The three covers of The Second Life of Ava Rivers

The Second Life of Ava Rivers was my second published novel and it’s still near and dear to my heart. This book is a mystery/thriller about a missing child who returns after twelve years gone with no memory of where she’s been and you can read more about it here.

Since it was published by Penguin in 2018, it’s been through a lot, ending with me gaining back my rights to the book and re-releasing it last year.

When a writer gains the rights back for a traditionally published book, one thing they don’t retain the rights for is the original cover, so last year I got a new cover made. At the time I liked it but the more I’ve learned since doing more self-publishing, the more I started wishing I had gone with something a little more eye-catching. Here we are, in 2023, and The Second Life of Ava Rivers now has a new cover that I’m really happy with. Check out the three covers below and let me know if you have a favorite!

Here’s the first cover, from the book’s original release in 2018:

The second cover, from the re-release in 2022:

And the most recent redesign from 2023:

This new cover is by Tim Barber of Dissect Designs, who’s done many covers for me now and who is just amazing at what he does.

Despite the rocky road this book has been on, I’m excited to refresh the face of it in hopes that it will find new readers and get a new life of its own!

Announcing my Kindle Vella story "The Poisonous Woman"

Have you heard about Kindle Vella? It’s Amazon’s newish publishing platform for serial fiction, and as a writer who’s embraced both long and short forms, I’ve been curious to try it. Well, the day has come.

I now have an ongoing story on Kindle Vella called “The Poisonous Woman” about a young woman with a lethal touch engineered as a weapon by the government. It’s a thriller, it’s dystopian, it’s soft sci-fi, it’s got a coming-of-age vibe to it. I’ve been holding onto this story for years now, not quite sure where it fit, so I’m excited to finally have it out there.

She's gone by many names: Donna, Queenie, Bell. But no matter what you call her, she's poison. The government made her as a weapon. When the experiment went awry, she was locked up in a zoo. She's grown up in here, alone. And all she dreams of is escape.

Check out “The Poisonous Woman” here! I’ll be aiming to update it twice weekly.

Pearl in Deep

IT’S MY BOOK’S BIRTHDAY! So excited to announce the release of my latest book Pearl in Deep. This one is the fourth book in the Jolvix Episodes, my series of standalone psychological thrillers. These books can be read in whatever order you want—they’re set in the same universe but each are their own story. My aim was to create a thriller series with a dash of The Twilight Zone.

Pearl in Deep is about a woman who falls for a genius in deepfake technology who also happens to be a psychopath. Full description below.

Epic scams. Juicy secrets. A man whose love language is lies.

Pearl Blackwood is waiting tables in San Francisco with dreams of one day opening her own restaurant when she meets Christopher McKinney: charming, sophisticated, a brilliant expert in deepfake technology, and the first person in her life who truly believes in her. Together, there's nothing they can't do. There’s just one little problem—he also happens to be a psychopath.

As Pearl falls for Christopher and their lives become entwined, the line between fantasy and reality blurs. Everything is a mind game and nothing is what it seems. And the more she tries to free herself from his grip, the tighter it becomes.

She can move to a new city. She can begin again. But she soon learns she can never escape him.

Buckle up, Pearl. It’s about to get real.

AMEN MAXINE

Guess what, friends? I have a new book coming out next month called Amen Maxine. While it’s always a joy and a pleasure to release a book, this one is very special to me because it’s my first novel for adults and represents a new direction for my writing. I’m expanding from traditionally published YA to indie publishing novels for adults via my new imprint Mirror House Press and I am THRILLED and I hope to thrill you too.

Amen Maxine is a domestic suspense/psychological thriller with a dystopian twist. It’s about a woman whose smart device begins giving her sinister warnings about her new husband. It’s twisty, it’s creepy, it’s set in the near future and filled with marital tensions and AI technology and features a snarky, neurotic protagonist. It will be available July 23 and ARCs are currently available on Netgalley.

The Second Life of ... Perdita

A dead girl found in a lake. A living girl haunted by ghosts. A sleepy town upended by the mystery—who killed Perdita?

I published my first book back in 2015, which seems like a lifetime ago now. Since then, the book’s original publisher went out of business and got acquired by Simon & Schuster—and now, after the book went out of print, I recently got the rights back. So this small but mighty book’s been published by a small press, a big 5 publisher, and now it’s an indie re-release. What a journey.

This new edition not only has a lovely new cover, it’s also been re-edited and I think it’s much stronger than the first version. If you like mysteries, ghosts, coming-of-age, and psychological thrillers, I think you might like Perdita, now available on Kindle Unlimited and in paperback.