Free Fiction Monday: The Blitz Experience

Tenesha McGuire misses her Grand immensely. She wishes she could visit her great-grandmother more often, but Grand lives in London and Tenesha in Chicago. So, when an opportunity to chaperone a school trip to London allows her to spend time with Grand, she jumps at the chance. But a visit to the Imperial War Museum’s Blitz Experience will bring Tenesha even closer to her Grand […]

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Free Fiction Monday: Dark Corners

Solae keeps his family alive during the horrible years of Paris’s occupation by hiding in the catacombs. The Germans murdered Solae’s father, who had a gift for glamour, in the first days of the occupation, as the lights went dim in the City of Light. Solae possesses the power to make light out of nothing. His father called that a useless talent, but it keeps […]

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Free Fiction Monday: Midnight Trains

An American in Paris, Alex faces Christmas alone—alone and lonely. Hopelessly lonely. He wanders the streets and train stations searching—for something, for someone, for hope. Until Christmas Eve, when he meets a strange woman in an abandoned Metro station. A woman seemingly out of time. She both unnerves him and compels him. And if he decides to trust her, they might just succeed in freeing […]

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Free Fiction Monday: Family Affair

Private Investigator Smokey Dalton receives a call from an old friend to help transport a battered woman and her young daughter from Madison, Wisconsin, to a shelter in Chicago. But when Smokey and Marvella Walker show up at the drop site, they learn that the woman is both white and a racist. She refuses to leave with them. And that’s only the beginning of their […]

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Free Fiction Monday: Christmas Eve at the Exit

As Rachel decides on a place to spend Christmas Eve, she can’t shake the feeling of being tracked. She knows well how hard they will search for her and Anne-Marie. Rachel knows they will never stop. But Rachel also knows she needs to focus on the plan, and on making sure Anne-Marie knows Santa will still find her wherever they go. Because every child needs […]

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Free Fiction Monday: The Thrill of the Hunt

Her family called her Hilda, before the war, before the Great Wulf murdered them all with his mind. Now the war has ended, leaving Europe in ruin, and the remaining Nazis have scattered. Hilda hunts them, but really, she hunts him. And thanks to an old friend, she has tracked him to Argentina. She should kill him, but she has doubts. She won’t know if […]

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Recommended Reading List: October, 2020

What a month of distractions. The election, weather weirdness, an actual run!, and so much more. It’s been tough to find the time to read at times, just because the days are so full. Still, I managed. I tried very hard to read a book by a writer whose work I adore. The book had what we call anti-reader cookies for me. A plethora of […]

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Free Fiction Monday: Still Life 1931

Years ago, Lurleen helped the NAACP investigate lynchings. She stopped when she met her husband, but never forgot the work…or the caution it required. After his death, Lurleen finds herself struggling to find purpose.

She travels to New York without a plan. But what she finds there might help her face her past—and finally chart her future.

A powerful story about justice, courage, and facing one’s true self.  

Originally written for the anthology In Sunlight or in Shadow, edited by Lawrence Block, and inspired by the painting “Hotel Room (1931)” by Edward Hopper, “Still Life 1931” by Edgar Award-nominated author Kris Nelscott, is free on this website for one week only.

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Free Fiction Monday: Her Mother’s Secrets

When tragedy took everything from Violet, she left home and never looked back. Until now. Her mother’s funeral.

Violet hopes she can settle her mother’s affairs and quietly return to the life she built after that day. Until she sees him. Skeeter Johnson. The boy who shot her in the face.

In a moment, her past returns to haunt her. A past she thought she left behind. A past, she comes to discover, full of her mother’s secrets.

“Her Mother’s Secrets,” by New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only.

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Free Fiction Monday: G-Men

February, 1964: Two men die in a squalid alley in a bad neighborhood. New York Homicide Detective Seamus O’Reilly receives the shock of his life when he looks at the men’s identification: J. Edgar Hoover, the famous, tyrannical director of the FBI, and his number one assistant, Clyde Tolson.

O’Reilly teams up with FBI agent Frank Bryce to solve the high-level assassination before the murders unleash even greater consequences.

In our world, Hoover kept his secrets until long after his death. In Seamus O’Reilly’s world, Hoover’s secrets get him killed.

The acclaimed short story that inspired the award-winning novel, The Enemy Within.

“G-Men,” by New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only.

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