a pile of leaves, even in the milk her brother drips on the table. Bria has no doubt her mother, somehow, is sending her a message. But how? And where could she be? To find out, she has to do something dangerous, but she sees no other option. While re-creating her mother’s last experiment in her basement, Bria, her autistic brother Dylan, and four friends cause a rip in time-space - and out of the resultant black hole tumbles K-Six, a time sniffer who has come to get them. This doglike alien creature takes them back through the rip to his training world, where Bria, her brother, and her friends must be altered to adapt to dangerous time confluences and worlds they must traverse to save the scientists trapped in a time eddy. If they aren't rescued soon, dark energy, now streaming into the galaxy at an alarming rate, will cause horrific destruction - including the end of all life on earth... more»»
Review by Paul Lappen  1st January 2023

Dangerous Illusions
by Joseph J. Gabriele
(1 Review)
In a beguiling tale of deception and murder, desire and theft, seduction and betrayal - where nothing is what it appears to be - a man is murdered and an iconic musical instrument is stolen during a gathering at Eliot Sexton’s Park Avenue apartment. The stolen item - an object of desire worshipped by millions - is the key to solving the crime, or so the detective brought in to investigate believes. The murder, however, is not nearly as straightforward as it seems - nor is the theft. Though the island of Manhattan presents no shortage of suspects - many of them capable of killing to satisfy their appetites - Eliot, a young economic historian and writer, soon becomes the prime suspect. As he draws closer to the truth behind the theft and murder, he also becomes the killer’s next target. Irreverent, provocative, and utterly unpredictable, Dangerous Illusions is a week long polyrhythmic journey into contemporary New York that will keep readers guessing right up to its thrilling conclusion... more»»
Review by Paul Lappen  1st January 2023

Lies to Die For
by Todd M. Thiede
(1 Review)
Max Larkin Detective Series - Book 2
Max Larkin and Jesse Fairlane are the top two detectives in Rockton Illinois. In Lies to Die for, the second book in the Max Larkin Detective series, they are in pursuit of a killer that is branding letters into the victim’s bodies. Is it someone the victims know or is it just a random person taking out frustrations on the small community of Rockton? Max is fresh coming off of his one month suspension for hiding things from his captain while Jesse has been holding down the fort during his absence. There hasn’t been much crime in Rockton since the Time Killer killings but Captain Perry knows he’s going to need his whole team working together to catch the person that killed a local college professor and his girlfriend. Just as the clues start to come together there’s another murder. Max and Jesse find themselves disagreeing a lot as to who done it and why. This partnership is on the rocks and the town needs them now more than ever... more»»
Review by Paul Lappen  1st January 2023

Drug of Choice
by Michael Crichton,
writing as John Lange
(1 Review)
On a secret island in the Caribbean, bioengineers have devised a vacation resort like no other, promising the ultimate escape. But when Dr. Roger Clark investigates, he discovers the dark secret of Eden Island and of Advance Biosystems, the shadowy corporation underwriting it. Long before Jurassic Park, Twister, and ER, Michael Crichton was an honours student at Harvard Medical School and writing paperback suspense novels on the side, under the pen name John Lange. Lange wrote eight books and then vanished. Now Hard Case Crime is proud to bring all of John Langes work back into print, incluidng Drug of Choice, for the first time in decades and under Crichtons real name... more»»
Review by Ben Macnair 1st January 2023