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Synopsis

Set across one feverish summer in the Hamptons and Montauk, Nothing Was Taken follows Mathias Wouters — a Belgian homicide legend who trusts faces over forensics — and Eli Brandt, the ghostwriter hired to keep a powerful family’s secrets, who falls for a woman tangled too deeply in the case to walk away from. Beneath the quiet money and the cedar hedges lie twenty years of buried names, a blackmailer with nothing to lose, and a killer who was never quite who they seemed.

About the author

Eleanor Pike writes mysteries set along the back roads and shorelines of the American Northeast, where old money and older secrets have a way of washing up in the same places. Her stories trade in the things polite society would rather keep buried — inheritances with strings attached, summer houses that have seen too much, and the kind of small-town quiet that hides exactly what someone wants it to. Nothing Was Taken, her debut novel, is a Hamptons murder mystery where nothing was forced, nothing was stolen, and nothing was taken — and that’s precisely the problem. She writes from Camden, Maine, with more on the way.

Synopsis

In between, there was money, loyalty, betrayal, a chaotic trip through the Amazon, a jail cell that defied belief, and a cast of people who were never supposed to become family. Still Standing is the darkly funny, brutally honest story of how a kid from a broke Midwest household built an operation, lost almost everything, and walked out the other side with his footing — and his sense of humor — somehow intact.

About the author

Quincy Beaumont writes about ordinary people in freefall — the ones still gripping the edge while the floor gives way beneath them. His storytelling finds the joke and the heartbreak in the same breath, mining poverty and power for comedy and quiet ruin alike. Still Standing, his debut novel, is a wickedly comic story of poverty, power, and the fall — and of how far a person can drop and still be left standing. More is on the way.

Please hold your review until release day — August 22, 2026.

Synopsis

[Publisher synopsis coming — to be added when finalized.]

About the author

I’ve wanted to write books for as long as I can remember. As a kid I read with a torch under the covers, tearing through whole novels in a single night, and the backs of my school jotters filled up with stories of my own. The writer who turned that habit into an actual ambition was Anthony Horowitz. The Alex Rider books showed me that an ordinary kid could be dropped into extraordinary danger — and that a thriller could be heart-pounding and, at the same time, quietly true about what it’s like to be young and on your own.

I was born and raised in Edinburgh, and came to Bangor, Maine at thirteen, when my parents crossed an ocean in search of a better life. That was their American dream. Mine was simpler: to be a writer. Cold Horizon is built street by street out of the Edinburgh I carried with me, and it’s how I hope to repay it. It’s the first book in The Vanguard Echo Series.

Synopsis

[Publisher synopsis coming — to be added when finalized.]

About the author

R. J. Kessock was born and raised in Edinburgh and moved to Bangor, Maine at thirteen. Iron Labyrinth is Book Two of The Vanguard Echo Series, following Cold Horizon.