Try Dying

Written By James Scott Bell

Reviewed By Nike Chillemi

Try Dying is the first novel in the Ty Buchanan legal thriller series. If this is going to be the measure of the series, I can’t wait to read the next book.

Ty Buchanan is preparing a case involving repressed memories that might make him a partner in his posh L.A. law firm. Meanwhile, he’s dealing with some memories of his own he’d like to repress. Schoolteacher Jacqueline Dwyer, the fiancé he adores and a committed Christian, winds up in what appears to have been a freakish accident. A gang-banger shoots his live-in girlfriend, jumps off a freeway overpass, and lands on Jacqueline’s rooftop, killing her. Less than an hour after Jacqueline’s funeral, a deranged man buttonholes a grief stricken Ty, claiming it was murder. The disheveled man attacks Ty and steals his wallet.

Ty Buchanan is charming guy, and the reader feels for him as he begins to doubt his own sanity. Bell’s ability to describe Ty’s descent into obsession keeps the reader turning pages, as this white-collar hero enters the seamy streets of L.A. seeking the truth, risking his life, and sustaining more than one beating in the process. He’s shocked and horrified by his own behavior when he is able to give another man a beating. Ty is quickly losing what little faith he had left. His investigation leads him to a modern day self-help folk-hero, Rudy Barocos, lionized by local politicians and in the press for rehabilitating gang-bangers.

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Movie Review: The Invention of Lying

By Nike Chillemi

I both liked and hated this movie.

I liked that there were truly funny moments. I did laugh a lot in this movie, more so in the beginning. The second half was more thought provoking than the movie previews suggested.

Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais, who also directs the picture) is having a terrible week. He lives in an alternate reality where everyone is compelled to spew out the brutally honest truth, at all times. It’s a world where people form opinions based on surface appearances, and where everyone’s out for themselves.

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Book Review: Worth A Thousand Words

Written by Stacy Hawkins Adams

Reviewed By Michelle Sutton

About the book:

Life has always gone Indigo Burns’s way. She’s smart, pretty, and talented, and she knows exactly what she wants. A photography internship at her hometown’s local newspaper is the next step in her well-laid plans for her future. But her long-term goals are put to the test when her boyfriend Brian proposes–two years before he’s supposed to and in front of all the guests at her college graduation party. Too concerned about his feelings to say no, she heartily agrees, but inside she’s cringing….

My review:

Ms. Adams has an amazing ability to make the reader see a variety of perspectives without straying from Biblical truths. She doesn’t always wrap things up in a tidy manner. I love that. I also love that every book Ms. Adams writes gets me thinking about people I know or situations I am familiar with and may even be struggling with myself. Her stories are solid and emotionally deep without being manipulative of the reader’s feelings. They confront important decisions that young people need to make and challenge the reader to look at all angles.

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Love Finds You in Revenge, Ohio

Written By Lisa Harris

Reviewed by Lena Nelson Dooley

 ISBN 978-1-934770-81-8
Summerside Press
Historical Romantic Women’s Fiction

Back Cover Copy:

The only thing worse than being a spinster is being a twice-jilted spinster.

At twenty-five, Catherine Morgan is hardly an old maid.  But she’s given up on marriage and instead manages the family’s general store in the small town of Revenge, Ohio.  Bound by a promise to care for her three sisters until they marry, she’ll do anything to keep them safe.  But Sheriff Corbin Hunter stands in her way.  He has evidence that her sister’s fiance is really an infamous bank robber–and the man who murdered his father.  Catherine finds herself torn between saving her sister’s heart and losing hers to the man who jilted her seven years ago.  Will Corbin’s desire for revenge cause him to lose Catherine a second time?

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Unsigned Hype

Written By Booker T. Mattison 
Reviewed By Rhonda Clark 

Back Cover:

I’m Tory Tyson, but you can call me Terror Tory because I bring terror to all producers and DJs.  I’m from the hood side of Mount Vernon, which is right next to the Bronx.  I’m fifteen and I already met my future wife.  I just have to get her to see it that way.

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