Cooper’s Revenge (First Coast Publishers), the first novel by Terrence L. Williams – a thirty-year decorated veteran of the CIA, is a gripping thriller that draws attention to the devastating toll improvised explosive devices (IED’s) have taken on our military men and women serving in the Middle East, and highlights Iran’s complicity in this tragedy through its training of proxies – the Taliban and Al Qaeda – to further their objectives. This became the inspiration for Williams’ book and is why he dedicated it to Wounded Warriors in honor of these brave soldiers.

Williams’ suspenseful novel pits recently retired Logan Alexander, a Navy Seal attempting to put his life back together following a career-ending injury in Afghanistan, against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s elite unit, the Qods Force, which is training terrorists at a secret facility in the Middle East. Logan learns that his younger brother Cooper has been killed by an IED in an ambush while on patrol with his Ranger unit in Iraq.

It doesn’t take much to destroy careers, pull families apart and ruin lives. As author Julian Earl Farris states: “A mix of ignorance and hatred, combined with an insatiable lust for power, will suffice. And in Florida, circa 1958, that unholy mix fermented in the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, a.k.a. the Johns Committee.”

Family bonds, created by blood and by choice, bring both acceptance and redemption in Julian Farris’s new novel, The Sin Warriors (Lethe Press), a drama that unfolds against a backdrop of bigotry and intolerance, and based on actual events that follow a McCarthy-era demagogue who uses the threat of Communism to persecute homosexuals and ruin the lives of Florida college students and employees.

While the author is not Jewish, City of Slaughter (Daniel and Daniel Publishers, Inc.) by Cynthia Drew is beautifully written from a Jewish perspective, with meticulous research that provides a powerful picture of the plight of women at the beginning of the 20th Century and the obstacles they were forced to overcome. Recipient of the Forward National Literature’s Silver Award in the category of Historical Fiction, City of Slaughter is an exceptional work of historical fiction that is both exciting and inspiring and takes readers back in time to see the world through the eyes of another culture. This profound historical tale has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the most honored literary project in America.

When her parents are murdered by Cossacks during a raid on the shtetl, Carsie Akselrod flees with her younger sister Lilia, touching off a turbulent journey that ends eight months later on New York’s Lower East Side. Plunged into the immigrant chaos of the most crowded square mile on earth, the two girls take sweatshop jobs – Carsie as a milliner’s apprentice and Lilia at the ill-fated Triangle Waist Company. It never occurs to Carsie that in her haste to live the life she strives for in America she hasn’t stopped to lament her parents’ deaths.