Spotlight: His in the Dark by Willow Winters

Release Date: February 12 

There are two things I’ve always known:
Magic is real
The Gods have no mercy for women like me.

I was born into power although what little I have is dying. Nonetheless, I’ve been protected all my life.  There are myths and tales that say one day I will come to a fork in a long, long path.  Either the light will take me or the dark.  I never paid any mind to the whispers and warnings…  

Until he crept into my window late at night.

Cloaked in darkness, silent as death. Every inch of me felt terror and yet I also felt something else.  Something I’d never known.

He tasted like sin … and I loved it.  

In a single moment, my entire world went dark and I was nothing more than a captive in the Underworld.

Nothing but his and suddenly all the lore brought a chill to my bones… even if he did light a fire in the most secret depths of me.

Prepare for a dark retelling of Hades and Persephone with spells and war and a love story that would change our world forevermore.

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Meet Willow Winters

I started writing after having my little girl, Evie, December of 2015. All during my pregnancy with her I read. I only wanted to read romance novels and I read everything I could get my hands on. I would read a book a day — sometimes two. In January I was staying up late with her and just thinking of all these stories. They came to me constantly. I finally sat down and just started writing. I always wanted to do it so I figured, why not?

I never thought I would reach this point of success to be honest. It’s insane to me that I have connected with so many readers.

And I love each and every one of them for all of their support. I’ll be honest, some days are HARD. I have my littles during the day and I write at night. Some days are just simply exhausting and then I hear from a reader and it motivates me to push through and keep writing.  I couldn’t be more grateful for this wonderful career. For more information, visit https://www.willowwinterswrites.com/

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Connect with Willow Winters: wwinters@willowwinterswrites.com

Spotlight: Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra by Ericka Kim Verba

Chilean musician and artist Violeta Parra (1917–1967) is an inspiration to generations of artists and activists across the globe. Her music is synonymous with resistance, and it animated both the Chilean folk revival and the protest music movement Nueva Canción (New Song). Her renowned song “Gracias a la vida” has been covered countless times, including by Joan Baez, Mercedes Sosa, and Kacey Musgraves. A self-taught visual artist, Parra was the first Latin American to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts in the Louvre. In this remarkable biography, Ericka Verba traces Parra’s radical life and multifaceted artistic trajectory across Latin America and Europe and on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Drawing on decades of research, Verba paints a vivid and nuanced picture of Parra’s life. From her modest beginnings in southern Chile to her untimely death, Parra was an exceptionally complex and talented woman who exposed social injustice in Latin America to the world through her powerful and poignant songwriting. This examination of her creative, political, and personal life, flaws and all, illuminates the depth and agency of Parra’s journey as she invented and reinvented herself in her struggle to be recognized as an artist on her own terms.

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About the Author

Ericka Verba is Director and Professor of Latin American Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. Her research interests include the cultural Cold War, the role of music in social movements, and the intersection of gender and class politics in twentieth-century Latin America. She has received grants from the National Endowment from the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright, and the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. She is a founding member of SCALAS (Southern California Association of Latin American Studies) and the recipient of the E. Bradford Burns Award for service to the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies.

She is the author of the book Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra. Her interest in Violeta Parra dates back to her early teens in the 1970s when she became friends with a Chilean family of musicians and artists who taught Verba her first Violeta Parra songs and guided her political awakening to the brutality of the Pinochet dictatorship and the role of the US government in installing and supporting it. As a musician and founding member of the US-based New Song groups Sabiá and Desborde, she has been performing Parra’s music since 1976. In 1980, she wrote her undergraduate honors senior thesis on Parra’s autobiography in verse. In 1996, She was the musical director and arranger for a tribute concert to Violeta Parra, supported by an Artists in the Community grant from the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and recorded and released as Desborde, Tribute Concert to Violeta Parra. As a professor of Latin American History since 2004, she has welded her research on the history of women in Chile with her interest in Parra to acquire a deeper understanding of the social context and gender dynamics that shaped Parra’s life. Suffice to say, Verba’s book represents the culmination of a decades-long curiosity about Violeta Parra and engagement with her work.

Spotlight: Nemesis by Gregg Hurwitz

In the next explosive novel in this New York Times bestselling series, Evan Smoak, having lived his life by the assassin’s Ten Commandments, finds himself at odds with his oldest friend in the world, where principles are in conflict with  honor, no rules hold―and no one may get out alive.

Evan Smoak was once a highly successful black ops assassin known as Orphan X, dedicated to a rigid set of operational rules. Even after going deep underground and remaking his life, Evan remains dedicated to his unbreakable code. But for the first time in his life, those principles have put him on a collision course with the man who might be his best friend in the world, Tommy Stojack.

Stojack, a gifted gunsmith who has created much of Evan's own weapons and combat gear, has  apparently crossed one of Evan's sharply delineated lines. When Evan decides to have it out with  Tommy, Evan is ambushed by a skilled crew of killers determined to take him down. But Evan is hard to  kill and the dispute explodes into open warfare between Evan and Tommy. Now Evan has no choice but  to track down and face his only friend. 

In the meantime, Tommy has already left town in order to honor an old promise to a Navy friend who  died in his arms. His mission is to help his dead friend's son. In a depressed rural area, with conflicts  flaring up everywhere, that son could be responsible for the death of an innocent. And while Tommy is  trying to keep him and his friends alive, Evan arrives with vengeance in mind. 

But as deadly as the former Orphan X is, Evan isn't even the most dangerous threat to arrive on the  scene.

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About the Author

GREGG HURWITZ is the New York Times #1 internationally bestselling author of 24 thrillers including the Orphan X series. His novels have won numerous literary awards and have been published in 33 languages. Gregg currently serves as the Co-President of International Thriller Writers (ITW). Additionally, he’s written screenplays and television scripts for many of the major studios and networks, comics for AWA (including the critically acclaimed anthology NewThink), DC, and Marvel, and poetry. Currently, Gregg is actively working against polarization in politics and culture. To that end, he's penned op-eds for The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Bulwark and others, and has produced several hundred commercials and creative content which have gotten several hundred million views on digital TV platforms. He also helped write the opening ceremony of the 2022 World Cup.

Connect with Gregg: GreggHurwitz.net

Spotlight: The Continental Divide by Bob Johnson

A stunning short story collection chronicling the Midwest no one talks about…

A country woman makes a Sophie's Choice regarding her family's survival. A small town marshal hunts his own son for murder. A former football hero must face his role in a brutal locker room ritual. Ferocious and real, the fourteen tales in Bob Johnson's blistering debut The Continental Divide explore the undertow of violence and sin along the St. Lawrence Divide in northern Indiana, where men, women, and children struggle to find their way in the darkness...of the divide.

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About the Author

Bob Johnson holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He took an extended break from writing short stories to follow several career paths, the most notable being an English professorship at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana, and Operations Manager at WSBT-TV in South Bend.

Upon retirement, he picked up his pen again and now writes full-time. His stories have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Common, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Barcelona Review, and elsewhere. His short story “Bird Fever” won the Marguerite McGlinn Award in Philadelphia Stories, and his story “The Continental Divide” was named Short Story of the Year in The Hudson Review.

Johnson lives and works in South Bend with his wife Cindy and their dog Gracie Mae.

Spotlight: The Treasure of Loon Lake by Rachelle Paige

Wholesome Romance

Publication Date: 02/11/2025

Publisher: Harbor Lane Books, LLC

In a few hours, MOLLY MAGUIRE’s life implodes. After her apartment burns down, a lawyer shows up at her office informing her that a distant relative left her a home in Loon Lake, Wisconsin. Then she’s fired. With nothing holding her back, and nowhere else to go, she heads to the small town. 

Young retiree, GRANT REEM sold his tech start-up and was contacted by the owner of his family’s favorite vacation spot with an interesting next act: buy a tour boat company in Loon Lake. With nothing stopping him, and always putting his trust in the universe, Grant buys the business and moves across the country. When he bumps into the one who got away, his college girlfriend Molly, he’s thrilled, but she’s not the same go-getter who dumped him.

Molly’s new home floods the first night, and she escapes to the Inn with a few dry belongings. She bumps into Grant and learns of the local legend about her family’s curse. When she uncovers a treasure map, she decides to take a chance with Grant’s encouragement. As they search for the treasure, however, they met unexpected opposition, learn about local superstitions, and have to decide if fate—or some other force—wants them to win or lose.

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About the Author

Rachelle Paige Campbell writes bestselling contemporary romances filled with heart and hope. She believes love and laughter can change lives. No matter the location—big city, small town, or European kingdom—her feel-good stories always end with a happily ever after. She’s grateful for the support of her family, her robot floor cleaner, and her reluctant writing partner (her dog). 

Connect:

Website: https://rachellepaigecampbell.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachellepaigebooks/

Spotlight: The Perfect Rom-Com by Melissa Ferguson

She's written dozens of smash hit romance novels. Too bad no one knows it.

Aspiring author Bryony Page attends her first writers conference bursting with optimism and ready to sell her manuscript with long-shot dreams of raising awareness for The Bridge, her grandmother's financially struggling organization where she teaches ESL full-time. But after a disastrous pitch session, she stumbles into correcting another author's work in a last-ditch attempt to make a good impression with the agent. And she, as it turns out, is spot on.

No one is more surprised than Bryony when the agent offers her the opportunity to be a ghostwriter for Amelia Benedict, popular rom-com novelist. Bryony agrees on one condition: she'll write books for this vain, demanding woman just as long as Jack Sterling, literary agent of the legendary Foundry Literary Agency, works to sell her own book too.

What nobody predicted, however, was that Bryony's books would turn Amelia Benedict into the Amelia Benedict, household name and bestselling author with millions of copies sold around the world.

And just like that, the Foundry Agency can't let her go.

But on a personal note, Jack is realizing he can't either.

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About the Author

Melissa Ferguson is the bestselling author of titles including How to Plot a Payback, Meet Me in the Margins, and Famous for a Living. She lives in Tennessee with her husband and children in their growing farmhouse lifestyle and writes heartwarming romantic comedies that have been featured in such places as Woman's World, Travel + Leisure, and The New York Post. In 2020 her family built their farmhouse from the ground up — she documents their sweet life here: @ourfriendlyfarmhouse