Author

February 13, 2025 · Book Review

One Way Ticket to Earth

by Daniele Vaccaro

3 / 5

Ten-year-old Max dies in a hospital bed, a four-leaf clover his mother once gave him clutched against his chest, promising her he’ll find his way back. Grief breaks his parents in different directions: his mother Elizabeth refuses to let go of the belief that he’s still out there somewhere, and his father Paul, unable to bear the loss, takes his own life not long after.

Light-years away, on a utopian alien world called Anturn where children are born from the fruit of a great tree rather than to a mother, a newborn arrives already fussy and strange, and grows into a boy named Sveern who insists, against everyone’s gentle correction, that his real name is Max and his real home is a planet called Earth. The bulk of the story follows Sveern’s long, lonely campaign to get anyone in Anturn’s government to believe him and let him go home, with only one Anturnian child, Blily, willing to take his claims seriously. What Max finds when he finally does make it back to Earth, and what that four-leaf clover turns out to mean twice over, is the story’s real payoff, and it’s worth encountering without it spoiled here.

September 18, 2024 · Book Review

Desperate Run

by C. J. Riggs, M. L. Burns

4 / 5

Max is a med student with a past she’s buried under sarcasm, one NDA, and a family who sold her out. When she and her friend group win free tickets to the Midnight Menagerie, a traveling horror-carnival where paying guests can be legally “hunted” through a weekend of escalating mazes, she’s claimed almost immediately by Grim, the carnival’s tallest, quietest, and most feared Hunter. What starts as a game becomes something neither of them expected: Grim, whose real name is Draven, is carrying his own seven-year-old grief, and the deeper Max pushes into the carnival’s trials, the more her reasons for being there and his reasons for staying start to look like two halves of the same wound.

The weekend builds through a series of increasingly dangerous mazes, each one testing something different in Max, physically, psychologically, and morally, while Draven’s own past and the carnival’s own rot come to a head around her. What she’s really hunting, and what it will actually cost her to get it, is worth discovering without it spoiled here.

July 17, 2024 · Book Review

All Your Bloody Lies

by M. L. Burns

3 / 5

Xeraphine has spent ten years hunting the five men who abducted, tortured, and buried her alive a decade ago, using the seductive, life-draining power of her Succubus nature (an ability she calls her Amoro) to track and kill anyone connected to them. Kairhyse, a Vampire enforcer assigned to stop a string of high-profile murders traced back to her, catches her mid-kill and becomes obsessed rather than turning her in, choosing instead to shield her from his own employer while chasing her, sleeping with her, and slowly becoming genuinely entangled in her life and her revenge.

What follows is a slow-burn, extremely explicit romance built on constant push-and-pull: Xeraphine’s refusal to be claimed, owned, or loved standing directly against Kairhyse’s total, possessive devotion, while she works her way methodically through the remaining men responsible for her captivity. Her best friend Sydni and an old ally named Tyson round out the found family orbiting her, even as the killings draw the attention of rival supernatural power structures who have their own reasons to want Xeraphine found, controlled, or silenced. The book builds toward a final confrontation that recontextualizes who has actually been hunting her all along, and ends with no resolution in sight.