Contemporary Fiction Releases

Mary Sharnick: Painting Mercy. The sequel to prize-winning Orla’s Canvas, Orla, now twenty-four, has been studying and painting in New York City. It is 1975. Saigon has fallen to the Communists, and Vietnamese refugees have been invited to settle in New Orleans by Archbishop Hannan, a former paratrooper and military chaplain in WW II. Orla’s childhood friend and forever confidant, Tad Charbonneau, is practicing immigration law in New Orleans, where he mitigates challenging adoption cases involving children, many of them bi-racial, recently airlifted from Saigon and in need of new families. On her way back home for Katie Cowles’ wedding and a summer painting in misspelled St. Suplice, Orla reconnects with Tad and contemplates her future. While she anticipates marriage and family with her undisputed soul mate, she discovers upsetting news about Tad’s sexuality and learns that her forty-three-year-old mother is pregnant. Adding to her troubling personal revelations, Orla becomes involved in the devastating costs of war for former GI and Katie’s brother Denny Cowles and Mercy Cleveland, a Vietnamese orphan who eventually becomes as essential to Orla as her art. Orla once again calls upon her art to make sense of loss and gain. Through her craft she re-imagines how Love and Home might look, finally charting a future for herself she had not previously considered possible.

Mary Sharnick: Orla's Canvas: Narrated by eleven-year-old Orla Gwen Gleason, Orla’s Canvas opens on Easter Sunday, in St. Suplice, Louisiana, a “misspelled town” north of New Orleans, and traces Orla's dawning realization that all is not as it seems in her personal life or in the life of her community. The death of St. Suplice’s doyenne, Mrs. Bellefleur Dubois Castleberry, for whom Orla’s mother keeps house, reveals Orla’s true paternity, shatters her trust in her beloved mother, and exposes her to the harsh realities of class and race in the Civil Rights-era South. When the Klan learns of Mrs. Castleberry’s collaboration with the local Negro minister and Archbishop Rummel to integrate the parochial school, violence fractures St. Suplice's vulnerable stability. The brutality Orla witnesses at summer’s end awakens her to life’s tenuous fragility. Like the South in which she lives, she suffers the turbulence of changing times. Smart, resilient, and fiercely determined to make sense of her pain, Orla paints chaos into beauty, documenting both horror and grace, discovering herself at last through her art.

D. C. Wales: The Prick. Jason Hunter’s dwindling bank account is a daily reminder that Jason never should have left his job at a prestigious law firm to start his own practice, a solo shop located in uncomfortable proximity to a strip club. Hope arrives in the form of Maggie Moxley, a legal assistant who tearfully claims that Robert Spelkin III—her boss, and the office’s most profitable partner—sexually assaulted her at work. Looking to transform Moxley’s misfortune into profits, Jason takes on Spelkin and his powerhouse firm, Levitt, Bennett & Taylor, LLP. Spelkin, a man of unbridled ambition and aggression, demands not only victory but Jason’s legal dismemberment. Levitt engages Rebecca Trent, widely regarded as the city’s best employment litigator, to embark on a campaign that will annihilate Jason, his little firm, and his client.Jason’s only weapon is the truth of what happened that night. But the more he gathers evidence, the more he questions whether Moxley has told him the whole story. Meanwhile, Moxley’s accusations initiate a series of events whose consequences extend far beyond accuser and accused, creating chaos for everybody in their orbit. 

Marc Liebman: Inner Look. After John Walker and Jerry Whitworth are arrested for passing top-secret information to the Soviet Union, the project Inner Look is initiated to determine if there are any other spies operating within the government intelligence agencies. Navy SEAL Marty Cabot and naval aviator Josh Haman are assigned to the project in the hopes that their unconventional approach and out-of-the-box thinking will yield more answers. Cabot and Haman discover that the security leaks go higher up than anyone imagined. Furthermore, the leaks have compromised many of their missions. For Josh and Marty, it's not just about national security, it's personal.Their pursuit turns international, taking them into dangerous waters. Nothing but their skills will keep them alive when the KBG sends assassins to silence the traitor and neutralize the threat they pose.

Marina Julia Neary:Saved By the Bang. Welcome to 1980s Belarus, where Polish denim is the currency, “kike” is a pedestrian endearment, and a second-trimester abortion can be procured for a box of chocolates. Antonia Olenski, a catty half-Jewish professor at the Gomel Music Academy, wavers between her flamboyant composer husband, Joseph, and a chivalrous tenor, Nicholas. The Chernobyl disaster breaks up the love triangle, forcing Antonia into evacuation with her annoying eight-year-old daughter, Maryana.
After a summer of cruising through Crimean sanatoriums and provoking wounded Afghan veterans, Antonia starts pining for the intrigues and scandals of the Academy. When the queen of cats finally returns home, she finds that new artistic, ethnic, and sexual rivalries have emerged in the afterglow of nuclear fallout. How far will Antonia go to reclaim her throne?

Bruno Jambor: Wildfire in the Desert. In this fast-moving tale of intrigue, present-day Arizona collides with its own past. A Navy veteran returns home to his ancestral land to escape the pace of modern life. His nephew begs him to hide the drugs he's transporting to escape his pursuers. An astronomer trying to find a replacement for his estranged wife finds solace in his work with the stars. Police work with a drug cartel to recover the disappeared shipment, ready to sacrifice any opponent. The antagonists crisscross the desert of Southern Arizona in a chess game where the loser will be eliminated—and unexpected help comes from a famous missionary who blazed new paths through the same desert three centuries ago.

Anne Chamberlin: The Book of Wizzy: Eighteen-year-old Brittany Bingham is working as a housekeeper for posh condominiums in Park City when she discovers a body in a hot tub. Dead. Brittany’s parents are serving an LDS mission in Southern California. Whom should she call? Why, her aunt Helen Snow, of course. But Helen has her own problems. She’s still mourning the loss of a daughter with Down syndrome who died fifteen years ago at age three. Though Wizzy’s sweet, angelic spirit visits her every day, no one understands that she’s the source of her inspiration, just as no one can know Helen’s celestial marriage is on the rocks. Should Helen accept her bishop’s call to be Relief Society president and tune out everything else, even Wizzy? Or should she respond to Brittany and learn how handsome Dave Jaramillo died?

Lou Aguilar: Jake for Mayor. Ken Miller is having a bad run of luck. After torpedoing his career as a campaign manager, he drives through tiny Erie, Colorado, when a homeless beagle named Jake causes a series of mishaps that lands him in jail. Ken is granted bail on two conditions: that he not leave town before his trial in three weeks and—much to his chagrin—that he not let Jake out of his sight until then. Stuck in Erie as it prepares for a mayoral election, he’s drawn into the local politics by a waitress who vehemently opposes incumbent Charles Dunbar, the only candidate on the ticket. Unable to resist political adventure, Ken gets a brainstorm. If he can exploit the dog’s popularity among the townspeople and get them to elect Jake as a protest candidate, the publicity will put him back on top. But things don’t go exactly as planned. Ken warms to the dog, falls for the waitress, and employs her teenage son and his gang as campaign aides in a madcap battle with Mayor Dunbar … who has no intention of losing to a dog. 

Philip R Ackman: Man in a Spider Web Coat. When the United Nations adopts a historic vote spelling the end of colonialism, Professor Titus Buchanan seizes the opportunity to test his theory of revolution. His laboratory will be the Splendid Islands, a collection of palm-fringed cays scattered across three quarters of a million square miles of the South Pacific. Its inhabitants will be his lab rats. But complications arise. The Splendids belong to New Zealand, which has no intention of giving them up. The United States has a secret “space age” agenda for the islands. The Queen of England supports New Zealand, but she doesn’t want Britain to fall out with the Americans, who favor independence. Meanwhile, the islanders have their own ideas about self-rule and this unlikely crew sets out to match wits with powerful opponents.