Byzantium Sky Press Books
Still Life in Blood - NEW EDITION!
First Place Winner of Best Novel in the Delaware Press Association Professional Communications Contest 2014 and First Place National Federation of Press Women Professional Communications Contest Winner 2014
Does seeing the future mean you may have a chance to change it?
For Francesca Munro, a successful artist in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, that is a question that plagues her daily thoughts. For years she's kept her psychic abilities a secret but when a murder she's dreamt of actually occurs—and then another—her struggle to cope with the deadly visions may be exposed.
Francesca knows that there is a deeper meaning to the murders, one that may be connected to her—especially when she begins to receive bizarre and cryptic clues that send her catapulting into a search for the truth about her mother who committed suicide twelve years earlier.
As Francesca tries to figure out how she, and her mother’s past, are connected to the killings, the body count continues to rise.
Delaware State Police Homicide Detective Jack Remington tries to unravel the intricate knot that ties the victims to Francesca.
But can Jack solve the mystery before Francesca becomes the final piece in a twisted killer's one-man show?
Also available at Browseabout Books, Amazon, B&N, and on order through your local bookstores.
Wanderlust
First Place Winner of Best Novel in the Delaware Press Association Professional Communications Contest 2022!
Kate Ketchum is inflicted with the disease of desire. Impassioned with fantasies of a singing career and traveling the world, she abandons her generations-old family tradition working at the declining Owl & Shamrock shoe factory. Leaving the stage of the local pub she's graced for years, Kate pursues her music education, when a surprising college scholarship to the University of Connecticut provides her escape route.
Enter Michael James. Back from two tours in Vietnam with haunts and secrets he's loath to share, he rejects his father's Harvard legacy and family business, and heads to UConn.
Wanderlust captures the college campus life where Kate and Michael's worlds collide in 1968 against the backdrop of the Vietnam war-passionate times of change, hippies, and history. Disappointments, distractions, and devastation, U-turns, misfortunes, and the fast lane lure each of the characters to unexpected destinations-from an institution for disabled youth to a concert in Paris to the bustling streets of Bangkok. Will their differing passions and history heal them or tear them apart?
Also available at Browseabout Books, Amazon, B&N, and on order through your local bookstores.
Rising Women Rising Tides
Second Place Winner of Best Short Story Collection by a Single Author in the Delaware Press Association Professional Communications Contest 2022!
Against the backdrops of thundering waterfalls, raging rivers, reflecting ponds, and the ever-alluring ocean, Kathleen Martens' award-winning short stories take the reader on tough and tender journeys across cultures and continents. Spanning the 1800's to modern times, from the Delaware beaches and British high society to the wilds of Canada, the streets of Washington, DC, and beyond, Rising Women, Rising Tides: Stories of Women, Water, and Wisdom delivers its high-impact tales of life, liberation, and love with rich and varied voices. From a marine biologist to a Guatemalan eye surgeon; twin-sister folk singers to a blind veteran; cancer survivor to Nanticoke native; Deaf teacher, and homeless woman, to opioid addicts, and more, the collection offers a memorable spectrum of women protagonists rising.
Also available at Browseabout Books, Amazon, B&N, and on order through your local bookstores.
Echoes & Memories & Night Air
Echoes and Memories and Night Air is a newly updated and expanded poetry collection previously published as Landslide.
This is a collection of poems recalling the love I have given freely to the few who actually mattered. Three different men managed to break down the walls around my tightly defended heart, at different moments of my life, for different reasons.
There was Autumn, a man who taught me about passion and need and that excitement that every woman wants. Spring taught me the opposite; getting to know someone deeply, not physically, sharing likes and dislikes, discussing literature and culture, connecting on an intellectual level. And then there was Winter, a man who with little words and equally little time, managed to accomplish what Autumn and Spring could not.
And in losing Winter, I was able to find myself in Summer.
*This title was previously published as Landslide in 2016
Soon to be at Browseabout Books. Also available on Amazon, B&N, and on order through your local bookstores.
Evergreen
First Place Winner of Best Novel in the Delaware Press Association Professional Communications Contest 2023!
Finalist in the 2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards for First Novel (70,000 to 90,000 words)!
Travel writer Emma Collins made the singular decision that changed her life forever-something she struggles to rectify. She wants to know why her long-term love relationship was so complicated, so hard to hold on to. After she returns to her childhood home, Evergreen, to bury her mother, Emma reflects on her life and her future.
Haunted by the memory of her true love, she feels helpless to move into the future without some resolution of the past, of what could have been and what remains, until her heart opens to an unexpected romance with a young vintner in Provence. Will she settle for that less than perfect, less than once-in-a-lifetime love? Even she can't decide until fate steps in and takes her full circle, making an unforeseen choice for her. An unusual love story of twists and turns, readers can expect the unexpected and will be blown away by its ending.
Click here to view the book trailer!
Also available at Browseabout Books, Amazon, B&N, and on order through your local bookstores.
Under a Jungle Moon
Third Place Winner of Best Novel in the Delaware Press Association Professional Communications Contest 2023
Raised in a cloistered convent, world-renowned American investigative reporter Vanessa Gold uncovers crimes and builds cross-cultural bridges. While exposing the flaws of others, she conceals dark secrets and lies about her own past.
In 1990, an American company constructs a gold mine on a remote Indonesian jungle island. Previously untouched by modern society, an isolated tribe is living a Stone Age existence. When indigenous tribal woman, Lukeem, reports her first sighting of the miners' mysterious helicopter to her tribe, she is accused of being a sorceress. By tradition, she is to be sacrificed to the river spirit. Tribal tradition links the timing of her sacrifice to the next full moon.
Vanessa intercedes in the intercultural drama along with her life partner, cameraman Tony, best friend and anthropologist Canyon, and Turning Prism, their Oscar-winning documentary team.
The unexpected unveiling of her estranged mother's identity and the appearance of a nemesis from Vanessa's past, threaten to destroy her life's work, her relationship with Tony, and the reputations of Canyon and her colleagues.
Fascinating cultural norms are explored as Lukeem, her son, and Vanessa escape together through the jungle seeking Lukeem's salvation. Can Vanessa bridge the vast cultural gap between the Paleolithic past and the 20th-century present?
Can she prevent the devastating and consequential exposé of her own life?
Click here to view the book trailer!
Also available at Browseabout Books, Amazon, B&N, and on order through your local bookstores.
The Wall of Hope
The Wall of Hope is a captivating, cross-cultural journey to discovering family, love, and purpose in a world of chaos and war.
Hope Lê Ketchum-James has struggled to find her place in the world. The daughter of an American soldier and a Vietnamese mother, Hope grew up as the indulged stepdaughter of a world-famous American singer in Boston. After graduating from Harvard Law, Hope’s memories of her early traumatizing years in an orphanage and dramatic wartime rescue begin to haunt her when she joins her father’s Uplift Children’s Foundation as an adoption attorney.
Enter Dominique Bellamy Bonchance. Uplifts new French Overseas Operations Manager draws Hope out of her shell. As their romance grows, so does the dangerous and violent nature of Dominique’s overseas work. Hope’s passion to save children as she’d been saved, and her painful past cause a conflict as Hope and Dominique navigate their budding relationship. Hope finds solace in her art, painting smiling faces of rescued children from war zones. While pursuing a case in San Francisco, she stumbles upon her birth mother’s family and begins to uncover who she is and what she’s meant to be.
Will Hope and Dominique be torn apart by the very thing that brought them together? Can Hope build a bridge to peace and love through her creativity amidst the chaos in her world?
Also available at Browseabout Books, Amazon, B&N, and on order through your local bookstores.
First Frost - OUT NOW!
For generations, the Frost family has run the Museum of Magical and Rare Artifacts, handing down guardianship from mother to daughter, always keeping their secrets within the family.
Gathered within the museum's walls is a collection dedicated to the Grimm fairy tales and the rare items the family has acquired: Cinderella's glass slipper, Snow White's poisoned apple, the evil queen's magic mirror, Sleeping Beauty's enchanted spinning wheel . . .
Seventeen-year-old Bianca Frost wants none of it, dreaming instead of a career in art or photography or . . . well, anything except working in the family's museum. She knows the items in the glass display cases are fakes because, of course, magic doesn't really exist.
She's about to find out how wrong she is.
Available for Pre-Orders at Amazon, B&N, and on order through the Byzantium Sky Press.
Zauberer
Mira Hall's life was finally starting.
Ten years of struggling her way through medical school, hospital rotations, and working at the local bookstore so she could afford a little apartment and keep food on the table.
All to earn that coveted white coat and degree in the back seat of her car that she plans to hang on the wall in her own practice.
Yup, her life was finally going exactly as she planned ...
That was until she was forced off the highway and into a pole by an eighteen-wheeler and straight into the ICU of a secretive doctor's care...
That was until she discovered she could move things with her mind...
That was until she found out the hot bookstore owner she worked for was actually a wizard.
Jove Brandt, the owner of Bindings—a small shop with big secrets in the basement and the attic—is delighted to discover that the woman he's cared for has a unique power so he could introduce her to his community.
A community that needs someone like Doctor Mira Hall.
Zauberer is a story of a woman of science thrown into a community of magic in the city of brotherly love.
Also available at Browseabout Books, Amazon, B&N, and on order through your local bookstores.