Reluctant Killer by Lisa R. Perron — A thriller with a touch of heart

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I bought this book at the Los Angeles Festival of Books a few years back, and thought it would be a good quick read to finish my month and to reduce the height of my TBR book tower. It’s a crime thriller, not necessarily my go to genre, but crime thrillers can be thrilling reads once in a while, hence the reason for the genre.

This might be Perron’s first stab at thriller writing. Her repertoire is small, and the story is standard, about a woman who is awakened by her husband in the middle of a home invasion, then learns that her husband is not the man she thought him to be. In fact, his past is shady, and the night ends with her shooting a stranger dead and with him disappearing on the run.

If this is an intriguing setup, this might be the story for you. Told in first person, present tense, we follow Katherine as she investigates who her husband Jacob once was while she manages how she could have been such a fool to fall in love with him. She also has a rough past of her own that she needs to come to terms with: a pastor father convicted of killing his wife—Kate’s mother—in cold blood. Kate never forgave her father for his sins at the beginning of the story and now, because she has to kill a man for her own safety due to her husband’s past, Kate struggles with the fact that she herself is capable of murder.

Perron’s writing style is essentially stripped down. No overly flowery prose, which makes for a good clean read. We feel Kate’s dilemma and sympathize with her. She’s not a superwoman. She deals with the trauma of the inciting event in a real, human way, and I like this about her character. She struggles with her feelings for a man who has always been kind and loving to her, and with the revelation of the heinous things he is proven to be capable of. It puts her in danger and forces her to have to fend for herself.

While the book is generally well written, there are just enough grammatical mistakes to betray an inexperienced editor—or maybe an over-reliance on basic editing software. There are passages where the narrative lapses from third person present tense to third person past tense, and it’s noticeable. I try to overlook these kinds of occasional errors because it happens, but if it happens enough to pull me out of the story, I feel the need to make note. 

Otherwise, though, Reluctant Killer is a good beach read for the general thriller fan.

Little White Flowers by Amber Hathaway—A Promising Start to a Gothic Horror Series

Cover art courtesy of
Deadly Seeds Press

What I wasn’t expecting from Little White Flowers by Amber Hathaway, was a story that thematically falls into the realm of religious themed/cult themed horror, which is kind of my wheelhouse when it comes to the horror I tend to write  

Alice and Andy are brother and sister, young adults, who are tasked with spending their summer in a rural Maine town to clean up an inherited piece of property previously owned by their deceased grandmother. Before she died though, grandma hinted to Alice about a secret and sordid past in her hometown, and Alice is eager to uncover the family history.

What Alice and Andy find when they reach the town of Evanston is a cut off community with deep religious roots that border on the puritanical. Things begin to go awry as the members of the community openly judge the siblings for their sinful lifestyles—that are barely sinful at all in the outside world—and then for a budding relationship between Alice and one of the boys of the town, Riley. 

Hathaway states at the end of the book that she drew inspiration from the likes of Stephen King, and Children of the Corn, but I was getting a Shirley Jackson vibe, in terms of ambiance and style. There is a gothic patina to the work as opposed to outright horror, imo, and I find it appropriate for a young adult or new adult audience. I honestly can’t keep up with all the audience configurations nowadays, but this wasn’t overly gory or overly explicit. Also, the love interest angle never crossed a perceived line. Adult topics are addressed though, including bullying, teen pregnancy, domestic and child abuse. 

The main characters, Alice, Riley and Andy are kind and caring and noble to a fault. You want to root for them, although at times I wished they had more fight when they were challenged with the horrible fate the town has in store for them. Their moments of worry, indecision and downright acceptance of the circumstances sometimes made the story drag for me. But there are a few pleasantly surprising twists in the last third of the book. It’s also important to note that it’s an open ended story, clearly designed to draw us in to the next book. 

The villains of the story are of the cloth of the ultra conservative Christian kind, which can come across as a bit two dimensional and on the nose at times. But there are a few surprises among those Christians who prove to be questioning the strict rules of the faith, and who may prove to develop quite nicely in a continuation of the series. 

And if gothic tinged stories that put a spotlight on religious trauma are for you, then you might want to check out this book and its upcoming sequel here. 

A Mortuary For Songs by Elizabeth Guilt -- A Novelette that Packs a Punch

Cover Image courtesy of
Graveside Press

    Don’t have time to read? Well this little piece, published by Graveside Press, is only 56 pages and, wow! Just wow. There is so much in this piece—nostalgia, heartbreak, love and loss, hope and horror. It’s a moving story about a high school love affair that takes a gut wrenchingly dark turn. I highly recommend it. If you have memories of high school and the hold that music had because of the way it spoke to you and helped you escape—everything— then this story will hit home.

    A young man finds friendship in a troubled young woman as they increasingly bond over the power of music. His love for her grows as they make and share endless mixtapes in their quests for meaning. But he can't seem to break past the thin shell that hides her real secrets. Until he does. And it's heartbreaking.

    If you need a taste of what this author--and this newish horror press has to offer, check out A Mortuary for Songs. You could find it at your favorite online book retailer. Or you can check it--and other merch--out at the Graveside Press website here: --GRAVESIDE PRESS MERCH-- 

The AI Experiment

I’m not an A-list writer. I’m happy with the ideas I parlay into scripts and novels, and I aspire to make a decent living from it, sure. But I’m also an introvert comfortable in her own introvert skin, and I don’t spend a lot of time investing in the marketing aspect of the business. I get decent reviews for my books and hit the upper echelon of script entrants who make it to the finalist lists often, but I don’t make a lot of money from it. I work a “real job” for a living, and what I make from writing versus what I spend would clearly put me in debt if it was my sole source of income. I’m also not into podcasts or audiobooks, so I’ve never seriously considered converting my novels to an audiobook format.

But I’ve recently come to the conclusion that it would be foolish to dismiss the audiobook audience. We all have busy lives, and reading, while arguably beneficial to both mind and soul, is time consuming. It’s not designed for multitasking, while audiobooks allow us to listen and drive, or listen and mow the lawn above the roar of the machine’s motor, with headphones or earbuds in place. So, I decided to look into the transfer of book to audiobook and found that to do it properly is…expensive.

Here, you can revisit my opening paragraph that outlines how I don’t make a lot of money. The cost of creating an audiobook—a good audiobook—involves talent. It involves narrators who do their jobs well, and who should be paid a decent wage to do it. But that’s a difficult cost to swallow for an Independent Author (IA, not AI) who is already spending their negative cashflow on things like professional book review sites (Kirkus isn’t free) or the “opportunity” to get honest reviews through NetGalley or other review sites for a fee—by offering your book to readers for free (And those readers love free books—but they don’t always reciprocate with a review…).

(Image found on Twitter
no copyright infringement intended)

Enter the rapidly growing technology of AI or, if you live in a cave, Artificial Intelligence. The technology is among the list of things that the WGA (Writers Guild of America) is currently striking over, and with good reason. Computers are learning to make art, write stories and read in surprisingly accurate likenesses of real people at an exponential rate. It’s currently a point of contention in the book publishing world too, as using credible sounding AI voices to narrate books puts real people out of a job. But back in November of 2022, the technology was being utilized by lay people as a cool thing to play with. 

Soon, I began wondering if having an audiobook available might be a good idea, especially for the visually impaired who would benefit from access to more narrated books in their lives; because everything has some catch-22 built into it, and I found a reasonably priced audiobook package through BookBaby that would convert my books to audiobooks using AI voices. My first novel, The Schoharie, was my experiment. Needless to say, I was disappointed and I regret that experiment. 

BookBaby uses Speechki for its audiobook conversions, and I had reservations from the start. The fervor over AI wasn’t at a fever pitch yet, but there were rumblings. BookBaby and Speechki give their AI narrators names – like Derek Torres—and my first thought was, well that’s kind of deceptive… I told them that I didn’t want to follow through with the order unless it was clear to the buyer that the voice was indeed AI generated. BookBaby assured me that an AI disclaimer would appear on the cover image of the book, and it does. I’m not going to delve into my disappointment with BookBaby’s review and rejection policies during the audiobook’s conversion except to say that maybe it soured me more over the process on a personal level, but in the end, I felt like the conversion was a waste of my money. Lesson learned from that experiment.

Here's why, and it’s not what you might think. First, the conversion is still expensive, especially for Independent Authors who might not have the money. If you can justify the cost of creating an audiobook, aim for real people who can inject the right amount of emotion to your words. The Speechki AI conversion failed to add the right inflection throughout my book – especially when it came to dialogue lines that were questions and…I don’t know. Maybe that’s a good thing, because if AI can’t add the right inflections to achieve the right emotional punch, then we still have a way of telling the difference between a human voice and an AI one. I don’t know how long that difference might last though, and I’m not enthused about the potential to have that line erased.

But let’s address the simple fact that AI is already an important part of our lives. We have Alexa and Siri, and we don’t think twice about asking them for directions or the weather. Although, the endless promotional ads enticing me to sit back and chat with an AI generated therapist is just…creepy as fuck! Stop it! I may be an introvert, but I’m not that hard up for friends. Back on track, though—we don’t think twice about using autocorrect or Grammarly as writing tools. But on that note, autocorrect irritates the hell out of me. I don’t use the word duck as regularly as it thinks I do, and if I do, it’s usually a mistake that it doesn’t correct. And Grammarly…I downloaded it once, then said nope, and deleted it the next day. It ruined the flow of thoughts spilling out of me, and I already write and correct things in spurts.

Anyway, those are some things to think about regarding the future of books and art and movies with AI. I haven’t even touched on the insane level of digital actor replacements being used by deepfakes. It’s a lot to comprehend, a lot to keep watch on, a lot to worry about. Artists already struggle when it come to being compensated for their work. They let some of it slide because of their passion for that work. They don’t need Artificial Intelligence replacing them because of some formula. Screenwriters in particular are confronted with the notion that their scripts should adhere to some “formula,” but in reality, it’s the rulebreakers that take the audience by surprise.

My AI narrated audiobook version of The Schoharie is currently available exclusively through BookBaby. As of the date of this blog entry, the audiobook version hasn’t made one cent. 

And I’m okay with that.