This is the opener of a planned Cade Chase series. It is a crime thriller set in the fictional Rockledge, an impoverished town in the center of Appalachia, more precisely in extreme southwest Virginia.The main character, Cade Chase, recently retired from the military. He has given insufficient thought to life afterward. He accedes to the urgings of a longtime friend and former JAG officer, to come to the town of Rockledge. He leaves Florida and heads to Rockledge uncertain that this move is wise.On his first morning in Rockledge he runs across a hillbilly octogenarian named Dale Carter, who tells him finding a place to live will be tough. So Carter invites him to have a look at a home, one of three, he owns on a mountainside "out in the valley." The home he shows Cade is one of the grandest Cade has ever seen. Carter tells Cade the house is his if he wants it. Seems joining the military was the defining event of Dale's life. Without the military's 'gifts' he wouldn't have amassed the wealth he possesses. But he stipulates one condition: help protect him and his wife against what appears to be a dangerous crew of squatters camping in the woods on or near his property.Cade is instantly fond of Dale, and agrees to help him. This agreement sets the story in motion. There's plenty of action from that point onward. Yes, it's a thrilling story involving crime, but more important, it's a story of the evils of autocratic behavior by political elites. Cade is determined to bring the evildoers down. He quickly learns that extreme southwest Virginia has been a whipping boy for sixty years or more. Cade and a cadre of like-minded people strive to end the trampling of this region of the state. You may find it on Amazon and Kindle books. If searching under my name, you need to search under John M. Vermillion, including the middle initial.Thank you.jmv

    In Glasgow, in the 1980s neither the Police nor the Public could understand why grown men were fighting over the rights to sell ice cream, the violence was extreme, and the streets of the housing estates were turned into war zones. Crowds of youths gathered on the street corners, while adults hung from their flat windows watching real-life scenes far more exciting than anything they could see on TV the smashing of Ice cream vans and cars, slashings and stabbings of rival Ice cream men were a nightly occurrence. And the reason behind the violence was that you could earn more money selling Ice cream than you could from selling drugs. The lack of shops in the vast run-down housing estates with thousands of families who had money to spend was a captured market providing an excellent living for the Italian families who controlled the Ice cream trade in Glasgow. Tam McGraw was building a reputation as an up and coming gangster who led a team that specialised in post office, factory, and cash and carry raids throughout Scotland. Tam McGraw realised that he could earn a lot more money a much easier way than robbing post offices, he could sell Ice cream. But first Tam had to test the strength of the Italians and the reaction of the police. McGraw went for the jugular right from the start. He knew Marchetti would not give in easily, and they would try to defend their territory. So he started with Carntyne one of Marchetti's most lucrative routes. Marchetti Brothers were about to suffer brutality and destruction of a kind they could never have imagined in their wildest nightmares. McGraw planned to be the Ice Cream King of Scotland, and Carntyne is where he would lay the foundations of his throne. Nothing or no one would stand in his way. This is the real story of the Glasgow Ice Cream Van Wars. The shocking violence mixed with a decent portion of Glaswegian humour will keep you turning the pages until the end. Written in a broad Glaswegian dialect with a lot of swearing, the author writes as he speaks. This book might not be suitable for those who prefer perfect grammar and proper English. But if you can see past that then I am sure you will find it an enjoyable read. Teddy Rennoc.

    She is warned that her life is in danger; powerful, ruthless men have reasons to want her silenced.   But there are things she needs to know, that compel her to press on with her search for the truth.    Was her father an innocent victim?  Can she continue to revere the image of him she grew up with, that of a good, loving parent?  Or will she be forced to accept that her father was not the person she thought he was?     Ayesha decides that the only way forward is to fly to Pakistan and confront his killers.    When she goes, Martin Sixsmith goes with her.   The denouement of their journey together is extraordinarily moving, with unforeseen repercussions for them both.

    A story about friendship and growth, love and loss, and life and death. Adam Spencer, a happily married 37 year-old father of two young boys, has everything he wants. A successful business, a beautiful home, two cars in the garage, and a dog. What he doesn't want is to die. But Adam doesn't have a say in the matter. He just found out he has brain cancer.Troubled by his newly-discovered death sentence, Adam joins a support group for the terminally ill. There, he meets six strangers who are struggling to cope with their own impending demises.When one member of the group dies, leaving behind an unfulfilled dream, the others realize just how limited their time is. Now, as the youngest member nears the end of his short life, they become determined to make sure the boy's dream comes true before it's too late. Together, they embark on a road trip that will teach them all what it means to live and to die.

    While dining out with her husband and their friends, Kirshenbaum's protagonist—an acerbic, mordantly witty, and clinically depressed writer—fully unravels. Her breakdown lands her in the psych ward of a prestigious New York hospital where she refuses all modes of recommended treatment. Instead, she passes the time chronicling the lives of her fellow “lunatics” and writing a novel about how she got to this place. Her story is a hilarious and harrowing deep dive into the disordered mind of a woman who sees the world all too clearly. Propelled by stand-up comic timing and rife with pinpoint insights, her examination of what it means to be unloved, and loved; to succeed, and fail; to be, at once, both impervious and raw ultimately reveals how art can lead us out of—or into—the depths of disconsolate loneliness and piercing grief. Rabbits for Food, Kirshenbaum’s first novel in a decade, is a bravura literary performance. A heartbreaking, irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny meditation on what it’s like to lose your mind.

    Love Hotel explores a heartbreaking and nightmarish world of unrelenting excess, impossible convergences, undeniable urges, and inexorable loss.  Jane Unrue’s writing, beautifully cunning and mysterious itself, twists and turns and lures the reader on with a heightened charged erotic magnetism of its own.

    She knows how to snare a rabbit, sharpen a blade and splint a bone. She knows that her daddy loves her more than anything else in this world and he’ll do whatever it takes to keep her with him.But she doesn’t know why she feels so different from the other girls at school; why the line between love and pain can be so hard to see. Or why making a friend may be the bravest and most terrifying thing she has ever done.Sometimes the people you’re supposed to trust are the ones who do most harm. And what you’ve been taught to fear is the very thing that will save you…

    But nothing could have prepared him for the heartache he feels when he falls hopelessly in love with a Japanese girl named Sakurai. Immersed in their shared love for classical music and foreign movies, the two gradually grow closer and closer.One night, after being hit by personal tragedy, Sugihara reveals to Sakurai that he is not Japanese—as his name might indicate.Torn between a chance at self-discovery that he’s ready to seize and the prejudices of others that he can’t control, Sugihara must decide who he wants to be and where he wants to go next. Will Sakurai be able to confront her own bias and accompany him on his journey?

    Ed Bolian’s memoir recounts his path from a conversation in high school with Cannonball Run founder, Brock Yates to setting the fastest time ever for driving from New York to Los Angeles. The journey explores goal setting, criminal psychology, and spirituality in the pursuit of finding your true purpose and using what makes you unique to achieve something extraordinary.

    Every day is a new hell for her, oscillating between torture and death, with a quickly dimming flicker of hope that one day she will find her way back home. But will she? What does home really mean to a fractured soul? In anguish, it appears the whole world delights in schadenfreude, while God lies in wait. In wait for what, no one knows. ***A provocative concoction of realism, mystery and myth in a dystopian tone. Throughout the reading, a sense of pain carries forward till the end and it endures. A disturbing impactful debut novel - The New Indian express Will leave a deep impact on the readers. The details and tone of the story are haunting. Incredible writing - The news up About the Author: Sujith Balakrishnan was born in Kerala, India. An engineer by profession, he lives in UAE. This is his Debut Novel. He can be contacted at - sujithwriter2018@gmail.com

    As peace settles on the Castle, darkness looms on the horizon and the pain of former lives threatens to destroy the here and now. Delphie, Jill, Jacob, Sandy, Aden and their loved ones come face to face with their worst demons. But this is Denver Cereal. It takes more than a school brawl, a shooting, prison, a vicious beating or even a death to destroy the love and loyalty that unites this extended family of choice. In Cascade, the beloved Denver Cereal characters return. Pooling their skills and abilities, they confront the past before it overwhelms their present. Cascade is the third installment of the Denver Cereal. An Internet sensation, Denver Cereal is a serial fiction grounded in Uptown Denver, Colorado. DenverCereal.com - Crunchy, sweet and always addicting, you deserve a little Denver Cereal in your life.

    No other version has so vividly expressed the horror, cruelty, beauty, and outrageous imaginative flight of Dante's original vision.

    Sulfurously funny and intellectually provocative, 7 Tattoos is a journey without maps through the labyrinth of a human soul. There are only a few landmarks as guideposts: the ones carved on the author's own flesh. Each section of this innovative book is the story of one of Peter Trachtenberg's tattoos, as well as a daring, intelligent exploration of the themes that each tattoo evokes: death, sacrilege, primitivism, rebellion, atonement, sadomasochism, and downfall. 7 Tattoos introduces us to a man responding ingeniously and emotionally to the harrowing events of his life: funerary rites in Borneo, heroin addiction on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the deathwatches of both his parents. Though it features deft portraits of famous tattoo artists like Spider Webb, Trachtenberg's book is not about tattoos; rather it is an arsenal of ideas fired off with great emotional power. At once memoir, wild anthropology, and meditation on love, faithlessness, and faith, this stunningly original book redefines what a literary memoir can be.

    Al Burian weaves an excellent fictional but real account of twenty / thirty something life in the modern USA. Here is an Excerpt: "We see humans engage in similar behavior, although admittedly less in the context of procreation and Darwinistic survival and more in the are of pay-per-view cable entertainment options, in the form of the "Ultimate Fighting Championship" program, an international sporting event in which there seem to be no rules except those generally governing global human rights abuses and war crimes. Martial arts masters from the Far East go up against guys from Newark whose idea of fighting expertise is drinking from a bottle of gin and starting a bar fight. The results are often surprising. The constant is the insane violence, the disturbing spectacle of seeing people pounding on each other like animals. "Ultimate Fighting Championship" viewing never fails to deliver a queasy, unsanitary sensation, the bottom-feeding feeling of watching the very lowest common denominator in what can still be identified as "entertainment" - one step up, maybe, from watching videos of police car wreck footage. Although, I must concede: if, as in ape culture, the prize for being the winner of "Ultimate Fighting Championship" was the exclusive right to mate with the women of earth, it would probably make the program more compelling viewing. In any case, I am not sure where I stand in regards to this whole mating-for-life-issue. Humans, Judith points out, are the only creatures that mate for entertainment. That whole aspect complicates everything greatly, we both agree. The great apes have a good thing going for their needs, in that they have an effective, albeit socio-mechanically primitive, form of assuring that the greatest of the ape qualities are passed on, and since these great qualities consist of exactly two, ass-kicking and chest-pounding, the selection process is reasonably simple. If humans subscribed to a winner-takes-all pecking order of the type the great apes favor, the only person currently allowed to initiate sexual intercourse would be someone like Bill Gates, a man of great power and influence but also a man whose dancing was characterized by Newsweek magazine as looking like "a twelve year old kicking around a squirrel."

    Autoportrait is a physical, psychological, sexual, political, and philosophical triumph. Beyond "sincerity," Levé works toward an objectivity so radical it could pass for crudeness, triviality, even banality: the author has stripped himself bare. With the force of a set of maxims or morals, Levé's prose seems at first to be an autobiography without sentiment, as though written by a machine—until, through the accumulation of detail, and the author's dry, quizzical tone, we find ourselves disarmed, enthralled, and enraptured by nothing less than the perfect fiction . . . made entirely of facts.