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Yankee Invasion: A Novel of Mexico City

By Ignacio Solares
Publisher: Scarletta Press & Aliform Publishing
ISBN: 978-0-9798249-4-4
Pages: 237
Published: May 2009

Yankee Invasion centers on one of the most traumatic periods of Mexican history, the 1847 invasion of Mexico City by American armed forces and the ultimate loss of almost half its territory to the United States. The story is narrated by a witness to events, Abelardo, who in the novel’s very first pages commits an act of resistance that will haunt him the rest of his life. In his old age he begins to recollect the history of Mexico, as well as his painful love for both his fiancée and her mother, which plays out against the backdrop of the invasion and occupation. Yankee Invasion offers vivid descriptions of the streets, cafés, cantinas, and drawing rooms of Mexico City from the mid-nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth. Abelardo is an informative yet unreliable narrator, and author Solares successfully combines humor and pathos.

About The Author

Ignacio Solares (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, 1945) is a novelist, playwright, and essayist, as well a the editor-in-chief of the "Revista de la Universidad de Mexico" and the past director of the Divison of Literature of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He has won numerous grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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The Litigators

By Lindsay G. Arthur, Jr.
Publisher: Scarletta Press
ISBN: 978-0-9765201-0-8
Pages: 206
Published: 2005

Stories of David and Goliath struggles in the courts are not new in legal thrillers; but in this story, figuring out just who is Goliath opens the reader to a discovery of unexpected truths about today’s highly litigious court system. Good versus evil, yes, but just what is the evil that is supposed to be vanquished? A woman living near a toxic waste site that was treated with a new process using genetically engineered microbes develops a mysterious neurological illness. By chance, she meets a passionate young lawyer at a neighborhood church supper. He feels obligated to find justice for his new struggling client and in the process takes on the largest law firm in Minnesota. How far will Dillon Love go for his client if the end result of his lawsuit is to destroy the brilliant university professor who has dedicated his entire life to improving the environment? How far will Henry Holten go to defeat the graceful woman whose family and financial future is dependent upon the success of her court case? The Litigators is a riveting page-turner, which asks if there can be any justice for either party without infliction of a great injustice on the other. This winner-take-all legal battle brings together three tenacious lawyers and their highly worthy clients in a way that forever changes the lives of all.

About The Author

Lindsay G. Arthur, Jr., is a nationally known lawyer who has tried over 150 cases during his 35-year career. In 1974 he founded his current firm, Arthur, Chapman, Kettering, Smetak, and Pikala, a highly regarded litigation firm in Minneapolis. He is also an entrepreneur, and in 1985, founded a biotech company that used genetic engineering to develop microorganisms to degrade toxic waste.

Seeking Reviews – Contact the author at: Bill Toole - WBT2515@...

The Dancing Masters

Author:  Bill Toole

Publisher: CreateSpace

ISBN: 978-1-4611-1864-0

Pages: 452

Published: December 2011

Author, Bill Toole is pleased to announce the release of his new book, The Dancing Masters. Small town revelations and sensational themes combine in this psychological novel. 

THE DANCING MASTERS describes the odyssey of Gene "Tiger" Bishop, a Korean war veteran haunted by the army's cover-up of an ambiguous battlefield situation that led to the death of his best friend. He has been honorably discharged because he gave up his attempt to bring the truth out. He returns to the small South Carolina college he left two years previously because he was running away from a responsibility to a mill girl in the town who loved him. He finds that the girl has disappeared and gradually becomes aware as he emerges from the trauma of his experiences in Korea that what he has done to her is more reprehensible than what he did not do for his buddy. In the process of his attempt to find her, he discovers a secret from a deeper past that involves her--a secret that threatens the image of the town and the college. Though the truth about what happened to her and the sins of the past are covered up through the interactions of some of the people he encounters in his search, he does find her and the truth about himself in his journey toward moral insight and self-knowledge against a background of institutional and social hypocrisy.

The story is developed through several intertwining plot lines that unfold through the actions of multidimensional characters from various walks of life who are presented realistically in the light of their time and place. There are sensational elements in the plot--rape, adultery, pedophilia, madness, murder, suicide--as well as issues of gender and race. And there are a number of amusing segments in it, ranging from the satirical to the parodic and the broadly comic. But THE DANCING MASTERS is essentially a psychological novel, suggesting the various ways rationalization serves the needs of convention, image, and conscience as well as the capacity of the human spirit to overcome its inclination toward moral inertia and the duplicity that encourages it. These themes are reflected in the interactions of the characters who determine the course of the story.

The title is adapted from a line in Dostoyevsky's THE IDIOT: "...grace and beauty come from the heart, not the dancing master."

About The Author

Bill Toole has published twenty short stories. Two have won first prize fiction awards from the journals in which they appeared; and one of these, "Song of Sarah," has been included in CARDINAL, an anthology of literature by contemporary North Carolina writers. Two chapters from THE DANCING MASTERS have been published in little magazines.

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Setting The Hook: A Diver's Return to the Andrea Doria

Author:  Peter M. Hunt

Publisher: CreateSpace

ISBN: 978-1453734209

Pages: 284

Published: December 2011

Website: http://www.settingthehook.org

Author, Peter M. Hunt is pleased to announce the release of his new book, Setting The Hook: A Diver's Return to the Andrea Doria . This book explores the Andrea Doria and extreme diving through an introspective odyssey of memory and history back to the dangerous underwater world of Northeast shipwrecks.

The 1956 collision of the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm triggered a night of sheer terror for the Andrea Doria's 1,134 passengers and set in motion one of history's most dramatic rescues at sea. From the moment the Andrea Doria settled on the sea floor in 240 feet of water, skilled amateur divers have risked their lives to simply touch her broken hull. In 1981, wealthy adventurer Peter Gimbel enlisted the aid of commercial salvage divers to torch open the Andrea Doria's Foyer Deck doors in search of treasure and answers. The unprecedented access to deep within the sunken ship's interior enticed growing numbers of sport divers to explore the wreck in increasingly daring quests for a piece of the "Mt. Everest of wreck diving." Not all returned alive.

Peter Hunt crewed on five Andrea Doria diving expeditions during the early 1980s aboard Steve Bielenda's legendary research vessel Wahoo before becoming a Navy carrier pilot and settling in Washington State. Nearly twenty years after first exploring the Andrea Doria - and following twelve months of arduous Pacific Northwest dive training in the newest equipment and techniques - Hunt hugged his wife and children goodbye and returned to New York to dive the Andrea Doria once again. The experience transformed him forever.

In Setting The Hook, an extreme adventure, thirty years of technical diving, and enduring friendships merge in a personal tale of learning to accept life's oldest challenge.

“The act of ‘setting the hook,’ when the expedition’s first diver races to secure the boat’s anchor to the shipwreck, signals the dramatic initiation of an underwater adventure,” Hunt says. “An intricate weave of history, extreme adventure and the evolution of technical diving over the course of 30 years come together in a compelling personal tale of learning to accept life’s oldest challenge.”

Seeking Reviews – Contact the author at:  James T Carpenter             Email: jamesc387@...

Hanged for the Few

Author:  James T Carpenter

Publisher: CreateSpace

ISBN: 9781461040040

Pages: 281

Published: August 2011

Hanged for the Few is a novel that touches on the topics of religious intolerance, legalistic religions and the nature of God and salvation. The theological science fiction nature of this writing allows liberal Christians and agnostics to explore the many questions they continue to seek the answers to.  

In a world torn by war and kings and queens fight among themselves, religions and sects rule the people and their ways. Flandism is a particularly radical and rigid sect of the Monidist religion. King Merkvor, a power hungry king with a vendetta against Flandism, captures Billor, a former Flandit, and forces Billor and four other companions to find this sect's major city of Weslin with the intent on destroying it. Merkvor appoints Billor as the leader of a group in which each member has his or her strengths and different loyalties: Lorbon, an expert of the weapons of the past and one who desires to end all intolerance; Margona, the guide and a woman who seeks laws that are eternal and not earthly; Allon, a Miltar, the most rigid and radical sect of a religion that opposes Monidism and believes in spreading its ways through war if necessary; Helen, a fighter who is content to be silent and let the others have their way until their goal is threatened.

These five journey through lands torn by religious civil war, an empire ruled by priests of a cruel god, a town of philosopher kings, and a town in which the Dark One is worshipped. As they journey they meet their own spiritual fates and Billor discovers that Flandism holds still more surprises for him.