Amber Road: A Novel of Danger and Desire on the Roman Frontier 

Sherry Christie 

Bexley House Books 

Shaggy-haired and unshaven, ex-tribune Marcus Carinna slouches over a cup of cheap wine in a squalid taberna far from Caligula’s Rome. A fugitive from the emperor’s anger, he sees only one way to overcome his disgrace: with a deed glorious enough to dazzle the Roman world. His plan needs the help of coppery-haired Aurima, once a hostage, with whom he has fallen disastrously in love. However, imperial agents are hunting for both of them, and Aurima has vanished into the Germanic wilderness. Learning of a secret expedition about to head into Germania, Marcus leaps at the chance to recover his lost love and his good name. But for a man seeking to prove his honor, the path ahead will prove long, dark, and dangerous. Because nothing is as it seems amid the menace and magic of the Amber Road. . . (Enhanced second edition)

Scent of a Beach Rose

Jeanne Gribbin

Maine Authors Publishing

In the final book of The Casco Bay Series, Camilla Scholte has returned from working abroad. She is traversing the Maine Coast, doing an article on resorts for Harpers Bazar magazine. It is The Gilded Age, between The Progressive Era and The Roaring Twenties. Her assignment is to find amusing antics, scandalous behavior, or untoward activity. This isn't hard to do with the looming impact of World War I, the Mafia watching Maine's prohibition, her tantalizing vaudeville acts, and falling in love along the way.

Black Dog 

Erica Kent 

Santa Fe Writers Project 

It’s 1980, and eleven-year-old Jessica Ryder wakes up to discover that John Lennon has been killed. In a misguided effort to assuage her grief, her father shares a beer with her, marking the beginning of a years-long dance with drugs and booze that will lead her down a harrowing, sometimes darkly humorous, path. Jessica’s full of contradictions: irreverent but romantic, smart but short-sighted, damaged but resilient. She grapples with the weight of tragedy and life, scrapes bottom, and finally discovers the elusive route to recovery, along with a hard truth: the black dog of addiction doesn’t die.

Circle of Friends 

Theresa Allocca 

Tower Publishing 

Tess Collaretti, a middle school counselor in Milan, Maine, has spent her career patching up damage the system arrives too late to prevent. When her cousin Marie, an ER nurse, calls about a battered eight-year-old, it reopens the trauma of Tess's own childhood abduction, stopped only because her cousin Irene ran for help in time. Furious at a system that keeps failing kids, Tess recruits eight women into what looks like a quilting circle. Using their access to gossip, paperwork, banking records, and social media, the Circle exposes abusers, embezzlers, and predators the law can't touch. All while one of their own falls for sheriff's deputy Chris Rourke. When a corrupt cop tracking the Circle corners her alone, Tess's past collides with the present in the group's most dangerous case yet. The summer ends with a quilt stitched from every confronted man, winning first place at the county fair in silent, unspoken justice. Book one of a series.

A Blind Spider 

Moe Claire 

12 Willows Press  

When three Pyke Island lobstermen drown within weeks of each other, the verdict is the same each time: tragedies happen when you fish alone. The island grieves, closes ranks, and moves on. But Del Corriveau can’t let it go. The pattern is too clean. The silence is too practiced. And what surfaces beneath the accidents is something far larger than Pyke Island—drug smuggling, a compromised sheriff, a Chinese-backed land grab hidden behind an environmental front group, and a killer who doesn’t stop at three. In Downeast Maine, some questions are dangerous simply for being asked. Del asks them anyway. Book 4 of The Pyke Island Mystery Series.

The Chimaera 

Written by Jon Lewis & Illustrated by Glenn Chadbourne 

Maine Authors Publishing  

When a shooting exposes Daniel to Lauren’s blood, he faces an irreversible transformation into a Living Vampire. Feeling overwhelmed and betrayed, he isolates himself from Lauren until a horrifying vampire anomaly forces him out of hiding to hunt for answers for the Circle. Meanwhile, Lauren’s past returns. Her thought-dead nemesis, Su, resurfaces in Geneva with a living genetic clone of Eve, the first vampire. Lauren vows to rescue and protect the child at any cost, making brutal choices that threaten to permanently shatter her already fractured bond with Daniel. As the two drift apart on separate, dangerous paths, a hidden enemy emerges from the shadows, ready to strike when Lauren is most vulnerable.

Deep Waters  

Nancy E Randolph

High Point Books  

In Deep Waters, Nancy E. Randolph pulls back the surface of a childhood to reveal the turbulent currents beneath. The fifth of ten children, she grew up in a dysfunctional family—moving through Ohio and Illinois and enduring physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, domestic violence, and food insecurity. Yet even in the deepest darkness, she found lifelines: the refuge of the woods, the warmth of a kind aunt, the loyalty of a trusted friend. Told with unflinching honesty and hard-won courage, her story traces what forged her fierce will to survive. Deep Waters: A Memoir of Childhood, Betrayal, & Becoming Whole is a testament to resilience and the healing power of storytelling. With each chapter, Nancy moves closer to the wholeness she was always owed—emerging with agency, self-worth, and certainty her story deserves to be told. For survivors and all who listen, this memoir is both a reckoning and a homecoming.

Autonomous Autopsy

Chantelle Flores 

IngramSpark 

"Yet, you / spectator / never cradle my quiet / skeleton / an amphitheater." What happens when a patient is left unheard? And what happens when routine procedures root themselves into memory? Inspired by personal experiences with medical trauma and chronic illness, Autonomous Autopsy places poetry into dialogue with found medical documents, from physicians' words and procedure synopses to MRI and X-ray images. Autonomous Autopsy explores moments of silence, acts of silencing, and sound as they are framed by, avoid, or integrate visual space and gaps. Just as traumatic memory is often fragmented, illegible, and unfamiliar, the following poems enmesh with one another, rapidly flit between snapshot moments, and scatter across pages. Gritty, fragmented narratives are interwoven with lighter, sensory-rich reflections on selfhood and desire, balancing painful memories of a medicalized body with the hopeful determination fostered in a lived body. Read more at www.chantelleflores.com

Floralia 

Kimberly Ann Priest

Sundress Publications 

Capturing the specter that haunts survivors of assault, Floralia is a stunning collection that is part poetry, part radio show, and part botany lesson. The natural world—in particular, flowers—is a vehicle to explore traumatic dissociation from the self. Butterflies flutter, succulents burst forth in laughter, and amaranth is pondered as both an herb and a weed in gestures to raw violence both subtle and blunt. The radio show’s protagonist converses with her own ghost, navigating the spectacle of her assault and the desire for it to be both witnessed and suppressed. Floralia holds agony and mundanity in parallel, interrogating the performance of pain and its social response, whether from therapists, partners, the media—even you, the reader. Yet inside this dialectic tension between visibility and protection, Floralia manages to hope, with the possibility of healing and growth promised in a future spring’s full and fragrant bloom.

Underwater Wonders

Written by Katie Coppens & Illustrated by Mary Post 

Sea to You Publishing 

Underwater Wonders is a nonfiction board book that teaches about the adaptations of sea life. It's written by Katie Coppens, who is a teacher in Maine, and the artwork is by Mary Post, who has a studio in Kennebunkport.