Author: Joseph Pietris

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Epeolatry Book Review: Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Murder by Memory
Author: Olivia Waite
Genre: sci-fi mystery
Publisher: tordotcom
Publication date: 18th March, 2025

Synopsis: A mind is a terrible thing to erase…

Welcome to the HMS Fairweather, Her Majesty’s most luxurious interstellar passenger liner! Room and board are included, new bodies are graciously provided upon request, and should you desire a rest between lifetimes, your mind shall be most carefully preserved in glass in the Library, shielded from every danger.

Near the topmost deck of an interstellar generation ship, Dorothy Gentleman wakes up in a body that isn’t hers—just as someone else is found murdered. As one of the ship’s detectives, Dorothy usually delights in unraveling the schemes on board the Fairweather, but when she finds that someone is not only killing bodies but purposefully deleting minds from the Library, she realizes something even more sinister is afoot.

Dorothy suspects her misfortune is partly the fault of her feckless nephew Ruthie who, despite his brilliance as a programmer, leaves chaos in his cheerful wake. Or perhaps the sultry yarn store proprietor—and ex-girlfriend of the body Dorothy is currently inhabiting—knows more than she’s letting on. Whatever it is, Dorothy intends to solve this case. Because someone has done the impossible and found a way to make murder on the Fairweather a very permanent state indeed. A mastermind may be at work—and if so, they’ve had three hundred years to perfect their schemes…

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Epeolatry Book Review: Blood Cypress by Elizabeth Broadbent

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Blood Cypress
Author: Elizabeth Broadbent
Genre: Horror
Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press
Publication date: 3rd April, 2025

Synopsis: What would you do for more time?
No one cares when Lila Carson’s ten-year-old brother Beau disappears. He can’t speak. He throws tantrums. He’s a useless Carson, one of those kids in a broken-shuttered house that lost its glory when his father died. When the sheriff and his good ol’ boy deputies show up to investigate, they eye up Lila and call her twin brother, Quentin, names. A closeted bisexual girl in the South, she’s terrified.

Lower Congaree recites it like an eleventh commandment: Don’t go in that swamp. But as the long night drags on, it’s clear Beau disappeared behind those ancient trees. The sheriff’s deputies won’t risk going back there.

Lila might not have a choice.

 

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Epeolatry Book Review: Chaos, Uncharted Hearts Book 3 by Constance Fay

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Chaos: Uncharted Hearts, Book 3
Author: Constance Fay
Genre: Sci-Fi Romance
Publisher: Bramble
Publication date: 11th March 2025

Synopsis: Lore Olympus meets Winter’s Orbit in this pulse-pounding romance between a space mercenary and a super soldier whose mind-control breaks when she touches him.
He’s a mind controlled killing machine, until her touch frees him
Engineer Caro Ogunyemi thinks she has everything in control. Sure, she has a dark secret in her past and aim so bad that she can’t shoot the side of a spaceship when she’s right in front of it, but those are minor details in the life of a space mercenary. When Caro embarks on a solo mission infiltrating a prison planet that is run by the deadly Pierce family, she embraces the opportunity to prove she’s a hero.
It’s there that Caro meets Leviathan, a super soldier with a chip in his head that turns him into a mindless killer. He’s drop dead gorgeous with an emphasis on drop dead, until she touches him and renders his chip inert. The danger begins when she lets him go.
In the heart of enemy territory, where love is at stake, life is treacherous and time is short, Caro and Leviathan must figure out how to recover his agency, protect her crew from Pierce’s sinister machinations, and stage a prison-break before Leviathan is lost to her—and himself—forever.

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Epeolatry Book Review: You Can’t Take It With You by Marcus Hawke

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: You Can’t Take It With You
Author: Marcus Hawke
Genre: Horror
Publisher: Hawke Haus Books
Publication date: 26th November, 2024

Synopsis: What would you do for more time?
Christmas Eve, 1984. Montgomery Nolan is about to die. Even at ninety years old it’s never enough. But he has a way out. A way to live…beyond death. No longer hunted by time, he will become the hunter. And the night will be anything but silent.
From Marcus Hawke, author of The Miracle Sin and Grey Noise, comes a bold new vampire tale. One of greed and lust. Power and immortality. Age and youth. And of course, blood!

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Epeolatry Book Review: A Conventional Boy by Charles Stross

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​Title: A Conventional Boy
Author: Charles Stross
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Tordotcom
Date: 7th January, 2025

Synopsis: In this new Laundry Files adventure the fate of the world will literally depend on the roll of dice… twenty-sided dice, that is.
In 1984, Derek Reilly was just another spotty teenage dungeon master growing up in middle England. But then a secret government agency tasked with suppressing magical intrusions received a tip-off – and one midnight raid later, his life was turned upside down by the Satanic D&D Panic.
Decades later Derek, now middle-aged and institutionalized, is a long-term inmate at Camp Sunshine, a center for deprogramming captured Elder God cultists. He’s considered safe enough to edit the camp newsletter, and he even has postal privileges – which he uses to run a play-by-mail game. After 25 years, Derek finally has reason to escape: a nearby D&D convention. While Derek’s D&D games were full of fictional elder gods and world-ending threats, a LARP game at the con is a dread ritual designed to summon a great evil into our world, and it’s up to Derek and his players to stop them.
The fate of the world may depend on the contents of Derek’s magic dice bag.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Ruthless Creatures by J.T. Geissinger

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

​Title: Ruthless Creatures
Author: J.T. Geissinger
Genre: Mafia Romance
Publisher: Bramble
Date: 7th January, 2025

Synopsis:Five years ago, my fiancé disappeared. He left me with a wedding dress I’d never wear. Left me with the kind of scars that can’t be healed. The man I built my future on vanished like a ghost. All that remained were my broken heart and a million unanswered questions.
Until a mysterious stranger arrives in town.
Tall, dark, and dangerous, Kage is as full of secrets as he is sex appeal. Though I know he’s hiding something, I’m drawn to him like a moth to flame. Heat crackles between us with every look, desire flares into passion, and I fall hard, helpless to resist.
But then I discover he’s been sent to collect on an unpaid debt from my missing fiancé….
And that debt is me.

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Parliament by Aimee Pokwatka

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​Title: The Parliament
Author: Aimee Pokwatka
Genre: Horror
Publisher: Tordotcom
Date: 16th January, 2024

Synopsis: The Birds meets The Princess Bride in this tale of friendship, responsibility, and the primal force of nature.
“Murder owls are extreme,” Jude said. “What’s more extreme than murder owls?”
Madigan Purdy is stuck in her hometown library.
When tens of thousands of owls descend on the building, rending and tearing at anyone foolish enough to step outside, Mad is tasked with keeping her students safe, and distracted, while they seek a solution to their dilemma.
Perhaps they’ll find the inspiration they seek in her favorite childhood book, The Silent Queen….
With food and fresh water in low supply, the denizens of the library will have to find a way out, and soon, but the owls don’t seem to be in a hurry to leave…
The Parliament is a story of grief and missed opportunities, but also of courage and hope.
And of extremely sharp beaks.
At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Madness from the Sea: The Dreamlands by Jonathon T. Cross

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​Title: Madness from the Sea: The Dreamlands
Author: Jonathon T Cross
Genre: Occult Horror
Publisher: Independent
Date: 6th September, 2024

Synopsis: Finn came of age knowing nothing of the world that once was. Cthulhu was released prior to Finn’s birth, and madness has since loomed over humanity. 
Although Cthulhu never left R’lyeh, his call continues to lure victims by the boatload.
On every continent, societies prepare their young against Cthulhu’s telepathic reach. Teaching them to resist the allure of R’lyeh, lest they be swayed to their doom.
Bad dreams and monsters under the bed are no longer scoffed at, they are active threats to humanity’s survival.
No one is exempt, no location is beyond reach, not even the depths of one’s mind are off-limits.
The frailty of humankind has never been on grander display.

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