Bless Your Heart (Crooked Lane Books 2025) by Leigh Dunlap is a luscious, wickedly entertaining novel set in Atlanta’s rich Buckhead enclave that leads its readers on a merry chase to the finish. And what a finish: the book has one of the most satisfying resolutions of any murder-mystery novel readers are likely to have […]
“Naked Thoughts” by Marina Brown
October 12, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Well-named and powerful, Naked Thoughts (Gilberte Publishing, 2025) by multi-award-winning writer Marina Brown contains 58 poems that invite readers into beauty and soul-searching along with her poetic syntax. These poems will haunt you long after the final line as Brown’s artistry conjures images both unforgettable and of the deepest beauty. In what is perhaps her […]
“The Tears of Things” by Catherine Hamrick
October 9, 2025 by Leave a Comment
The Tears of Things (Madville Publishing 2025) by Catherine Hamrick is an exquisite, sensory-rich and sensitive body of poems that vividly capture with what it means to love, lose, fall, get up, and do it all again. Hamrick’s language is consistently vibrant, and often unique—for example, “slick-tripped” in a poem about winter ice entitled “Fat […]
“Like Zeros, Like Pearls” by Lola Haskins
September 30, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Judging from her exceptional poems in Like Zeros, Like Pearls (Charlotte Lit Press 2025), award-winning poet Lola Haskins has both a scientific and a literary bent to her world view. In this new and glorious collection, she showcases both. Like the cicadas in her poem “The Spirituality of Cicadas,” creatures believed by ancient Chinese to […]
“Love You to Death” by Christina Dotson
September 15, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Love You to Death (Bantam 2025) by debut author Christina Dotson is an action-packed, smart, genre-blending story of a deep but dysfunctional friendship between two young women. The novel is superb—and superbly disturbing. While female friendships are the heart and soul of women’s fiction, the toxic relationship in Love You to Death is not the […]
“She Had To Die” by Rebecca Barrett
September 14, 2025 by Leave a Comment
In Rebecca Barrett’s new novel She Had To Die (2025), murder in a small-town near Mobile Alabama sets off a riveting police procedural steeped in late-sixties atmosphere. A beautiful young woman, Ruby Stanton, is found shot dead in a shabby motel, and Mobile detectives Hugo August and his longtime friend Junior Knight are called in. […]