Spotlight: Death By Theft by Abigail Keam

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Publication date: October 30th 2023

Genres: Adult, Cozy Mystery

Synopsis:

Josiah is happy for her pals Lady Elsmere and Shaneika Mary Todd when broodmare Jean Harlow gives birth to a male foal sired by Comanche. The owners of both horses have high hopes the foal will become a stakes winner—maybe even win the Kentucky Derby. The foal has a broad chest, indicating significant lung capacity—important for winning races, but just like his daddy, the foal is ebony with a bad attitude.

Josiah and Shaneika visit dam Jean Harlow early one morning and are shocked to find the prized foal is missing. They frantically search Lady Elsmere’s and Josiah’s farms without success. It’s urgent they find the foal fast as he is not yet weaned and is too young to be separated from his mother. Who would snatch the feisty foal from his mother’s care? And equally important, why?

Excerpt

Excited, I entered the nursery barn with Shaneika Mary Todd leading the way. It was still very early, and the mares were with their offspring in their stalls, quietly munching on hay. They would be let out when the grass had dried. However, kicking and neighing erupted from one stall.

Shaneika shot me a worried look. “That’s Jean Harlow. I know her cry.”

We both rushed to the stall. “What’s wrong?” I asked, seeing Shaneika’s alarmed facial expression.

Shaneika swung open the stall door and pushed a nervous Jean Harlow out of the way.

I grabbed the mare’s halter and led her out into the barn aisle. She was jumpy and hard to handle, so I shouted for aid. “Can someone help us, please?”

Shaneika ran out of the stall and began checking the others frantically.

“What is wrong?” I asked again, handing Jean Harlow over to a nursery groom who led the horse back into her stall.

Shaneika screamed, “WHAT’S WRONG? WHAT’S WRONG? THE FOAL IS MISSING. THAT’S WHAT IS WRONG!”

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About the Author

Abigail Keam is an award-winning and Amazon best-selling author who writes the Josiah Reynolds Mystery Series about a Southern beekeeper turned amateur female sleuth. Besides loving history, Kentucky bourbon and chocolate, Abigail loves honeybees and for many years made her living by selling honey at a farmers’ market like her protagonist, Josiah Reynolds. She is an award-winning beekeeper who has won many honey awards at the Kentucky State Fair including the Barbara Horn Award, which is given to beekeepers who rate a perfect 100 in a honey competition.

Miss Abigail has taken her knowledge of beekeeping to create a fictional beekeeping protagonist, Josiah Reynolds, who solves mysteries in the Bluegrass. While Miss Abigail’s novels are for enjoyment, she discusses the importance of a local sustainable food economy and land management for honeybees and other creatures.

She currently lives on the Kentucky River in a metal house with her husband and various critters. She still has honeybees.

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Spotlight: Gaslighting Recovery for Women by Dr. Amelia Kelley

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A complete gaslighting recovery guide for women to regain control and reclaim their lives

Gaslighting is one of the most destructive forms of emotional abuse that women can experience, causing them to distrust their own realities and perceptions and even believe they have a mental illness. In Gaslighting Recovery for Women, trauma-informed therapist Amelia Kelley, PhD, offers evidence-based therapy and tools to help women detect and protect themselves from manipulation that can occur in all key areas of life—family, intimate relationships, work, academia, and healthcare. Her guided approach to healing from abuse helps survivors establish a greater sense of self-worth, self-esteem, and empowerment.

This book features:

• A THREE-PART RECOVERY PROGRAM designed for understanding gaslighting, healing from trauma, and reclaiming your reality

• REAL-LIFE COVERT GASLIGHTING CASES from all aspects of a woman’s life that help validate realities and perceptions that have been otherwise distorted by a gaslighter

• ACCESSIBLE THERAPY EXERCISES, ACTIVITIES, AND TECHNIQUES rooted in DBT (dialectical behavioral therapy), mindfulness, and self-love, among others, to facilitate personal healing from past traumas and guide women to embrace who they truly are

• SIGNS OF MENTAL MANIPULATION FOR PREVENTION AND RECOVERY that enable women to be self-aware and fully trust their instincts when they sense something is wrong.

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About the Author

Amelia Kelley, PhD, is an integrative, trauma-informed therapist focusing on motivation, women’s issues, empowering survivors of abuse and relationship trauma, Highly Sensitive Persons, healthy living, and adult ADHD. She is trained in EMDR, hypnotherapy, somatic thera­pies, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Brainspotting. Dr. Kelley is an adjunct professor in counseling at Yorkville University and a nationally recognized relationship expert featured on SiriusXM’s Doctor Radio program “The Psychiatry Show,” exploring the impact of gaslighting on our society. Her private practice is part of the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium at the Kinsey Institute. She is a co-author of What I Wish I Knew: Surviving and Thriving After an Abusive Relationship and a regular contributing writer for the world’s largest blog for HSPs, The Highly Sensitive Refuge. Her work has been featured in Psychology Today, Teen Vogue, Scary Mommy, Yahoo! News, Well+Good, and Insider.

Spotlight: An Unexpected Ally: A Greek Tale of Love, Revenge, and Redemption by Sophia Kouidou-Giles

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Powerful Circe, daughter of the sun-god Helios, is sad to see Odysseus, King of Ithaca, depart from her island, Aeaea—but her heartbreak is eased after dolphins take her to Delos, where she explores a new love relationship.

Circe has a strained relationship with her mother, Perse, but when she finally listens to Perse’s encouragement to seek out the amphibian god Glaucus, she’s glad she’s heeded her advice. Together, the two embark on underwater adventures, and Circe shares with Glaucus her knowledge about the healing and harmful power of herbs. While in Delos, she also meets and befriends Skylla, a local beauty with whom Glaucus is enthralled, although the girl is indifferent.

Circe eventually returns to Aeaea, but one day she learns, upon consulting her scrying mirror, that there is trouble in Delos that requires her immediate action. In the turbulent world of gods mingling with mortals, our heroine shifts shapes, flies, and uses her superpowers to reverse the course of evil.

In a tangle of love, hate, vengeance, and the final righting of wrongs, a cast of irresistible characters weaves an adventure laced with beauty and terror in An Unexpected Ally—a newly woven set of tales that brings to life ancient Greek myths and revives issues familiar to contemporary readers.

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About the Author

Sophia Kouidou-Giles was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, and university educated in the USA. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and masters in social work. In her over-30-year child welfare career, she served as a practitioner, educator, researcher, and administrator and published articles in Greek and English professional journals. In recent years, her focus has shifted to writing nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and translation. She has published in Voices, Persimmon Tree, Assay, The Raven’s Perch, The Time Collection, and The Blue Nib. Her poetry chapbook is Transitions and Passages. Her work has appeared in anthologies, including The Time Collection, Visual Verse, and Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis.

Her memoir, Επιστροφή Στη Θεσσαλονίκη/Return to Thessaloniki, was published in Greek by Tyfri Press. The book in English: Sophia’s Return: Uncovering My Mother’s Past, was published by She Writes Press. Sophia  lives in Seattle, Washington, near her son, her daughter-in-law, and two grandsons. Find out more about her at her website. Perse is a sequel to An Unexpected Ally. Look for it in November 2025. 

Follow Sophia Kouidou-Giles on social media: 

Facebook: @Kouidou | Twitter: @Kouidou | Instagram: @sophiakg1

Spotlight: Finding Sunlight: A Coming-Of-Age Memoir about Love Within the Wreckage of Purity Culture by Chrissy Holm

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In Chrissy Holm’s inspirational coming-of-age memoir, “Finding Sunlight," she separates the pressures of purity culture from all the possibilities of meaningful love. Homeschooled at church and raised by a devout father, Chrissy suppressed her bisexuality and followed all the teachings of purity culture. But when she turned sixteen, her parent’s divorce flipped the script. Devastated and unsure of her values, Chrissy embarked on a long journey until she figured out just exactly who she is and what she believes in. Raw and hopeful, this liberating memoir is an intimate look at figuring out how to forgive–and love–after purity culture.

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About the Author

Chrissy Holm (she/they) is a writer, editor, and project manager. She is the host of the podcast Stirred By Words, where she talks about words, writing, and wellness. Her writing has been featured on Everyday Health, National Council on Aging, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, and more. She is an alumni at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, where she studied Public Health Education and Promotion. Chrissy lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her husband and daughter.

To learn more, visit: www.chrissyholm.com

And follow Chrissy on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok: @chrissyholm_

Spotlight: The Cruel Dark by Bea Northwick

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Publication date: October 31st 2023

Genres: Adult, Gothic, Romance

Synopsis:

Millicent Foxboro is haunted.

Not by ghosts, but by the anguish of her past and the uncertainty of her future. After all, even in the progressive year of 1928, most people would balk at hiring a woman who’d spent two months in a mental ward for traumatic amnesia. So when an uncommon assistantship to a reclusive Professor of mythology falls into her lap with an ungodly salary attached, her desperation for stability overrides her cautious nature.

To Millie’s dismay, the widowed Professor Callum Hughes and his estate, Willowfield, are more than she bargained for. The once magnificent home, known for its sprawling gardens and dazzling parties, is falling to pieces after the death of the professor’s fragile wife. What’s more, the staff has been reduced to the only three people not frightened away by rumors of ghosts, leaving the halls empty and languishing in bitter memories.

The professor himself is a grim, intense man with unclear expectations, unpredictable moods, and hungry eyes that ignite Millie’s own dormant passions. The closer she finds herself drawn to Professor Hughes and his strange world of flowers and folklore, the more the house closes in, threatening to reveal her secrets. But the professor is keeping secrets of his own, and the most dangerous of all is hers to discover.

Excerpt

I’d never questioned the presence of my wits more than the moment I stood in the frigid morning air and watched the hired car arrive. The vehicle, sleek and ostentatious, was said to be capable of going fifty miles an hour, and I pretended it was the prospect of that speed making my stomach do somersaults.

The car pulled to a smooth stop, and a tall, ruddy driver unfolded himself from the front seat, introduced himself briefly as Joseph Dempsey, and went to collect my bags. It was short work; I had only one. I wasn’t a woman of means. As the gentleman loaded my valise into the trunk, I ran my bare fingers along the smooth deep sea blue of the wheel hull. This was, undoubtedly, the worst decision I’d ever made, but there were few options, and this was by far the least evil of them.

I glanced over my shoulder to the doorway of the little bookshop I’d come to know as home, where the stooped owner, Mr. Helm, had appeared, his blue eyes uncharacteristically red-rimmed. I’d never seen him on the verge of tears, and my heart constricted painfully. I rushed to him, pulling a thin cotton handkerchief from my pocket. It wasn’t in his character to embrace, so he enveloped both of my hands in his. They were large hands, covered in the ink stains of his trade as an antique book restorer, a business he had been teaching me for the past year despite his once firmly held belief that restoration was not for women.

Mr. Helm had been a tall man in his youth, but the war and many years hunched over a workman’s table had scuttled his stature. I didn’t need to lift my chin to look at his face, which was working to arrange itself into something less aggrieved. I was glad for his trying, because I would call off everything if even one tear rolled down his cheek.

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About the Author

Bea Northwick is a lover of magical, spooky, and romantic things. She owns too much perfume, can’t pick an aesthetic, and loves 80s movies. She lives with her husband, children, dogs, and a black cat in the sunny American South where she dreams daily of Irish cottages and rain swept Scottish castles. 

The Cruel Dark is her debut novel.

Connect:

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Spotlight: Magic & Medicine by Olena Nikitin

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Publication date: October 2023

Genres: Adult, Paranormal, Romance

Synopsis:

Danger doesn’t lurk in the shadows. It barges in and smacks you in the face.

After years of working in the Emergency Department, Sara thought nothing could surprise her, but when the deceased victim of a stabbing opened his eyes and demanded his knife back, she knew her life had taken a bizarre turn.

Leszek had guarded the magic of the Nether before the first human set foot in his lands. His power was absolute, his authority unchallenged. The world might change, but even ruling from the shadow, no one, not even hardened criminals, dared to question his judgment.

When he was called to clean up the mess an unruly vampire caused in the hospital, Leszek barely contained his irritation when his power couldn’t make the stubborn doctor forget his existence. Instead, she looked him in the eye, challenging him to leave, and he listened.

Sara’s courage and audacity were intriguing, but her magic captivated him with its beauty. The magic she was unaware of. She may be human, but even humans have their uses, and Sara will soon learn there are consequences to capturing the undivided attention of the Tricity Mafia’s boss.

This fascinating woman might haunt his dreams, but Sara’s magic made her a target for a dangerous, emerging power, and Leszek has to decide if he will sacrifice her to save his domain.

Excerpt

The knife had penetrated his chest to its hilt, and while the paramedics were desperately trying to save him, I knew this one was long gone. The grey cloud of death covered him, the soulless body bouncing rhythmically during the chest compressions. He had no chance, but I couldn’t tell my team their efforts were pointless. There was no science to back up my claim, so medical training kicked in and, taking a deep breath, I issued the order.

‘Stop chest compressions.’

‘No, he has no pulse.’ The paramedic tried to argue, instantly making me wish Damian and Rysiek were here, but one look at my face and his voice faltered.

‘He’s running on empty. How do you plan on restarting an engine without fuel?’ I said and turned to the team. ‘Secure the airway, prepare O neg and get me a thoracotomy set. We need to crack him open to plug this hole in his heart.’

Like a Formula One pit crew, my team was ready in less than a minute. Pride surged at their response as I bent over to start the incision when the patient’s bright blue eyes snapped open in surprise, and a cold, male hand grabbed my wrist in a vice-like grip.

‘Oh, hell no, you are not doing that.’ His voice was cold and commanding, and the man, about to be opened up like a giant clamshell, sat up, the dagger still fully embedded in his chest. What the actual fuck, I thought, looking at him in shock. It is one thing to feel like there is more to the world than science can explain and a whole other one to stare at this discovery in its smugly amused face.

‘Did you just pull a Lazarus on me?’ I heard myself saying, despite my voice being drowned out by screams of terror and the clattering of fallen medical equipment. I didn’t care. Why would my attention be anywhere other than the talking corpse before me? Maybe years of conditioning, medical missions to war-torn countries and stories my grandmother told me; stories that had suddenly become very real prepared me for it because I was as calm as he was dead. I will never break a fucking mirror on the full moon again, I thought, observing him as he looked around, his gaze eventually falling on me.

‘Pulled a what?’ He asked, still holding tight to my wrist, and for no apparent reason, I reached out with my free hand, pulling the knife from his chest. Some say emergency people are built differently, and while I still could barely believe what just happened, part of me methodically analysed the situation. This man was definitely alive, yet no blood escaped the wound, and I bit my lip, trying to comprehend the insanity. He didn’t even wince when I examined the gaping hole, poking it with an inquisitive finger. He just looked on with impatient annoyance, utterly unphased, before asking again.

‘I pulled a what?’

The knife in my hand looked odd. I’d seen my fair share of weapons, combat, folding, and kitchen knives, but this was different. It was vibrating… no. Looking carefully, it didn’t move, but something felt… tension. That was it. It felt as if it were under tension, like the cable on a bridge or, more accurately, a string on a bow, ready to release its murderous power, aimed at this man before me. In fact, it refused to be pointed anywhere else. Nothing about this blade was normal. Ornate Slavic engravings adorned the metal that, whilst bright and clean, felt like it belonged in a museum. I had to resist the urge to stab it back into the gaping hole in the man’s chest. I wasn’t sure whether the knife was driving the desire or my curiosity at seeing the strange man’s reaction. Then, the real, screaming, noisy world crashed into my consciousness, and I focused on answering his question.

‘Did you just resurrect on me, like Lazarus, or maybe Jesus would be more accurate as nobody here helped you? What the fuck are you, a zombie, vampire, or something else that sparkles?’ My rambling question made the very alive man laugh.

‘Yeah, or something. Now, be a darling and give me the dagger. It still wants my life, and I see you are keen to give in to the temptation.’ He commanded, looking into my eyes as if trying to reach into the depths of my soul, but his five minutes were gone. My anger broke through the shock of the situation. Now he faced a very focused woman with a powerful urge to tear him a new one… newer than the one that brought him here, anyway.

‘Pack it in, Romeo. First, the dagger is evidence, and second, I’m not your darling, so you can stop trying to make puppy eyes at me. I’ve seen this constipated look far too many times. That is borderline creepy. Who, or should I say, what, are you?’

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About the Authors

Olena Nikitin is our pen name. We are an enthusiastic couple of writers who are fascinated by the fantasy/paranormal romance genre and decided to write a book we would love to read

Behind the Pen name:

Olga - is Polish, armed with a wicked sense of humour and typical Slavic pessimism she is the wicked witch from the East. She has written stories since childhood, initially mostly about her work. As an emergency physician, she always has a story to tell and often not much time to write.

Mark is a typical English gentleman whose charm, refined taste and an impressive collection of books were tempting enough to make Olga leave her homeland. Don't tease him too much; this man has an impressive sword collection and he knows how to use it. He also can fix everything, including Polish syntax in English writing.

See more on our website: www.olenanikitin.uk

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