All Book Reviews
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Fallen Kings: Unholy Secrets
June Gillam (Gorilla Girl Ink)
Fallen Kings: Unholy Secrets by June Gillam is set during one sweltering summer, the sixth book in the Hillary Broome mystery that stretches from a Pride parade in Sacramento to the cobblestone streets of Rome. Professor and reluctant sleuth Hillary travels to Italy with her husband Ed, her estranged mother Paisley, and her teenage daughter Claire for what should be a dream vacation: a college tour, basketball camp, and gelato. Instead, Dei Patri...
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The Phantom Skipjack
Robert Gill, Jr. (Teaching Press Publishing)
Robert Gill, Jr.’s The Phantom Skipjack: A Carroway Island Story is a spellbinding maritime mystery that opens at Haddie's Fish Shak on Carroway Island, a Chesapeake Bay community with “more stories than people.” When a visiting stranger puzzles over an 1857 photograph of men standing on the frozen bay, old waterman Crazy Jack Mercer launches into the tale of the Great Freeze, a winter so brutal it trapped the ferry, cut off supplies, and turned...
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The Touchstones of Leadership: Essential Principles for Business Leaders
Joseph Carleone (Forbes Books)
What if everything you needed to know about leadership fit on forty-five index cards? Joseph Carleone's The Touchstones of Leadership delivers exactly that. With a career that ran from rocket motors to pharmaceutical plants, Carleone brings decades of hard lessons into punchy one-liners that are as revelatory as they are thought-provoking, such as “Never mistake activity for achievement” or “Once you get into a hole, stop digging.”He sorts them i...
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Center Stage Confidence: How to Own your Story and Command Any Room
Justin Guarini (Entrepreneur Press)
The spotlight doesn't give you confidence; showing up scared does. That is the key idea behind Justin Guarini’s Center Stage Confidence, a compelling book that's part memoir, part playbook. The book brings you wisdom and insights from experiences that include seven Broadway shows, American Idol, and seven years as Dr Pepper’s Lil’ Sweet. The book quickly shows you the indisputable truth: everything you want waits on the other side of your willing...
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The Frequency
Randall D. St. Claire (Atmosphere Press)
The Frequency by Randall D. St. Claire tells the story of Bronx Rousselle, a former minor-league hockey enforcer and Marine veteran now working as a pawnbroker in Warroad, Minnesota. Heather Li, a nurse, trades a box of Inuit artifacts in exchange for a discreet flight out of town, and Bronx reluctantly agrees. The box contains cryptic letters from her shaman great-grandfather describing a whale that turned into stone. That single deal disrupts B...
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Parallel Heartbeats
Ashritta Saran (Notion Press)
Ash, a self-reliant army daughter already used to constant relocation, transfers to Lucknow's St. Xavier's expecting another temporary stop, but a corridor collision with Aaryan, the school's effortlessly charming guitarist, scatters her biochemistry notes and her careful plans in Ashritta Saran’s Parallel Heartbeats. Their chemistry deepens through café study sessions, music room rehearsals, and a sunflower confession, as they survive Shreya’s j...
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Voyagers: Homeland to Heartland
D. L. Norris (Outskirts Press)
Every immigrant story begins with a goodbye, and D. L. Norris turns that goodbye into an unforgettable hymn of hope in her latest book, Voyagers: Homeland to Heartland. The tender, multi-generational saga is inspired by the author’s family history and follows Kittil and Marte Dyrebu, who leave the picturesque community of Svene, nestled within Buskerud County, Norway, in the late 1860s to chase the promise of land and freedom in America. After a...
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ActualizationOS: A System of Inner Architecture
Sanjay Sabnani (Causal Wisdom)
What if change fails not because you lack willpower, but because your inner system is working against itself? That is the bracing premise of Sanjay Sabnani's ActualizationOS, a field manual for deliberate transformation inspired by the author’s own breakdown. After losing his marriage and business in 2015, Sabnani rebuilt his mind through a simple chanting practice, then spent a decade putting together what actually worked. Stillness is the platf...
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White Coat Leadership: Empowering the Next Generation of Healthcare Leaders from Bedside to Boardroom
Timothy N. Liesching (Advantage Books)
In White Coat Leadership: Empowering the Next Generation of Healthcare Leaders from Bedside to Boardroom, Dr. Timothy N. Liesching, a former banker, an ICU physician, and past chief medical officer, argues that American healthcare's compounding crises (workforce burnout, soaring costs, technological disruption, and fragmented care) demand a new kind of leader: the clinician who can “heal, lead, and inspire.” The book is part manual, part manifest...
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Descending Darkness
Martyn Rhys Vaughan (Martyn Rhys Vaughan)
Martyn Rhys Vaughan’s Descending Darkness is a gorgeous collection that blends horror, black comedy, and science fiction. A captured fighter struggles to escape a cell while the ceiling slowly descends on him, armed only with desperation and bedsheets in “A Room with No View.” A smug con man plunges into a haunted manor overnight, wins his bet but loses his sanity in “Alone.” In “Dia de los Muertos,” a walking skeleton named Ralph comes after a h...
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