Little Brown & Company; 400 pages; Amazon

Yes, keeping up with each new James Patterson release can be a little difficult with at least two books, as well as the Bookshots ebooks, being released every month. The author's thriller Never Never, co-written with Candice Fox, was released in January, and it introduced a brand new character, Detective Harriet "Harry" Blue - well sorta, since technically the character was first introduced in the "Black & Blue" Bookshots novella.

In the novel, Harry Blue is a detective for the Sex Crimes Department in Sydney, Australia. She is shell-shocked when she learns that her brother, Sam, has been arrested for the Georgia River Three murders.

Despite wanting to do anything she can to prove her brother's innocence, her boss orders not to get involved with the case and gives her a new assignment out of the city. She's assigned a simple missing-person case, but there is one catch - she has to work with a new partner, Edward Whittaker, who is more or less there to babysit her while the Feds are investigating her bother.

Final Thoughts: Honestly, it took me over a month to read Never Never, which is probably the longest it has ever taken me to read a James Patterson novel. The problem for me is that I couldn't connect with the main character, aka Harry Blue. Her, along with most the other characters, felt very flat and one-dimensional with absolutely no character development; just a wooden by-the-book character similar to the ones on television series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

ZonderKidz; 160 pages; $10.99; Amazon

Now available from ZonderKidz is The Berenstain Bears: Friendship Blessings Collection, featuring five picture books. The Berenstain Bears books were created by Stan and Jan Berenstain. Sadly, both the authors have passed away, but their son, Mike, has taken over the series by writing and illustrating new stories.

The collection includes:

Perfect Fishing Spot (originally published in ?) - Papa Bear wants fish for dinner. Instead of buying fish from Grizzly Fish, he takes Brother and Sister fishing.

Reap The Harvest (originally published in ?) - Brother and Sister Bear are out of school for the summer. They quickly become bored and start looking for a summer job to make some cash. The reply to a help wanted sign on Farmer Ben's farm. They get the job, but they don't get paid right away. Instead of giving the cubs cash, Framer Ben gives them a section of his crops.

Faithful Friends (originally published in 2009) Sister Bear befriends the new cub, Suzy, in school. Suzy doesn't have any other friends because she isn't like other cubs. Instead of playing, Suzy would rather be reading.

Kindness Counts (originally published in 2010) While getting ready to fly his model plane in the park, Brother Bear befriends a young cub named Billy, who also likes model planes.

God Made You Special (originally published in 2014) Sister Bear gets a little confused when she meets her best friend's cousin, Tommy. Tommy is the same age as Brother Bear, but mentally he acts a lot younger. Eventually, she learns that God made Tommy special from others.

Best Buy; Walmart

Now available to own from Lucasfilm on Blu-ray Combo Pack (Blu-ray +DVD+Digital HD) is Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the first standalone adventure set in the Star Wars franchise. Directed by Gareth Edwards, the film stars Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Jiang Wen, and Forest Whitaker.

Set just prior to the events that took place in the original movie, Star Wars: A New Hope, Rogue One tells the story of the small group of rebels who stole the plans to the first Death Star, which will eventually finds its way to Princess Leia.

The rebel group consists of Jyn Erso (played by Felicity Jones), Cassian Andor (played by Diego Luna), Chirrut Îmwe (played Donnie Yen), Bodhi Rook (played by Riz Ahmed), Baze Malbus (played by Jiang Wen), and K-2SO (played by Alan Tudyk), all of whom must (Spoiler Alert) sacrifice their lives in the attempt to stop the Empire's greatest weapon - the Death Star.

The special features are a little lacking for this release. There are no deleted scenes, bloopers, or commentaries. However, there are several short behind-the-scenes features.

These bonus features are:

• A Rogue Idea – Hear how ILM’s John Knoll came up with the movie’s concept – and why it’s the right film to launch the Star Wars stand-alone films.

• Jyn: The Rebel – Get to know Rogue One’s defiant, resourceful survivor, and hear what it was like for Felicity Jones to bring her to life onscreen.

• Cassian: The Spy – Diego Luna shares insights into his complex, driven character, who becomes a hero through selflessness, perseverance and passion.

• K-2SO: The Droid – Explore the development of this reprogrammed Imperial droid, from initial pitch and character design through Alan Tudyk’s performance.

• Baze & Chirrut: Guardians of the Whills – Go deeper into the relationship between these two very different characters, with Chinese superstars Jiang Wen and Donnie Yen.

Now available from author LM Preston is the paranormal romance series The Purgatory Reign.





When did you become interested in storytelling?

I’ve always enjoyed writing. Story telling was something that came easy to me and I used to talk out loud to myself while pretending to be different characters. I started writing poetry, then songs (my father was a song writer) and then fan fiction. After college and being married awhile, my son refused to go to the bookstore since he said none of the books had guys on it that looked like him. At that point, I wanted to write to his enjoyment.

What was your first book/story published?

Explorer X- Alpha was a middle grade science fiction novel. Where, for most kids, a trip to space camp is the trip of a lifetime—for Aadi it was life altering.

What inspired you to write PURGATORY REIGN SERIES?

This story was inspired by a short story written by my husband twenty years ago for a college class. I was cleaning out some old boxes and found it. After reading it, I asked him if I could develop the story and change a few things. He gave me freedom to do so and collaborated with me on it.

What character in PURGATORY REIGN is the most/least like you, and in what ways?

Now available from Common Deer Press is the science fiction novel MOM, book one in the Magic Circles series, by Collin Piprell.



When did you become interested in storytelling?

I’ve loved reading ever since I learned how. By the time I was a teenager, I found myself favoring novels with anti-heroes for protagonists, many of these fictional characters themselves being writers. In my mid-teens I left my village home in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains and moved to Montreal, where I encountered ample opportunity to slip into my anti-hero persona, which often had me imagining I was a writer on the road to perdition.

I managed to get a fair way down the road to perdition, but I didn’t write any fiction till many years later. But the idea lurked there in the back of my mind the whole time.

What was your first book/story published?

I moved to Southeast Asia because the whole region stimulated me, and I thought that if I couldn’t write fiction here I couldn’t write it anywhere and I’d have to think about learning a trade. While I girded my literary loins, I taught writing in a Bangkok university, traveled, partied, scuba dived, and whatnot till one day a Thai colleague asked whether I’d ever considered modeling. A friend of hers ran a modeling agency and was looking for a Western male about my age to play a businessman in a series of ads for a hotel chain. Later, as I tried to describe this very interesting adventure in a letter to my parents, it got so long and, I believed, so amusing that I ended it by saying they could read the rest of it in the newspaper story to follow. And sure enough the Bangkok Post Sunday magazine section ran it over a full page or two as “My Career as a Model.”

That gave me a real buzz, and I was inspired to write more, mostly humorous articles and then a few short stories under the penname Ham Fiske. I imagined my readership as Western ex-pats needing diversion from their Sunday morning hangovers. Soon these pieces became regular features, and friends were encouraging me to find someone to publish a collection. But there weren’t enough good ones to fill a book, plus I believed Ham Fiske could do better work than this. So I wrote a number of longer and meatier short stories to punctuate those I’d already had published. The result was Bangkok Knights, a collection of stories described instead as a novel by Asia Books, its last publisher, since the stories are linked by overlapping characters and an implicit plot development involving, surprisingly enough, the nameless narrator who hovers above all the farce and tragedy, the ironic old hand who himself comes to feature more and more in the stories till in the end he’s revealed to be as great a blunderer as any other in the story.

Over the years quite a number of people told me they thought these were merely a collection of anecdotes — that they were all “real” stories that “really” happened to me. Not so. It’s fiction. But I’m flattered that many chose to believe they came so freighted with verisimilitude. (I couldn’t resist that phrase. Sorry.)

Two of the longer stories I wrote to flesh out that book were too different in voice from the others, and I held them back. These gave birth to Kicking Dogs, my first proper novel and in some ways the most successful one, which had three different publishers over the years and is currently available on Amazon in digital and print-on-demand self-published versions. ... covers and https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Dogs-Collin-Piprell/dp/1452802726 ...

What inspired you to write MOM?

I had read about the “gray goo scenario,” something that might well follow the escape into the wild of just a single self-replicating nanobot. I couldn’t help wondering how anyone could survive a disaster than would turn the surface of the planet into a sea of microscopic robots within a matter of hours. The problem niggled at me till the outlines of a story started to emerge. I’d actually begun to draft the story before I realized I was writing a science fiction novel, something it hadn’t occurred to me I wanted to do.

What character in MOM is the most/least like you? And which is your favorite part?

Now available from Wild Thorn Publishing is the coming of age adventure Age Six Racer by Joe Vercillo.




When did you become interested in storytelling?

I started songwriting when I was about 12, which is sort of like storytelling I guess. But I’ve always had a wild imagination, and Age Six Racer was a combination of that and life experiences.

What was your first book/story published?

AGE SIX RACER is my first!

What inspired you to write Age Six Racer?

Last summer I found a dead mouse in the garage. I made a joke about the mouse’s back story to my fiancé, who is an indie author, and she encouraged me to turn it into a book (haha).

What character in Age Six Racer is the most/least like you, and in what ways?