Book Review - Everybody's Daughter by Michael John Sullivan

Michael Stewart is obsessed with finding something that was hidden in the basement of an old church.  He also faces his own demons, worried he isn’t being a good enough father to his teenage daughter Elizabeth and punishing himself for his belief he failed his wife before her death.

 

Unfortunately, nobody else seems to believe this hidden secret exists.  And how could they?  They believe he is crazy, his talk about travelling to the past through a tunnel in the church basement the delusions of a man who is not coping with reality.   But Michael knows it is real because he has gone through it before.

 

When Michael re-discovers the hidden passageway through time he vanishes.   Realizing what happened; Elizabeth is determined to follow her father.  Elizabeth finds the passage and emerges in Jerusalem centuries in the past just as she hoped, but her father is nowhere to be found.

 

Michael returns to the present to find Elizabeth missing.  He can only guess what happened to her, that she had followed him through the tunnel.  The world that was Jerusalem centuries ago is a dangerous world ruled by Roman soldiers and brutality.

 

Michael immediately realizes the danger his daughter in.  He has to find the way back.  He has to find her and bring her back!

 

But the tunnel has vanished and Michael cannot find it.  Complicating things more, he is everyone’s suspect in the disappearance of his daughter Elizabeth.  The three women in his life make it even more difficult.  His deceased wife’s friend blames him for her death and is convinced he is to blame for his daughter’s disappearance.  His sister and a woman who seems caught between being his friend and wanting more are both torn between his craziness, being unable to decide if he is guilty or innocent, and the need to help him find his daughter.

 

With the FBI investigating and following him, and the three women holding him back, it doesn’t seem that Michael will ever find his daughter.  The more Michael tries to convince those around him that his daughter is trapped in time; the more convinced they are that he is crazy and has done something to her.

 

His only real ally is his friend Dennis, the priest of the church who has his own reasons to believe this passage to the past exists.

 

While Michael fights his own battles in the present, desperate to find a way to return to Jerusalem in the time of Christ, Elizabeth faces the greatest danger of her life centuries in the past.  She reconnects with Leah, a woman she and her father met on their previous visit to Jerusalem in the time of Christ.  With no one who can save them the two women fight for their lives against a sadistic Roman soldier determined to own and control them both in his prison of savage cruelty.

 

 

Everybody’s Daughter mixes religion with the paranormal in a blend of miracles and sacrifice and the lesson that faith in the unbelievable is sometimes the only answer.  Michael John Sullivan treats the reader with a story of hope and despair, and finding salvation, all in a story that any reader can relate to.

 

 

Everybody’s Daughter is published by The Story Plant.

 

Book Review: Scorpion Bay by Michael Murphy

Working as an investigative reporter and a prosecuting attorney respectively, Parker Knight and his wife both had jobs requiring secrecy and chasing down sensitive information.




Unfortunately for Parker, his wife has been more secretive lately.



Worse, his investigative reporting instincts bring him racing to the scene of an explosion that would rip his life apart.



Crassly snapping off photos of the scene, including an injured woman; Parker stops by the woman only to come face to face with the horror of the reality of the situation.



The woman is his wife Erica. He is helpless as she dies in his arms.



This is the start of events that pull Parker deeper into the mystery surrounding his wife’s death.



Parker is compelled to find out why his wife died and bring whoever planted the bomb to justice. With the help of his friend from his days in the Special Forces, Justin Kendall, and Justin’s girlfriend Tina Banks, he starts digging into the secrets behind Biotech and its CEO Harrison Bradley.



Together they follow the one elusive lead he has, Wildflower, a path that leads Parker into being dubbed a vigilante. Parker finds himself unwillingly embracing his identity as a vigilante despite its hindering his efforts to avenge his wife’s murder and bring the man he believes is responsible to justice.





The thing that initially drew me to want to read Scorpion Bay was a comment the author made once about how he was so charmed with Scorpion Bay, a real place, that it inspired him to write a book about it.



Michael Murphy did justice to both the place and the dangerous feel of the name. Scorpion Bay is more than an action packed mystery, it draws you into its web of intrigue and plays on sub plots that make you wonder where they will take you. Just when you think you figured it out you learn not to make any assumptions.




Scorpion Bay is published by Second Wind Publishing, LLC.

Book Review - Pat Bertram's Daughter Am I

In Daughter Am I, Pat Bertram has created an entertaining tale of friendship, discovery, and mystery filled with diverse characters who are instantly likeable. Not only does she bring to life the past world of the gangster era in the current age where it is mostly forgotten, she also reminds us through her elderly cast just how closely linked the past and present really are.






Mary Stuart received a letter from a lawyer that would change her life. She learns that not only did her parents lie to her about her grandparents having died many years before, but also that those grandparents have just passed away and left her everything.



She immediately learns that her grandparents were murdered!

Driven by curiosity and perhaps a sense of self loss and the lack of direction her life has, Mary is drawn into the intrigue of finding out who these people were who her father denied her for her whole life, and the possibility of solving the mystery of their murders.

Mary begins to follow a trail she picks up at her grandparents farm, one that leads her back through their life by finding people who had once known them and finds herself travelling with an unlikely group of relics from a past era. Each stop they make in the search for truth ads another elderly person to her crew. They seem more interested in breaking the boredom of their lives and the excitement of sneaking off on a road trip than anything and yet hold the key to the secret of her grandparent's murder.

With colourful characters, leftovers from the long gone age of the gangsters, including Lefty, Teach, Happy, Lila, and more at her side, Mary finds more than just answers. She finds more questions and love, and a direction for her life.

Daughter Am I is published by Second Wind Publishing, LLC.

 

(What Kind Of) Writer Am I - With Guest Pat Bertram

Daughter Am I Blog Tour 2009 - With Guest Pat Bertram
(What Kind Of) Writer Am I

I am thrilled to be featuring my first ever guest blogger, Pat Bertram, author of three novels published with Second Wind Publishing LLC.

This is an especially exciting event for me for a few reasons; one being that Halloween is only a few days away and I love Halloween. Okay, so blogging isn't exactly the stuff witches, ghosts, goblins, and all manner of things that say "boo" are made of. Well, unless your guest blogger happens to be the likes of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, or Jeremy Shipp, that is. But blogging is fun and so is dressing up in a tacky costume and frightening little kids before bribing them with handfuls of candy so they hopefully won’t t-p my house a few years down the road. I’m not all that scary myself, but the assortment of screaming rocks, cackling witches, gravestones, and various dead creatures decorating my house are.

At first glance Pat’s new book Daughter Am I may not seem the stuff of Halloween. But when a young woman (Mary Stuart) finds herself on the move investigating her great-grandfather’s deadly secret with the help a group of former gangsters, and a killer on the trail anxious to dig up that same secret, things certainly could get a bit dicey. A little murder, a little mystery … what more could you ask for in a book to read around Halloween?


Another reason this is exciting for me is that my first guest blogger happens to be Pat Bertram, who also happens to be my first online writing friend and mentor. Pat has been an unending source of wisdom, support, and encouragement for me and many other writers who have met her. And, best of all, she hasn't complained about any of my silly questions. Not to me anyway.






I hope you’ll enjoy Pat’s blog post as much as I did. And don’t hesitate to visit Second Wind Publishing where you’ll find Pat Bertram’s newest novel Daughter Am I available both in print and ebook format.

Pat Bertram

National Novel Writing Month is coming up in November, and I am half in awe and half befuddled by those who enter. The writing of a novel takes me a year, and some of the research I’ve done has taken longer than that. But then, I am not an intuitive writer. I have to drag each word out of hiding and find its place in the puzzle that is a novel. I suppose two types could write 50,000 words in a month — the intuitive writers who spew out words, and the logical writers who have the whole thing outlined before they begin. Me? I fall somewhere in the middle. I so hate tossing aside my hard work that I habitually rework my writing as I write. (Though I have rewritten one of my novels four times, and deleted 25,000 words from another.)

I write slowly. Although Daughter Am I came easily to me, I still only wrote an average of 300 words a day. Not that the number of words matters to me, it doesn’t. The only reason I mention it is to let new writers know there are all kinds of writers. Some let the words gush out and try to type fast enough to catch them all. Some, like me, have to pull each word, kicking and screaming, into the world. Some have a compulsion to write; others make a conscious choice. How you write, how often, how many words you write per day are all unimportant, unless, of course, you are a writer under contract. But if you are a writer under contract, you would be writing, not reading this blog.

In the end, the only thing that counts is the finished story. The story doesn’t care how long it took you to write it. It doesn’t care if you wrote it in a month or in a decade. It doesn’t care if you bled words onto the paper or created it slowly, one puzzle piece at a time. A finished story exists complete and entire of itself, separate from the author and the author’s work habits.

Sometimes we wonder how our favorite authors write, but mostly we devour (or savor) their works, wanting only to immerse ourselves in the story. If it moves us to tears, makes us laugh or shiver, that’s what we care about, not how long it took for the author to create the effect. Being writers, of course, we might go back later and see how it was done, but at the time, all we are interested in is the story.

So, here’s the truth. You can call yourself a writer or not. You can write 50,000 words in a month or not. You can write every day or not. The only thing that counts is the story.

That’s what we are all aiming for.

Story.

Pat Bertram is a native of Colorado and a lifelong resident. When the traditional publishers stopped publishing her favorite type of book — character and story driven novels that can’t easily be slotted into a genre — she decided to write her own. Daughter Am I is Bertram’s third novel to be published by Second Wind Publishing, LLC. Also available are More Deaths Than One and A Spark of Heavenly Fire.