Monthly Features – August 2026

September 7, 2026 ~ likelystory18 ~ Leave a comment

The Weight of Snow by Sal Nudo

I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest opinion.

Synopsis: The past doesn’t wash away. It just freezes over.

For fourteen years, Alex Neitzel has lived a life built on a foundation of silence and blood money. To the residents of Champaign-Urbana, he is a wealthy, solitary remote copywriter. To his teenage children, Sammy and Cecelia, he is a ghost—a cold, self-absorbed father who nurses a bottle of Scotch in a silent house where nobody truly talks.

But Alex is living in a prison of his own making, haunted by a brutal midnight memory: his brother Trevor, dead at the bottom of a frozen playground structure in Cameron Park. Every night at exactly 2:49 a.m., his fracturing mind punishes him with the phantom echoes of that horrific winter night.

Then, a knock comes at the front door.

Two local cold-case detectives are rattling old trees, armed with a deathbed confession from a witness who knows too much about the money Alex inherited after the “accident.” As the psychological chess match with the police tightens around him, Alex panics. Desperate to find an escape hatch, he risks everything on a shadowy, international investment opportunity in Brazil—only to find himself blindly stepping into the trap of a lethal predator.

With his fortune stolen, his children severing ties, and the authorities closing in, Alex is forced to engineer the ultimate exit strategy: staging his own death on the freezing waters of Lake Michigan.

A haunting, slow-burn exploration of guilt, isolation, and familial decay, The Weight of Snow is a gripping literary noir character study that asks a terrifying question: How far can a man run when the monster he’s fleeing is himself?

Summary: The Weight of Snow is a short psychological crime thriller about guilt, paranoia, family dysfunction, and the impossibility of escaping your own past. Rather than building its suspense around the question of whether Alex committed a crime, the story focuses on what happens when the consequences of that crime finally begin closing in fourteen years later. I especially liked the irony of Alex, a man who has spent years living a lie, becoming the victim of an elaborate con when he desperately searches for a way to disappear. The ending is bleak but fitting and reinforces the idea that Alex’s real prison has never been a physical place.

I would recommend this to readers who enjoy morally complicated protagonists, psychological crime fiction, dysfunctional family dynamics, stories about guilt and consequences, and shorter thrillers that move quickly. Readers who prefer traditional mysteries with a concealed culprit may find this less mystery driven than expected, since Alex’s guilt is revealed relatively early. It is much more about watching a guilty man unravel.

See the full review here: The Weight of Snow
Purchase here

Daughter of the Golden Realm by Eva Barber

I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest opinion.

Synopsis: Emery inherits a mystical necklace and a cryptic warning of its importance to humanity’s survival. When her mother’s body vanishes, Emery leads a band of refugees into a desolate, post-apocalyptic world and an eerie underground city, ruled by unscrupulous and immortal beings. Grieving her mother’s death, haunted by visions emitted by the necklace, and pursued by assassins enhanced by the technology her mother had invented, she uncovers a conspiracy that stretches from a dying Earth to the fabric of the universe itself. But things get even more complicated when a mysterious woman kidnaps her beloved Peter. She and her small group race against time to find him and stop a cosmic threat. Once again, destiny forces Emery to embrace her fate, which is far greater and more terrifying than she ever imagined, and to make an impossible choice.

Summary: Daughter of the Golden Realm is an ambitious mix of post-apocalyptic science fiction, dystopian rebellion, fantasy, mythology, romance, and family drama. The story follows Emery as she and her companions continue searching for answers about the destroyed Earth, the Masters, the mysterious golden necklace, and Emery’s own connection to forces she still does not fully understand.

I think this book would appeal most to readers who enjoy genre-blending speculative fiction, complicated world-building, found and biological family dynamics, environmental themes, supernatural or science-based powers, dystopian resistance stories, and romances built around the idea of soulmates finding one another across impossible circumstances. Because this story continues a much larger series mythology, I would definitely recommend reading the preceding Dark World books first rather than treating this as a standalone.

See the full review here: Daughter of the Golden Realm
Purchase here

Blood Gilt by Jessica Housand

I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest opinion.

Synopsis: In a world shaped by war, blood, and betrayal, Alejandro Whitmore has spent years trying to outrun the ghosts of his past. Torn from his family during the brutal Salvadoran civil conflict and raised in the shadow of cartel power, he now lives between two identities—American on paper, but haunted by the violence that forged him.

When a dangerous assignment forces him back to El Salvador, Alejandro is thrust into a web of corruption, political manipulation, and buried family secrets. As he reconnects with the sister he lost, confronts the father who weaponized his life, and falls for a woman who may be hiding secrets of her own, Alejandro must decide whether redemption is possible for someone born into bloodshed.

Dark, gritty, and emotionally charged, Blood Gilt is a sweeping crime drama about survival, loyalty, generational trauma, and the cost of freedom. Perfect for readers who love layered antiheroes, cartel thrillers, and emotionally complex literary suspense.

Summary: Blood Gilt is a dark, character-driven crime thriller that blends historical fiction, romance, and psychological drama. It has the conspiracies, betrayals, organized crime, and high-stakes confrontations you’d expect from the genre, but it spends just as much time exploring the emotional cost of living inside that world. Readers looking for an action-heavy thriller should know this is a slower burn, while those who enjoy layered characters, morally gray decisions, and suspense built around relationships as much as danger will likely find a lot to enjoy.

See the full review here: Blood Gilt
Purchase here

Echoes of a Wild Girl’s Drum by Tiffini Johnson

I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest opinion.

Synopsis: I was seven when they tied me to the stake.

They wanted me to burn, burn, burn like Nángi. I threw blackjack petals in her ashes, but not even the strongest herbs can make dead mothers come back. Nobody threw blackjack petals for me, but when my turn came, a boy broke rhythm for me instead — the village drummer, the Commander’s ward — and he was scarred for it.

So I ran. Into the forest, into the dark. I learned to sleep where nothing could find me and eat what the forest gave and trust tree kangaroos and cuscuses before people. I forgot almost everything — except the boy who cut me loose from the stake. Except the tree where we carved a spiral with hair and blood and a poem nobody knows. Except the night we climbed so high the whole sky cracked open and I told him there were a million hundred stars. Except our beat — tap boom tap, tap boom boom tap — that belongs to no one else in the world. He was the only thing I kept.

Women burn in this village. They burn for sick children. For failed crops. For the herbs they keep. Some are tired. Some are angry. Some pass secrets. But I didn’t decide to come back. Something small needed me to.

And now they know: the witch’s daughter didn’t die twelve summers ago.

I know the sound the drum makes before whispers spread like fire.
The air already smells like smoke.

Only now the boy who once broke the rhythm is a man.
And I am no longer seven years old.

Summary: This was a beautifully written and emotionally powerful novel that stayed with me long after I finished it. It’s the kind of book that asks difficult questions about humanity while still leaving room for hope. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy emotional historical fiction, character-driven stories, literary fiction, and novels that explore resilience, culture, and hope after unimaginable loss.

See the full review here: Echoes of a Wild Girl’s Drum
Purchase here

A Cakewalk to Memphis by Brenda C. Wilson

I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest opinion.

Synopsis: In the sweltering summer of 1958, the Jim Crow South is a landscape defined by danger, secrecy, and the need to survive.

A Cakewalk to Memphis, the debut novel by Charlotte-based author Brenda Wilson, follows Big Sallie Morning, a determined Black cleaning woman from Memphis who becomes caught up in a desperate search for her pregnant niece’s missing husband. What starts as a personal mission quickly turns into a dangerous journey across a segregated South, where each bus stop presents new risks and every encounter holds hidden significance.

Big Sallie is a force of nature. Intelligent, observant, and shaped by a past she has never fully escaped, she navigates a world of smoky nightclubs, backroom gambling halls, bootlegging routes, and counterfeit schemes operating just beneath everyday life. As she seeks answers, she is also forced to confront buried parts of her own history, including the reputation that follows her from town to town.

Brenda Wilson vividly details the era with rich Southern textures. The novel moves through dry county beer joints with deceptively cheerful names, crowded juke joints where blues music carries both joy and sorrow, and a society defined by strict racial boundaries and constant danger. Each setting reveals another layer of a world where survival depends on quick thinking, tough choices, and knowing when to speak up or remain silent.

Inspired by family stories, including an aunt who was jailed in the 1940s and a cousin who became a blues singer, Wilson weaves personal history into a broader story of resilience and reckoning. Cakewalk to Memphis is a compelling historical novel about one woman’s journey through a fractured time and the strong pull of truth, memory, and responsibility.

Summary: A Cakewalk to Memphis feels like historical fiction crossed with a Southern mystery, with a little noir and a lot of family drama mixed in. It’s funny in places, genuinely tense in others, and much more interested in complicated women than perfect ones. Sallie’s journey starts as an attempt to find one missing man, but underneath that is a story about guilt, faith, motherhood, secrets, and how difficult it is to keep the people you love from making mistakes of their own. Readers who enjoy Southern historical fiction, strong older female protagonists, family secrets, historical mysteries, blues and Memphis settings, and books about complicated women trying to make peace with who they used to be may enjoy this one.

See the full review here: A Cakewalk to Memphis
Purchase here

Review: The Weight of Snow by Sal Nudo

August 5, 2026 ~ likelystory18 ~ 1 Comment

Synopsis:

The past doesn’t wash away. It just freezes over.

For fourteen years, Alex Neitzel has lived a life built on a foundation of silence and blood money. To the residents of Champaign-Urbana, he is a wealthy, solitary remote copywriter. To his teenage children, Sammy and Cecelia, he is a ghost—a cold, self-absorbed father who nurses a bottle of Scotch in a silent house where nobody truly talks.

But Alex is living in a prison of his own making, haunted by a brutal midnight memory: his brother Trevor, dead at the bottom of a frozen playground structure in Cameron Park. Every night at exactly 2:49 a.m., his fracturing mind punishes him with the phantom echoes of that horrific winter night.

Then, a knock comes at the front door.

Two local cold-case detectives are rattling old trees, armed with a deathbed confession from a witness who knows too much about the money Alex inherited after the “accident.” As the psychological chess match with the police tightens around him, Alex panics. Desperate to find an escape hatch, he risks everything on a shadowy, international investment opportunity in Brazil—only to find himself blindly stepping into the trap of a lethal predator.

With his fortune stolen, his children severing ties, and the authorities closing in, Alex is forced to engineer the ultimate exit strategy: staging his own death on the freezing waters of Lake Michigan.

A haunting, slow-burn exploration of guilt, isolation, and familial decay, The Weight of Snow is a gripping literary noir character study that asks a terrifying question: How far can a man run when the monster he’s fleeing is himself?

Favorite Lines:

“Inside the foyer, Ratatouille was whining, her little tail thumping against the floor in a frantic welcome, but Alex walked right past her, staring blindly into the dark hallway, the ghost of his brother breathing heavily down his neck.”

“He needed this. He needed a new sky.”

“What am I not running from?”

My Opinion:

I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest opinion.

The Weight of Snow is a dark, surprisingly compact psychological crime story about a man who has spent fourteen years waiting for the worst thing he has ever done to finally catch up with him. Alex Neitzel has money, a beautiful home, and two children who will never have to worry financially, but his actual life is pretty miserable. His relationship with his son, Sammy, is openly hostile, his daughter, Cecelia, is basically holding the household together by herself, and Alex spends most of his time drinking, hiding in his office, and being haunted by the death of his brother Trevor. When two detectives show up asking questions about Trevor’s supposedly accidental death, Alex immediately knows exactly how much trouble he is in.

What I found most interesting about this book is that it doesn’t really try to make Alex’s guilt a mystery. We learn fairly early that Trevor’s death wasn’t an innocent accident and that Alex’s fortune is tied to what happened that night. Instead, the tension comes from watching someone who has gotten away with something terrible for fourteen years suddenly realize that the walls might finally be closing in. Alex is not an especially sympathetic character, but he is an interesting one because there are moments where you can see that he genuinely loves his children and recognizes how badly he has failed them. Then, almost immediately, his fear or anger takes over and he treats them horribly again. The scenes between Alex, Sammy, and Cecelia were actually some of the strongest parts of the book for me because the damage Alex has caused isn’t limited to the people who died. His guilt has seeped into every part of the family’s life.

The Brazil storyline takes the book in a direction I wasn’t initially expecting. Alex becomes so desperate to escape the reopened investigation that he jumps at what appears to be an opportunity to invest in a legitimate Brazilian gardening business, only to discover that Francisco Silva is supposedly running a massive criminal operation behind it. What makes this section work is how quickly Alex is willing to accept it. He has already convinced himself that he crossed the moral line years ago, so becoming involved in something even darker doesn’t seem like much of a leap if it can buy him a new identity and a way out. Of course, the irony is that Francisco is not actually offering Alex salvation at all. He is a con man who specifically targets wealthy, desperate people with secrets, and Alex is almost the perfect victim. Watching a man who built his entire life on deception get spectacularly deceived himself was probably my favorite twist in the story.

I also liked that the book doesn’t give Alex an easy redemption arc. Even when he loses his money, stages his own suicide, abandons his children, and flees halfway around the world, there is no sense that he has actually escaped. The final scene in the Akatarawa Forest brings the story back to its central idea in a way that worked for me. Alex has managed to leave behind the police, his identity, his wealth, and even his family, but none of those things were ever the real source of his imprisonment. He is still carrying Cameron Park with him. I thought the ending was appropriately bleak because Alex technically succeeds at running away while also completely failing to escape the one thing he cannot outrun: himself.

Summary:

Overall, The Weight of Snow is a short psychological crime thriller about guilt, paranoia, family dysfunction, and the impossibility of escaping your own past. Rather than building its suspense around the question of whether Alex committed a crime, the story focuses on what happens when the consequences of that crime finally begin closing in fourteen years later. I especially liked the irony of Alex, a man who has spent years living a lie, becoming the victim of an elaborate con when he desperately searches for a way to disappear. The ending is bleak but fitting and reinforces the idea that Alex’s real prison has never been a physical place.

Check out The Weight of Snow here!

Review: County Road 2400: A Midwest Noir by Sal Nudo

June 6, 2026 ~ likelystory18 ~ Leave a comment

Synopsis:

One night of “mailbox metal” was supposed to be a reset. Instead, it became a life sentence.

Illinois, 1998. Tommy Cancio and Todd Wells are fueled by cheap beer, jagged lines of cocaine, and the midnight fog of Champaign County. The mission is simple: a high-speed pass and the satisfying ping of a baseball bat against a rural mailbox.

But when the bat hits something wet and heavy on County Road 2400, the music stops.

What follows is a desperate, mud-caked crawl into a different kind of darkness. From the suffocating rows of unharvested corn to a concrete hole beneath an abandoned Indiana burger stand, Tommy discovers that the Midwest doesn’t just grow crops—it buries secrets.

Trapped with half a million dollars in drug money and a silent “gentle giant” for a jailer, Tommy must confront the ghosts of his past—and the very real predator coming to collect.

In the heart of the Heartland, the distance between a “good time” and a shallow grave is shorter than you think.

Favorite Lines:

“All for a pumpkin, Todd. You died for a fifty-cent gourd.”

“The guy wasn’t just a drunk; he was a rabbit on the run.”

“I don’t speak English today, Tommy.”

My Opinion:

I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest opinion.

County Road 2400 reads like someone threw a 90s Midwest burnout story into a blender with noir fiction, small-town crime drama, and just enough dark absurdity to make the violence feel grimly funny instead of purely brutal. The novel opens with one of the strongest hooks I’ve read in a while: two drunk, coked-up friends speeding down an Illinois backroad smashing mailboxes with a baseball bat when one of them accidentally obliterates what they think is a person sitting roadside. From there, the story spirals into a chain reaction of panic, bad decisions, accidental deaths, desperate escapes, heroin addicts, corrupt luck, and the kind of bleak Midwestern atmosphere where everybody seems trapped by geography, poverty, or their own terrible impulses.

What makes the book work is the voice. The writing style is lean, aggressive, and loaded with vivid imagery without becoming overly flowery. Nudo has a really strong sense of place, especially when describing Illinois cornfields, roadside bars, junky motels, drainage ditches, and dying small towns. The atmosphere almost becomes its own character. There’s a constant feeling that the landscape itself is swallowing these people whole. Tommy Cancio is also a surprisingly effective central character because beneath all the stupidity and violence, there’s still a deeply sad guy underneath trying to outrun a life that was probably doomed long before the story even started. The book never pretends Tommy is innocent, but it also understands that people can become trapped inside one catastrophic night and keep digging themselves deeper trying to escape it.

The middle section involving Tommy hiding in Indiana was probably my favorite part of the novel because the tone shifts from crime thriller into something almost existential. The abandoned burger joint cellar becomes this horrifying little psychological prison where Tommy slowly loses his grip on reality. The hallucinations involving Todd, the darkness becoming physically oppressive, and the bizarre emotional attachment to the cellar itself all worked really well for me. There’s a strong Coen brothers energy running through parts of the book where terrible people keep colliding with even worse luck, but underneath the violence there’s also genuine loneliness and desperation. Sheriff Levi Keller ended up being another standout character because he feels exhausted and human rather than written as some perfect noir lawman. His cancer diagnosis and growing weariness mirror Tommy’s emotional deterioration in an interesting way.

The novel is definitely pulpy and exaggerated at times, but honestly I think that’s intentional. The dialogue can occasionally feel theatrical, and there are moments where the noir style becomes so heightened it borders on comic-book bleakness. But the story commits fully to that tone, and because of that it mostly works. The pacing is fast, the chapters move quickly, and the writing constantly throws memorable images at the reader. Even small details stick in your head, like the J.D. Drew bobblehead lodged in Todd’s eye socket or Tommy crawling through cornfields while combines harvest around him. The epilogue also surprised me because it gives the novel a strangely melancholic ending rather than a simple crime-story conclusion.

Summary:

Overall, County Road 2400 is a dark, fast-moving Midwest noir packed with desperation, bad luck, guilt, violence, and the feeling that one reckless night can permanently ruin multiple lives. It reads like a collision between rural crime fiction and 90s grunge culture, with enough psychological weight underneath the suspense to keep it from feeling shallow. Readers who enjoy bleak Americana, morally messy protagonists, and atmospheric crime fiction will probably burn through this very quickly. Happy reading!

Check out County Road 2400: A Midwest Noir here!