Author C.M. Evergreene’s writing debut, "Echoes of Descent" is an impressive and memorable effort exploring the adventures of Miranok Danse, the heiress to the kingdom of Corticia, and how her first journey outside the royal confines becomes a formative and transcendental experience. Evergreene’s prose is vivid and her characters are ...Read more

In this groundbreaking book – the first in Calhoun’s seven-part “Faith at Work” series – the author bridges two worlds that rarely meet: timeless spiritual principles and the demands of contemporary project management.

Unlike generic business devotionals, "If Jesus Was a Project Manager" zeroes in on the specific responsibilities of ...Read more

Christmas holidays generate a lot of togetherness. A lot of togetherness means cooking, cleaning, searching for kids’ missing boots and gloves, digging through trash for a gift card accidentally thrown away, separating grands leg wrestling on the family room floor and plunging the kitchen garbage disposal.

It’s a lot of merry.

Ho, ho, hold...Read more

What would you do if you know your exact point of death? What if death is encoded into our DNA at birth? Imagine the possibilities. They’re hard to grasp, right?

John H. Thomas delves into those very questions in his new novel, "The Terminal Gene." The novel’s far from an existential crisis, but instead it is wrapped around a techno-...Read more

Some losses feel like mountains you’ll never climb. Some griefs linger in the quiet corners of your heart. And some questions have no easy answers. Yet in those moments, certain books become companions, guides, even lifelines.

The following memoirs do exactly that. They explore grief, faith and the stubborn courage it takes to keep moving ...Read more

If you’ve had a cold recently, you know the drill: You drag yourself to the store and prepare to spend the next four days scanning row after row of cold meds. By the time you find the meds that fit your symptoms, your cold will be gone.

All the fine-print ingredients and warnings on the boxes, bottles and origami folded sheets of paper inside...Read more

The labor and delivery portrayed in the Christmas story has been highly sanitized. We have softened the realities of Christ’s birth with pillowy mounds of straw, cattle gently lowing, moonlight streaming in through strategically placed windows and an inexperienced husband attending the birth like a seasoned OB/GYN who has delivered hundreds.

...Read more

"Thunderbird Rising" by John H. Thomas launches listeners into an alternate history thriller set in September 2001. Former Army Ranger Maxx King is pulled into a covert conflict between the U.S. and China after a violent encounter with a spy. At the center is a mysterious device capable of triggering catastrophic natural disasters … and every ...Read more

"The Chronicles of Durajan" invites readers into a sprawling yet deeply intimate fantasy world where exiled outcasts band together to create something extraordinary.

In the remote canyons of the Durajan – a harsh land of banishment where the “branded” are cast away – a new settlement called Dothemia is born from the hopes of those who ...Read more

I talked to Santa by phone today. Truly. He was in St. Louis getting ready to head out for an afternoon shift at the mall and after that a couple of runs on the Polar Express.

Mrs. Claus was helping with the custom-fit red and white suit (which his daughter makes for him), the belt, the hat, the boots, the gloves and the signature beard.

Santa...Read more

Midway through "The Bone Thief," Vanessa Lillie’s new thriller starring Cherokee B.I.A. archaeologist Syd Walker, this interaction between Syd and Shawna, a Narragansett woman who interned with the B.I.A, hit me in the heart.

“No, not artifacts, not objects … This basket is a story about how we’re connected to the land, to our own ...Read more

Some psychologists spend their lives writing polite articles about human behavior. Others walk straight into the storm and pull truths out of the chaos. The books below follow the second group, the thinkers who argued, obsessed, unraveled and rebuilt everything we thought we knew about the mind. Their lives were messy, bold and sometimes ...Read more

There are days I feel like the last surviving gatekeeper to tradition. My mission is to keep the holidays from crashing into one another.

In my rich fantasy world, Labor Day is followed by Halloween, Halloween is followed by Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving is followed by Christmas. Never do they meet, mix or mingle. Welcome to dreamland.

The ...Read more

"My Mountains: Our Family’s Story of Adventure, Mysteries, and Tragedy" opens on a blue-sky Colorado day and a text message no parent wants to receive.

From that first, shattering scene, author Chris Smith carries readers into a life measured not only by summits and trail miles, but by the stamina of a family learning to love through pain. ...Read more

In today’s most compelling crime fiction, the chase is never just about the killer — it’s about the fragile minds drawn into the hunt. These five thrillers plunge deep into the psychology of obsession, pairing haunted investigators with murderers who blur the boundaries between predator and prey.

Set against backdrops of small-town ...Read more

In "Searching for Bowlby: The Life of John Bowlby," C.V. Wooster has written a comprehensive biography about the life and work of Dr. John Bowlby, the noted British psychiatrist who devoted most of his career to studying the links of the emotional bond (or lack thereof) between parent/guardian and their child and how the child’s development ...Read more

Jane Gallagher’s reflective memoir explores one big question: What does it mean to become conscious, both personally and collectively amid shifting beliefs, power structures and ecological awareness?

If you’ve ever found yourself contemplating how much of what you believe comes from the world around you vs. how much comes from within ...Read more

I set off the alarm at the grocery store over the weekend. I wasn’t going to mention it, but it’s always best to get ahead of a breaking news story. My story, my spin.

I’ve never set off an alarm before.

I take that back. I set off the smoke alarm in the kitchen about once month, but high heat with cast iron does that. Other than that, ...Read more

There were no witnesses, but all I said was, “Get Fred off the table and away from the food.” I thought it was a reasonable request, but from the look on her face I was out of line. Who knew a first-grader with beautiful hazel eyes nestled above cherub cheeks could shoot such a menacing look?

I was momentarily intimidated, but I also knew I...Read more

Life doesn’t hand out road maps for the hard stuff — illness, grief, loss or the quiet, sometimes overwhelming uncertainty that comes after survival. There’s no checklist, no perfect sequence of steps, no easy answers. But books? Books can meet us exactly where we are. They can hold us, challenge us and whisper the truths we need to hear ...Read more