New Additions to Awesome Indies: October
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The Chinese Spymaster
by Hock G. Tjoa
Genre: Thriller
Chinese Intelligence uncovers a North Korean trying to sell a nuclear device. Then they find five other dealers trying to do the same. The buyer is the same in every case–the Pashtuns. Is this a “Pashtun Spring”? A realignment of geopolitical power in Central Asia? A resurgence of Islamist terrorism? In order to anticipate and confront these threats, Spymaster Wang must negotiate through bureaucratic rivalries, as well as personal ambitions, at home and abroad. He reaches for ancient insight into strategies and unorthodox alliances. But the struggle he must undertake cannot cease, and the outcome always remains in doubt. The Spymaster must also confront a vendetta within the Party as well as the determination of his Old Friends and their wives to make him a “match.”
Awesome Indies Review
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On the Verge
by Garen Glazier
Genre: Fantasy
Art, demons, and death. Seattle is On the Verge.
Freya is just a university student worried about grades and tuition until a gorgeous succubus interrupts her post-exam latte with a proposition: come work for her boss, Seattle’s reclusive heiress and antiquities collector Imogen Beldame. Eagerly agreeing despite a nagging feeling in the pit of her stomach, Freya finds herself swept up in a deadly quest at the behest of her psychopathic new employer. Beldame has given her until Halloween to collect three magical pigments that hold the key to crafting mesmerizing portraits that can access the Verge, a borderland on the edge of human reality, and the powerful beings that call it home.
Freya’s reluctant journey takes her to a goblin stronghold in the Cascades for the color blue, to the Seattle Underground to request the color red from Baba Yaga, and to the Fremont home of a beautifully gruesome Cambodian ahp, or spirit of the night, for the color yellow. Working together with Rusty, an enigmatically disfigured man intimately connected with the Verge, and a motley crew of mercurial demons, Freya must come up with a plan to stop Beldame and preserve the fragile balance between fantasy and reality that is at its most vulnerable on Halloween.
Awesome Indies Link
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Delivering Virtue
by Brian Kindall
Genre: Historical Fiction
Awarded the Awesome Indies Seal of Excellence
It s 1854 and Didier Rain doesn’t want to be a rogue. He prefers to think of himself as a gentleman poet. And yet every time Rain finds himself in questionable circumstances, some animal instinct leads him into wrongful behavior. Maybe it’s his Oedipal upbringing that’s to blame. Or maybe he’s just never found a good moral example that hasn’t let him down. But now Rain has to put away all of his failings because The Church of the Restructured Truth has hired him to fulfill a prophecy – Didier Rain is to venture into the American Wilderness and deliver a bride into the waiting arms of the Prophet Nehi. It won’t be easy, what with all the hooligans, natural phenomena, and carnal temptations between here and there. Not to mention that Virtue, the would-be bride, is at present no more than a babe. But maybe the invisible gods will lend Rain a hand in the endeavor. Maybe Virtue is as much of an angel as she appears. And maybe, by epic journey’s end, Didier Rain will overcome the odds, experience a miracle, and find a way to secure his own dubious salvation. At once ribald, irreverent, and charming, DELIVERING VIRTUE features one of the most despicable and endearing characters ever to gallivant through the pages of American Literature. Join Didier Rain on his escapades as he navigates that precarious line between the sacred and the profane, all the while protecting Virtue from the legions of evil that would seek to do her harm.
Awesome Indies Review
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Short Story Collection (with recipes)
A Taste of Triskele
by Barbara Scott Emmett
Genre: Literary Fiction, Short StoriesA Taste of Triskele
A tale, a place, a time, a taste.
Eight delectable short stories, each set in a distinctive location, accompanied by a local dish.
Fall in love with honey, bite into bitterness, sweeten the secrets, indulge your excesses, tickle your palette and free your imagination.
Whether you’re on a beach or in your own back garden, escape into extraordinary worlds.
Bon voyage. And bon appétit.