Reviewed by Jaylynn Korrell

Informational, sincere, and valuable—a book on how Reiki can be an asset in your journey to better health

Author M. Lori Torok was a skeptic at the beginning. How could Reiki really work? She writes with honesty and joins the interested reader where they are—a personal story from skeptic to Reiki master. Her mind opens up, and so will yours. Her honesty allows to get comfortable, to let your guard down, and be a better vessel for something life-changing.

Reiki in Integrative Medicine makes Reiki feel accessible and achievable to people from all walks of life. I don’t think I’m the only reader who will leave this book ready to book my own session.

Torok didn’t feel fulfilled as a college professor, so she did something about it. She trusted her gut and took a leap of faith into practicing Reiki, and it amplified her body and soul. Now, she bridges the gap for others to do the same, especially for people on the road to better health. As a Certified Medical Reiki Master (CMRM ) Torok provides insight into the true benefits of Reiki and how they can and should be used in medical facilities.

Torok’s impulsiveness and ability to listen to her inner voice is refreshing to read. Not many would consider giving up a job with such stability, but it’s part of what makes her story compelling. It is this intuitive faith and unique experience that makes her so inspiring. She makes Reiki feel less like an exclusive new-age experience and more of a way for everyone to receive the energy they could be missing. For her it was a higher calling, and it seems this informative book is too.

It’s also a valuable guide for those who are unsure about how to set up an appointment and receive the service. We are coached on how to find the right practicer, joining group settings, and what questions to ask when booking. She explains the process clearly and effectively.

Torok provides readers with a clear path to becoming a Reiki practitioner too, explaining the different levels you can reach and the timeframe and practice it’ll take to get there. Reiki could be a beneficial business path since many top medical facilities are looking to integrate the practice into their standard care options. Sometimes it feels this business aspect switches audiences—from recipients of the service to people seeking Reiki as business—but it always returns to its primary audience in the end.

See Reiki for what it really is: a way to amplify both physical and mental healing with Reiki in Integrative Medicine. This is a book that everyone can take something from.

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Reviewed by Warren Maxwell

Melding poetic forms, candid conversations, and calls against injustice, these poems are confessional, communal, rage-filled, compassionate, and above all, kind.

Melding poetic forms, candid conversations, and calls against injustice, these poems are confessional, communal, rage-filled, compassionate, and above all, kind.

“Dustin’s instinct is to argue against the compliment—that’s life with a narcissist parent. He (begrudgingly ) writes thank you.”

Zooming into the experiences, frustrations, and joys of modern life with a magnifying glass, the slim volume of poetry, Repeat As Needed, offers validation, commiseration, and critique of the way we live our lives.

In a fingerprint-like poetic voice that captures the unique cadences and peculiarities of the author, poems like “Things That Definitely Suck” list the myriad awfulnesses that one encounters on a day-to-day basis, or once in a lifetime, in one foreboding block of text .

“Stuck on a Ferris wheel with a full bladder. Missing buttons. Chipping a tooth. A dust allergy. Misogyny.”

Elsewhere, poems are minimalistic haikus, elegant villanelles, literal conversations traded back and forth with other poets, and quixotic repartees against the cliched comments that heterosexual people make about homosexuality. The diversity of form is thrilling, but it’s the poetic voice winding through each piece that makes this an enthralling read.

“Sob.
Sob until God fears
you’ll one up His flood.”

Each poem in Repeat As Needed is accompanied by a subheading that name-checks an inspiration or literary jumping off point. This in itself creates a beautiful sense of poetic lineage and history—it is a collection very much in touch with contemporaries and forbearers.

When viewed in combination with the two explicit conversation poems (“Dustin Wants To Write A Poem With Caridad” and “Dustin Wants To Write A Poem With Nicole”) that trade block paragraphs between Brookshire and another poet—each poet writing about themselves in the third person—this collection takes on the aspect of a community. Many voices are drawn into contact with Brookshire’s. The lively chatter between poets and thinkers actively performs some of the values that become apparent in the collection’s denunciations of homophobia, misogyny, and discrimination of all stripes.

“When I was straight,
my father would say,
I’d rather one of my sons
blow my brains out
than tell me he’s gay.”

Among the real pleasures of reading these poems is discovering the way poetic form and the uses of concrete space inflect a voice. Brookshire’s voice doesn’t falter in navigating brutalist blocks of text, slim lines of repetition, and meandering, minor epic stories of being frightened by religious tales as a child. Yet, each new structure on the page brings out another aspect of Brookshire’s language. There is the heavy potency of a poem that can simply declare “All we had was lust” and let those lines resonate alone on the page. Then there’s the prolix excitement of a voice that loves speaking and free associating as we see in “Things That Definitely Suck” and the conversation poems. Through different forms, the different faces of the poet come into beautiful relief.

A passionate, richly articulated snapshot of life, poetic community, and the many identities that are wrapped up in a single individual, Repeat As Needed is a gorgeous poetry collection.

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Reviewed by Nikolas Mavreas

An out-of-the-box murder mystery with some seriously intriguing twists

The Last Case is an unconventional but wholly satisfying specimen of the murder mystery form. Set in a coastal town in New England during the early 1980s, this novel opens with a body: a man in a Dungeons and Dragons costume found beheaded on the beach. This brings the lighthouse-dwelling detective Joseph Tey out of his isolation and back into the game. As he works at solving the case, Tey also works on himself, battling identity issues and a sense of mental deterioration.

Our protagonist’s inner conflict, his doubts about his past and his capabilities, are a constant presence in the book. This is accomplished with an ingeniously selected alternative to inner monologue: interjections of passages from Joseph Tey’s journal. In addition to fresh approaches to the genre, the plot is sprinkled with familiar mystery tropes as well, like annoying police colleagues, Cold War rhetoric, and a large corporation of unclear morality.

Every single character in this book, however minor, feels alive and breathing. Manners of speech, contents of speech, and little actions meticulously described all work toward the painting of people who feel vibrantly real, accentuated with sparse brushstrokes of the caricatural.

The attention to detail and resulting characterization is in every nook and cranny of this book, and it defines every aspect of the writing. Through particular, descriptive, and expressive detail, this novel is both fully excavated and polished like a jewel.

“The journal may tell him, if he dared read it. Something made him reluctant. Something made those memories unpleasant. He’d written them down as though putting them on paper removed them from his mind, making room for other things. His curiosity pulled and his apprehension pushed, so the diary remained on the coffee table.”

The novel rises to real thrills but also plunges to profound psychological depths. At its center, it is concerned with why people do what they do, the senselessness of bad actions, and redemption. It’s a thought-provoking thriller—and a strong one at that.

Some readers will notice that the protagonist’s name is taken from the pen name of an older mystery author. The reference doesn’t seem to carry more meaning than just being a simple homage to Josephine Tey, and it has no connection to another popular book series which has a fictional Josephine Tey. Delauder may have gone tongue-in-cheek with titling this novel, The Last Case: A Joseph Tey Mystery, but he also could be leveraging for a sequel or prequel to follow. DeLauder admits in the back matter of the book that this is his first foray into the murder mystery genre, but he writes with enough skill and expertise to make it feel like he couldn’t have done a better job. Until next time, I hope.

Thank you for reading Nikolas Mavreas’s book review of The Last Case by Sean DeLauder! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Frankie Martinez

A compulsive story of how aimless travels can become a meaningful life journey

David LeBrun was twenty-four and working at a broccoli farm in Ontario, Canada in 2011. At the same time, he was working on a manuscript about his past part-time jobs, Curriculum Vitae, and getting ready to send it to the editor-in-chief of Edifice Books in Toronto.

In order to finish his manuscript, LeBrun heads to Costa Rica to stay with a childhood friend for some well-needed work and isolation. However, after his stay in Costa Rica comes to an abrupt, sudden end, Lebrun finds that he’s willing to go anywhere. With money slowly dwindling and the vague direction of his friend’s farm in Mexico guiding him, LeBrun finds himself on a wayward, knife-edge adventure, hopping from the bus to the backs of trucks, to befriending strangers, and to busking (badly).

Told in expressive detail, LeBrun’s memoir, Delirium Vitae is a compelling story about trying to find your way in a world that sometimes feels woefully meaningless and ordinary. With his father’s death from cancer and his mother’s disability from a stroke hanging over him, Lebrun is on a mission to make his mark, not only with his manuscript, but also in his travels: “It was at seventeen, after watching his cancer devour him, that I knew I wanted nothing in my life to be ordinary.”

In many ways, Delirium Vitae is a successful product of this mission. LeBrun’s journey through Central America and Mexico is evocative of a real-life Alice in Wonderland. It’s easy to see him: a young man drifting around the open road with a broken family and no agenda; who is French-Canadian with some knowledge of Spanish, has fifty pages of his precious manuscript shoved at the bottom of his bag, and uses a recorder to gather voice notes from people he meets. Though locations, names, and faces are fleeting, his descriptions of places and people are fond and sharp. Even if LeBrun doesn’t have particularly good memories of certain people, tidbits of their words seemed to hold an impact.

One memorable example is LeBrun’s recollections of his interactions with Antonio, an unscrupulous musician he meets right after entering Mexico, who can’t seem to keep a steady relationship or stay in one place. There are several times LeBrun is sure that Antonio has abandoned him, only for him to show up once again to travel together: “Fuck it, David. You know what? My old friends always ask me how I stay slim, why I look this young… And I tell them it’s because I keep moving. I keep rolling, you see?”

While Delirium Vitae succeeds in portraying the uncertainty of travel and the multitude of perspectives you encounter, it can be difficult to find footing in LeBrun’s emotional journey. There are hints of it throughout, particularly of how emotionally taxing it is to have his father die at an early age and to see his mother in a hospital bed, but there isn’t much introspection on the topic to make me feel like I knew exactly how it all connected.

Of course, not all stories, especially memoirs, should be expected to follow a linear path or project a direct meaning. It’s impossible to know the right thing to do in a certain time, or for people to do and say the right things to keep a story moving. However, Delirium Vitae shows that with time and space, perhaps meaning can be gleaned from the biggest of adventures across countries to the smallest of interactions over a beer.

Thank you for reading Frankie Martinez’s book review of Delirium Vitae by David LeBrun! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Peter Hassebroek | Content Warnings: School shooting

A compelling novel about the ironies of the Second Amendment and rationalizing stricter gun legislation

Austin McGuirk gets bullied frequently at the fictional Brushy Ridge High School. Simmering rage prompts the purchase of an AR-15 through a private advertisement. He keeps the gun in his locker, ready to enact his revenge when he boils over. It happens with the ultimate humiliation that’s compounded by being recorded and shared online:

“. . . but none of it was as bad as this, none had ever stripped him so mercilessly of his dignity, had laid it out so blatantly for all to exploit and take delight in. Nothing sank his heart so deep into his bowels, no one had so mockingly exposed both his feelings and his self.“

He targets the bullying ringleader and girlfriend, isolating them in a hallway. He starts shooting. And then the moment overtakes him. He ends up killing eleven in all, including other unintentional innocents like his guidance counselor and, when cornered, himself.

While obvious blame lies with Austin for the shooting and Blake for its provocation, it’s not enough for the grieving parents and husband of the guidance counselor. They feel it could have been prevented and determine a root cause: the ease with which a boy like Austin could acquire such a powerful weapon.

It becomes their mission to thwart future occurrences by tightening the gun laws. In this, they have much support, including from their congressman and the US president. But not the resolute Speaker of the House, Fred Grantham. A formidable obstacle who would never consider tabling any bill encroaching on the Second Amendment. This he makes directly clear by spurning their appeal in Washington.

Thus is born the eponymous Brushy Ridge Militia, consisting of most of the parents and others. They scout the logistics and design an elaborate, costly months-long plan to kidnap the speaker to compel him to see the light. Ironically, the same Second Amendment Grantham uses to deny them provides rationale for the group:

“Why is it perfectly legitimate to use that ambiguous set of words to support the premise that a bullied eighteen-year-old youth can legally purchase a semi-automatic weapon, while the Brushy Ridge Militia’s actions are considered illegal, even though much more consistent with the Amendment’s original intent?“

To add further irony, the members must acquire guns and take NRA training. It’s a risky plan. A low percentage plan. Success depends on so many factors falling in place as expected. However, their collective grief has coalesced to overcome initial and ongoing doubts. Their resoluteness equals Grantham’s. And what the militia’s leader, Hank Patrick, a former DC lawyer, argues is highly persuasive and inventive. Will it work?

This is a well-paced read where the writing is economical yet complete; cohesiveness is one of its strengths. Readers will become easily invested in the militia’s efforts and whether they’ll succeed or not. The three stages of the plot—the mass murder, the kidnapping, the trials—are given thorough treatment, and the progression from one to the next is consistently smooth and logical.

The points-of-view shift from omniscient to close third person for many characters, from the murderer to the militia members to the FBI to the kidnapped speaker and more. This provides a broad perspective of events while remaining solicitous to each character. It also retains objectivity and avoids bias. Considering the number of characters, it’s impressive how all but the most minor are relatable and real.

For a story grounded in such heartbreaking sadness, The Brushy Ridge Militia is tastefully entertaining. The ironic use and cogent interpretations of the Second Amendment highlight this absorbing novel.

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Reviewed by Timothy Thomas

An inspired commentary on life’s unpredictability and the beauty of second chances

Moment by moment, day by day, we rarely know how or when people will enter or exit our lives or how influential they could become. Our acceptance of this most erratic characteristic of life may give us the courage to embrace the unexpected changes in things, circumstances, and people, giving potential to great joy even in the midst of great loss. While not strictly a treatise on the uncertainty of life, Michael Kahn’s The Gourmet Club poignantly illustrates how our most rewarding moments and meaningful connections can be birthed from the unpredictable.

The year is 1981. Four first year associates at Chicago’s prestigious Abbot & Windsor (Gabe Pollack, Eric Cameron, Susan Baker, and Norman Greenberg) have bonded because of their chance inclusion in their orientation’s Words of Welcome presentation. Norman’s wife, Esther, comes up with the idea of a potluck dinner for the small group and their respective spouses to get to know each other. After a delightfully successful evening with great food, conversation, and entertainment, the group agrees to get together for four dinner parties a year, with each couple hosting once a year. Thus, the Gourmet Club is born.

Over the years, this quarterly tradition plays host not only to the Club’s growing friendship, but also to the navigation of major decisions, career changes, and celebrations of life. As their paths diverge, these dinner parties keep them linked together by a shared desire for and need of community that offers support and encouragement.

Though Kahn writes in his author’s note that he simply followed the lead of the characters, the narrative conveys a strong sense of intentionality and wisdom. There is a thoughtfulness in the approach to each of the main characters. Their paths connect to an overarching theme of ceaseless change and community, and this connection results in a narrative landscape that is recognizably realistic with characters to match.

The difficulty in creating such a landscape and telling a story that spans decades, however, is that details can sometimes get lost. As the story gains momentum, there are lengthy gaps in the timeline that gloss over significant moments in the characters’ lives. The narrative tends to focus more on their careers, which means that less attention is given to their interpersonal lives and the changes happening within them, like parenting and marriage.

Still, this story does exactly what it sets out to do. Armed with an eclectic cast and a thoughtfully familiar world, The Gourmet Club is a confident, engaging book that prompts a reflective look at one’s own past and a hopeful look toward the future through eyes of wonder at life’s fortuitous paths.

Thank you for reading Timothy Thomas’s book review of The Gourmet Club by Michael A. Kahn! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Shelby Zwintscher

An exhilarating international scavenger hunt for a powerful ancient relic

The Arcane Religious Knowledge and Numinous Experience Institute, ARKANE, is an international organization dedicated to solving supernatural and religious mysteries. Morgan Sierra, an ARKANE agent surrounded by loss, was recently cursed on a mission. But while paying respects to a friend who died during that same, fateful mission, Morgan receives a call about a new assignment from her partner, Jake Timber.

It turns out that an archivist at the national library archives in Vienna has found a Nazi Enigma machine containing a long-forgotten, encoded letter depicting a drawing of The Spear of Destiny. Also known as the Holy Lance, the Spear is a relic said to have been stabbed into the side of Jesus Christ during his crucifixion. It is believed to contain unimaginable power which can wield great good or tremendous evil.

While many have claimed their relics are the real Spear, Morgan and Jake are inclined to believe the Spear in Vienna could be the true, power-wielding lance due to this newly uncovered note. Written by a Nazi officer who transported this Spear fragment to the museum, the note confirms that the Spear has been “split into four pieces, as directed.”

As the Spear’s WWII historical connections are uncovered, Morgan and Jake suddenly find the museum under attack. Jericho Command, a military group under the rightwing US Presidential candidate Ezekial Stronghold, will do whatever it takes to gain the Spear fragment.

While fighting to flee the attack, Morgan has an encounter with a tattooed man who is part of this mysterious group. In their brief interaction, both can sense darkness around the other. Is this man cursed too?

The quest to find and reunite the Spear fragments begins with the personal. Morgan learns the true weight of her blood curse when her niece is hospitalized with a potential cancer of the blood. This emotional gut punch sets up a story that’s as satisfying on the human level as it is on the high-stakes plot level.

Spear of Destiny takes Morgan and Jake to archives filled with WWII artifacts, across borders and oceans, into crypts as dark as their history, as they race to find the Spear before it can be used for evil.

It’s a heart-pumping supernatural thriller that takes the reader to real locations all around the world. From Historischer Kunstbunker in Nuremberg to Potala Palace in Tibet, every historical location that Morgan and Jake visit is described in vivid detail and adds immense value for the historical fiction fan. The settings jump off the page and make the supernatural elements all the more frighteningly believable.

The settings are specific but so is the historical detail. Penn aims to satisfy in multiple arenas—from real history to real thrills to the real possibility of the occult—and does. There’s even a bibliography and details of the research at the end of the novel for those getting lost in the fascinating history.

As the 13th installment of a series, you’d think it’d be difficult to jump into as a first-time reader. But Penn takes care to sprinkle in the relevant histories of Morgan and Jake in ways that we can understand quickly and get moving.

Fast-paced, surprising, and dark, Spear of Destiny is a can’t miss thriller for fans of Dan Brown and action-packed historical fiction.

Thank you for reading Shelby Zwintscher’s book review of Spear of Destiny by J.F. Penn! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Victoria Lilly

A collage of dreamlike, visceral images—an experimental arthouse movie in shifting literary form

VHS is an eclectic patchwork of forms, styles, and formats—an array of vignettes loosely tied to the narrator’s experience of growing up a second-generation immigrant in the United States.

The narrator’s father immigrated to the United States from Cuba in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961. His mother moved from socialist Poland to America, and the two met in a toothpaste factory in the industrial zone of Long Island City. The narrator, driven by a mix of ennui and homesickness for a home he never knew, drifts from career to career, town to town, on a vaguely planned trek east to his mother’s native Poland.

Among those chapters with defined settings, most take place in Berlin, Germany; another prominent locale is New York City. Over the course of the collection and the narrator’s journey, he shares snippets of his life—events, sensations, musings—and intersperses them with vignettes from the lives of his friends, lovers, acquaintances, parents, and absolute strangers.

The narrator is a great fan of the visual medium, so the microfiction-style chapters are named after movie classics, such as Only Lovers Left Alive, Total Recall, The Lives of Others, and more. The fragmented, stream of consciousness style blends the essay form with that of diary entries, letters, and poetry—often within the same short chapter.

Boundaries of said fragments are muddled—melted down, one could say—and pieced together without seams or needlework through the use of an even more dizzying array of techniques. Single-sentence paragraphs, graphically broken-up text, ellipses and enjambments, strikethroughs and caesuras, all are deftly utilized to create the stream of consciousness effect. And a stream it is, as the reader has no choice but to surrender to the meandering, confusing, language-breaking and language-loving voice of the narrator.

Some stories are funny despite the overall serious and contemplative tone of the collection. One such section is “Vision Quest,” in which the narrator obtains special newly tinted glasses which he dubs “Tinman Elite,” complete with a “heavy-duty double-lock ‘High Performance Resin Case'” with a handle on it. His students (in this chapter, the narrator is working as a college professor) remark that he looks like “the Matrix;” the narrator muses on the nature of vision and the (dis)advantages of having one’s eyes so concealed as he heads for a rave party in an East Berlin nightclub.

On the other end of the spectrum are dry, grey, melancholy stories such as “Only Lovers Left Alive:” a brief piece about a girl (presumably the narrator’s mother) waking before dawn in a windowless room with bare walls. The girl heads to the immigration office to present her “white card,” dreading the strangeness of the new country she found herself in, bereft among the unfamiliar language and unadorned walls.

As is always the case with experimental writing, summary of individual tales within VHS is a shadow of the true depth of the text, which lies in the playful use of language (even if the author has a sometimes overbearing fondness for the use of parentheses). The immigrant experience is a theme as old as time in American literature, but Campanioni breathes fresh life into this tradition through clever turns of phrase, surprising depths of the narrator’s inner life, and a steady hand with prose and genre alike.

VHS is not a rollercoaster but a contemplative train journey—a shifting, colorful, and surreal landscape of cities, persons, and memories going by—to bring you out of the grey dullness of everyday life.

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Reviewed by Eric Mayrhofer

Chip Cater’s short stories shine with compassion, wisdom, wit, and warmth

Memories don’t play out like feature-length movies. They happen in flashes, fits, and starts. Sometimes a memory can bubble up to the surface of your mind with a very clear point, and sometimes they ramble or roll by for no other reason than to remind you of something pleasantly familiar.

Those are characteristics that Chip Cater’s collection Capers and Switcheroos embodies beautifully. Transforming his memories into short stories, he lets readers into his mind and gives them the joy of experiencing his admiration and love, his childhood mischief, and the quiet humility that comes with age.

And it truly does feel like each story is a little door into Cater’s mind. That’s partly due to flourishes like the quick, easy nicknames that pepper his writing. When recalling his wedding in “Blue Velvet,” the opening story, he says, “We were married in the Congregational Church, which stands on the hill over the tiny string of stores and restaurants in Wellfleet. The Congo’s tall steeple towers over the town and is what you aim for when sailing back in from the outer reaches of Wellfleet harbor.”

Those small but irreverent choices, nestled in an otherwise matter-of-fact tone, help readers see that Cater doesn’t take life too seriously, even as he regards it with a sharp eye respectfully studying everything it lands on.

That matter-of-fact voice could also be called openness—even earnestness. In the same story, Cater’s wife winds up having to change into a borrowed dress, a dazzling blue number with sparkling stones. The incident is briefly the talk of the restaurant, and when Cater and his wife leave, “twelve to fifteen ‘fans,’ who had watched the drama unfold, rushed up…They wanted Mary’s autograph. After the scenes in the bar and dining room and the changes of costume, they were positive she was a celebrity. She still is.” Then later, in the story “Something Noticed,” he and Mary find themselves in Vietnam and notice there are no birds; the Vietnamese ate them into scarcity due to food shortages that began in the Vietnam War. Upon returning home, Cater reflects, “We have hundreds of beautiful birds, many of whom sing…it is our palette and our symphony.”

In just a few words, Cater reveals so much: his bounding love for his wife Mary. The couple’s quiet awareness of all their blessings, humble in the knowledge that so many have far less.

There are one or two stories that err on the rambling, rolling side of memory. “Saved by the Belle,” for example, may luxuriate a little too long in the technological details of early digital publishing for some. Even then, however, readers glimpse our narrator’s open-hearted kindness as he remembers a workplace rival. “Dan left and went to our largest competitor,” Cater writes. “He did well and we stayed in touch over the years…we had a shared interest.” Even in adversity, obstacles never become permanent barriers to good relationships, politeness, or decency.

Capers and Switcheroos is a quietly moving piece, a comforting blanket of a short story collection.

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Reviewed by Erin Britton

An action-packed thriller that traverses the globe and plumbs the depths of political conspiracies and power struggles

Nikki Yanu Kanati’s The Savagery of Man: Operation Homecoming offers a gripping exploration of a world on the brink of catastrophe. As government factions, megalomaniacal individuals, and sinister secret societies compete to seize and retain power in the face of global devastation, the fate of the world hinges on the actions of one covert operative.

The tipping point comes with the assassination of US President Abraham Bancroft Calhoun. “Unfathomable, gruesome violence. Explosions. Dozens of thunderous explosions shatter the serene, beautiful spring morning of a quaint Virginia town as smoke, flame and deadly shrapnel poison the air.” This is closely followed by the sound of gunfire, and when the smoke clears, the body of the president is seen lying in the street.

The hero of the piece is Max Doss, a freelance operative with a history of taking whatever steps necessary to secure his country’s interests. “Unlike many in his profession, the man took no pleasure in administering pain,” although he is certainly willing to do so.

As Doss and his temporary (and unwanted) partner Tactical Agent Alejandra Bijeau traverse the country and then the world in search of the assassins and their paymasters, their mission is complicated by the machinations of two powerful individuals: Kurt Stromquist, an unusually charismatic UN administrator with a plan to forge a European empire, and Temüjin the Blessed, a direct descendent of Genghis Khan who is seeking to recreate his ancestor’s kingdom.

Complicating matters even further is the ongoing and highly confidential extraterrestrial arms race, which was triggered by the discovery of odd humanoid remains and alien tools in a cave system in Ethiopia. “For some time, we’ve known that Germany acquired an alien spacecraft, the first, right around 1954 and now we know how -.” Since then, the world’s major powers have all been searching for similar alien artifacts, with the USA, Russia, and China all seeming to have succeeded.

There are plenty of strands to The Savagery of Man: Operation Homecoming, allowing plenty of opportunities for action and keeping the story moving at a cracking pace. From the recognizable political intrigue to the malevolent secret societies and diabolical individuals to the extraterrestrial technology, there are certainly wheels within wheels when it comes to the plot.

While some of the leaps between incidents can be a bit sudden, especially when involving detailed backstory, all the different aspects ultimately hang together well. It helps that Max Doss has spent a lifetime in international security circles, which has afforded him insight into all the shady dealings that are afoot.

In fact, Doss is a true Renaissance Man when it comes to covert operations. He has all the skills, knowledge, and tools needed to thwart a number of international conspiracies. He’s an impressive hero—arguably verging into antihero territory—who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty and always proves more than a match for the various villains he encounters. His partnership with Alejandra Bijeau also works well, even if their banter is sometimes a bit much.

While the story largely follows Doss and Bijeau in the course of their investigation, valuable background information and insightful analysis is provided by Hermann Adelman, both through his diary and via explanations he provides to his daughter Gretchen, who has been in a coma for two years following a car accident. “When you are strong enough to hear a story, I will tell you a story. I fear it is neither a short nor happy story. Much has changed in the world over the past two years. Our own country is at war with itself.”

Adelman’s role as an almost omniscient narrator is an interesting one, ensuring access to top secret information that helps drive the plot forward. However, as he remains a shadowy figure—his role within the US government and as Max’s boss are obscure—it is questionable just how reliable a narrator he is. This adds tension to the story, making it difficult to get a handle on who can be trusted and what is true, as does the input of the mysterious Mother.

There’s also a background mystery concerning Max’s real identity, his training, and his ultimate employer. “Our fearless leader once upon a time assigned code names to certain field agents. X was for the experimental program they were in. The number five meant that our Max was the fifth Max in the program to graduate. The boss later discontinued the project along with these designations for reasons unknown.” It adds an extra layer of depth and suggests there might be more in store for Max in the future.

Although the exact timeframe isn’t specified, it seems that The Savagery of Man: Operation Homecoming is set in the relatively near future. There are new technologies, political shifts, and conflicts, but the world is largely recognizable. In this regard, Kanati has clearly put a lot of thought into the worldbuilding and alternative history, blending reality with both current conspiracy theories and projections of possibilities for the future.

Such touches enhance the realism of the story, keeping it grounded in the present and likely future, even with the extraordinary elements of various threads, like the alien technology. The story is truly immersive, and as Kanati’s vision of the possible decline of the established global order is frighteningly plausible, there is a real sense of tension and peril.

The Savagery of Man: Operation Homecoming weaves together political chicanery with brutal violence and action to craft a disturbingly realistic thriller. It’s an ambitious novel carried on the shoulders of an archetypal action hero, and the various conspiracies and double-crosses mean that there’s never a dull moment.

Thank you for reading Erin Britton’s book review of The Savagery of Man: Operation Homecoming by Nikki Yanu Kanati and Mark McMillin! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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