Review: Ghost Phone by Melissa Bowersock

Genre: Mystery/Paranormal/Detective

Description:

“When Sam first starts getting phone calls with no name and no number—and no one there on the line—he thinks it’s strange but not a big deal—just irritating. Without a number, there’s no way to trace the calls to either find out who it is that’s calling, or to block them and their annoying pranks. But then the calls take a darker turn, spewing an unintelligible stream of angry, garbled nonsense. The calls are very insistent, ringing through even when the phone is turned completely off. To save their sanity, Sam and Lacey have to figure out who—or what—is calling, and what it wants. But how?”

Author:

“Melissa Bowersock is an eclectic, award-winning author who writes in a variety of fiction and non-fiction genres: paranormal, biography, western, action, romance, fantasy, spiritual, and satire.”

For more visit Ms.Bowersock’s website and follow her on Facebook.

Appraisal:

If you’ve read a few of the 50 prior books in this series then you’ve come to expect certain elements. A house or some place seems to be haunted. Sam Firecloud is called in with his wife, Lacey Fitzpatrick, to figure things out. Sam, with his ability to communicate telepathically with spirits who have not yet left this world visits the haunted space and Sam describes what he’s seeing which Lacey records. Together they ponder with Lacey figuratively putting on her detective cap to help figure things out. As a team, they find what it will take to help resolve the unfinished issues preventing the spirit from peacefully moving on. It’s an engaging and thought-provoking pattern that the author has managed to keep entertaining with each of her stories keeping the reader guessing along with Sam and Lacey, just what you’d hope for in a mystery story.

This book throws a few twists into the pattern especially in the beginning, when they get calls that give no caller ID information and are silent on the other end, at least at first. Later, some of the calls have a voice that is too garbled to understand. How these calls evolve, how they figure out where they are coming from and ultimately how to communicate in a way they can understand with the being on the other end is full of twists and turns we haven’t seen in any other book in the series. Then where this leads them to resolve the issue at hand and how they get there is much different from any of the other books in the series. Sam’s connection with the spirit behind it all matters, but it felt like Lacey’s detective skills got much more of a workout than is typical for the series too. In the end, it was an entertaining read that shakes up the normal pattern, but that fans of the series are still going to enjoy, find entertaining, and make them work a bit harder trying unsuccessfully to figure out where things are going through most of the story. I’d call that a positive.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

FYI:

While the 51^st first book in the series, each book stands alone.

Format/Typo Issues:

No significant issues.

Rating: ***** Five Stars

Reviewed by: BigAl

Approximate word count: 25-30,000 words

Review: How to Hotwire an Airplane by Henry Rausch

 

Genre: Adventure

Description:

The protagonist, Hiram is a Vietnam veteran, and carries a lot of guilt. He makes a very small living from flying his battered Cessna on whatever jobs he can pick up, and renting out half of his house. He has issues. The story takes us through from Spring, to 9/11 and its aftermath, in 2001. The action takes place around the Texas/Mexico border.

Author:

Henry Rausch was a submariner for 20+ years. He did some hush-hush things for the USA, deep underwater. He retired in 2005. Now he enjoys flying small planes, and has a lot of experience in this area. He has written about his submariner experiences in Submerged which was very well received, and won prizes.

Appraisal:

Hiram is not really a likeable character. But then, the book is set in 2001 – a third of a lifetime ago, in my case. Attitudes have shifted: some of them. And, of course, some of them never shifted at all, and some of them are circling back around. Am I being a bit gnomic? Well, it’s that sort of book. Just when I thought I had Hiram pigeon-holed as a woman-objectifying red-neck the book takes flight (if you’ll pardon the pun). He falls in love. He starts mercy flights for rescue dogs. This leads onto rescuing some of the people who daily try to cross the Mexican/Texas border on foot. He sees it as atoning for a perceived, fatal, error he made in ‘Nam. But perhaps the only error in war is starting one…

Hiram and the lovely Lucy for whom he falls are both old enough to know better. But their developing relationship is, none the less, sweet passionate and good for them both.

The ferrying of immigrants across the Mexican border turns out to be not as secret as Hiram had believed. Border Patrol go to some lengths to catch him. But one man and a battered Cessna can do much once they are air-borne.

For much of the book I feared Raush was displaying firearms over the mantlepiece which were not going to get fired, rather than building plot. I was wrong. Most of what he puts on the page is used in the end. Trouble is, the setting up (and the occasional excursion) does tend to reduce pace. As do the lengthy technical explanations of what exactly Hiram does with his Cessna.

But if you enjoy adventure which leans fairly hard on the technical, there is much to enjoy here.

And 2001 Hiram turns out to have some interesting humanitarian opinions which are once again matters for debate under the current (2025) regime. This is one of the great things you can do with fiction. It can’t be political can it, because it all happened a long time ago. Yes, in some ways this is an historical novel – and yet it all somehow seems so now …

Oh, and the splash of magic is a delight.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

FYI:

Format/Typo Issues:

The variation in formatting is slightly odd. This reviewer spent time trying to work out if it was deliberate and meaningful, or not. Not, I decided. So don’t you waste time on that.

Rating: *** Three Stars

Reviewed by: Judi Moore

Approximate word count: 100-105,000 words

Reprise Review: The Grumpface by B.C.R. Fegan

 

Genre: Children’s Picture Book

Description:

“Dan is a young inventor in love. He ventures into a forest looking for a rose but instead finds the mysterious Grumpface who threatens to hold him captive unless he passes some difficult challenges. What follows is a humorous adventure that neither Dan nor the Grumpface could have anticipated.”

Author:

“BCR Fegan is a multi-award-winning author who has written a number of fairy tales and fantasies for children and young adults.”

 

“His ravenous appetite for both reading and writing soon saw him drawing on the transformational influence of the world around him to craft short stories, poems and picture books.”

Appraisal:

What a fun kids story. I had fun reading it to my four-year-old granddaughter, with its rhyming, lyrical language and a nice mix of things that felt silly (aka fun, for a four-year-old) and serious. That my granddaughter was giggling at the Grumpface (the guy in the book, not her grandfather) was another good sign. We both enjoyed and my granddaughter hopes to revisit the grumpy old guy (that would be the grandfather this time) for another reading of The Grumpface.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

Format/Typo Issues:

No significant issues.

Rating: ***** Five Stars

Reviewed by: BigAl

Review: Short Grift by Simon Maltman

Genre: Short Story Collection/Crime Fiction

Description:

“In the world of the Short Grift, the plans are desperate, the criminals are questionable, and the outcome is usually messy. Simon Maltman delivers a masterclass in modern noir, blending razor-sharp crime fiction with a dark, cynical wit that cuts right to the bone.

This collection contains conflicted grifters, serial killer grifters, zombie grifters, and even Donald Trump.”

If you’re interested you can also find an album of music related to the short story collection here.

Author:

“Simon Maltman is the author of crime fiction novels, novellas and short stories.

He is also a T.V writer, reviewer, musician and the lead guide for the crime tour, Belfast Noir.”

Appraisal:

A fast read with eleven short stories that, while all crime fiction, have a wide variety of takes with the common theme being grifting, sometimes by zombies which, while as a reader you suspend belief, you realize isn’t true to Donald Trump making an appearance, where you just assume lots of grifting is going to happen. It made for a fun read and an enjoyable change of pace from my typical reading material.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

FYI:

Some adult language. The author is Irish and based in Ireland, so some of the verbiage and context is going to require some minor reading between the lines, but it wasn’t too difficult. For example, I had no idea what the reference to an Ulster Fry was, but Google quickly clued me in that it was a traditional Irish breakfast that apparently includes baked beans as one of the items.

Format/Typo Issues:

Review is based on an ARC (advance reader/reviewer copy) and thus I can’t gauge the final product.

Rating: **** Four Stars

Reviewed by: Bigal

Approximate word count: 20-25,000 words

Review: One More For The Ditch by Eric McLaughlin

 

Genre: Absurdist Fiction

Description:

“One More for the Ditch is a savage, darkly comic triptych about collapse, cancellation, and the violent search for meaning in a culture addicted to outrage. Moving between addiction, grief, satire, and rebellion, the book asks what, if anything, is worth worshiping when institutions fail, morality fractures, and survival itself becomes an act of defiance.”

Author:

Information about the author is limited, but this appears to be his first full length book with short stories being featured in multiple venues prior. He has a substack site that you can check out if you’d like.

Appraisal:

I feel like I could write a novel on my reactions about this book which range from the extremely negative to the extremely positive. I’ll try to cut my review down to at least novella length or even a short story. We’ll see how I do.

About fifteen years ago when I first started writing reviews of most of the books I read, focusing on indie (both self-published and extremely small press) publications that were starting to get attention among Kindle owners, one of the claims I saw from my fellow readers was that the proofreading was lacking in these books. While it wasn’t unusual to see a handful of proofing misses in a book, even those published by the large traditional publishers, I didn’t often see serious issues regardless of how they were published, but sometimes it happened. I came up with a threshold of a number of errors I needed to flag while reading a book where I would mention that it had proofing issues and an even higher number where I would start deducting stars based on the proofing misses. This book exceeded that second threshold by more than 4 times and of the close to a thousand books I’ve gauged using this criteria this has, by far, the worst proofreading of any. In fact, it feels like the book could have been written using speech to text and then the generated text was published without even looking at it based on a lot of the errors I saw, like constantly confusing the words passed and past or saying shes instead of she’s with apostrophes missing from words where they should be. If this kind of thing bothers you, this book will drive you crazy.

The content itself, if you ignore the above, I liked much better. The title says it is a “triptych” which is usually used for a work of art that has three pieces. This has three parts to it with different sections that are different, yet still tie together in many ways. Amazon has this classified as absurdist fiction which Wikipedia describes by saying that “common elements in absurdist fiction include satire, dark humor, incongruity, the abasement of reason, and controversy regarding the philosophical condition of being ‘nothing’.” That gives a pretty good idea of the story (okay, make that stories) that you’ll find here. In some ways it felt dystopian, but felt like it was showing us what today’s world could be headed for if we continue on our current path. I love books that get me thinking and looking at the world from different angles. This does that. If I wasn’t constantly having to interpret and correct in my head for all the proofing issues, I’d have enjoyed it a whole lot more.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

FYI:

Some adult language

Format/Typo Issues:

Proofreading, if it happened, was atrocious as discussed in the appraisal section.

Rating: ** Two Stars

Reviewed by: BigAl

Approximate word count: 75-80,000 words

Review: Dreaming True in the Apocalypse by Phoebe Walker

 

Genre: Dystopian/Science Fiction/Romance

Description:

“After being left for dead by her survivor group, Allie Dawes has been living in an underground bunker for the first year of the zombie apocalypse. Her only company is Morrigan, a goddess who has gifted Allie with prophetic dreams and abilities that seem to have brought more trouble than good into her life. Just when the isolation is starting to make Allie wonder if she’s losing her mind, Morrigan sends her a dream with a mission: save Cameron Hale.

Cameron Hale is trying like hell to get back to his group and their community of settlements, where they are starting to rebuild society. On the way, he stumbles into the path of a massive zombie horde. Cam’s only hope for escape is to outrun the monsters, but he’s on the verge of exhaustion. Then an angel with a rifle snatches him, quite literally, from the jaws of death.

In Allie’s bunker, these two touch-starved, PTSD-ridden people who don’t quite feel like strangers find themselves drawn to each other physically and emotionally. But love isn’t simple in a world where the undead walk the earth, and even if Allie and Cam manage to stay alive during the struggles that await them outside the bunker, their tenuous bond may not survive.”

Author:

“Phoebe Walker is the pen name of co-authors and longtime best friends Jennifer ‘Jay’ Bull and Mary Morris. Jay lives with her husband and her cats in rural Illinois, where she works as a writer and a professional psychic. She began making up stories and characters in her mind at a very young age and always loved sharing them with others, so writing became a natural creative outlet. Jay collects tarot decks and cats, but her spouse has put a limit on cat collecting, so she only has the care of three tiny terror beasts. Mary grew up reading romance novels and SFF epics on a farm in southeastern Illinois. After earning an MFA in fiction, she has worked as a proofreader, copy editor, reporter, and English professor; today, she is an educator and freelance editor who has published short fiction and nonfiction in various lit mags. She lives in the middle of nowhere with her husband, her children, and miscellaneous cats.”

Appraisal:

While willing to consider books of almost any fiction genre, I tend to shy away from science fiction although books in the dystopian subgenre are the most likely exception. While I’ll read romance, it is relatively rare, although a bit of a romantic subtext is no big deal. This book, while definitely falling outside my normal mild doses of sci-fi and romance still hit the spot in spite of that. The romance, while an important part of the overall book and definitely fitting the conventions of the genre, seemed perfectly natural (in spite of the very unnatural setting of the book). The premise of the book and how things shake out for our main characters involved a lot of unique twists that I had no idea what was coming next. Figuring out how to live in a world that has changed in so many ways, who to trust, and how far to trust them, and just how to survive this wild and strange world the characters found themselves in was a vicarious adventure I’m glad I took.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

FYI:

Some adult language and relatively mild adult situations.

Format/Typo Issues:

Review is based on an ARC (advance reader/reviewer copy), so I can’t gauge the final product in this area.

Rating: **** Four Stars

Reviewed by: BigAl

Approximate word count: 105-110,000 words