Are you a book reviewer? Do you love thrillers filled with clever ways of exacting revenge upon the deserving? I’ve got a vigilante justice novel for you!
As I prepare to release Vengeance is Hers, I’m compiling a list of reviewers. Whether you’re a Booktuber on YouTube, a booktok maven, or you review on Amazon, I’m interested in getting a review copy to you!
We’re making a list and checking it twice. If interested, please email my assistant Holly at expartepress@gmail.com with your contact information and review channelon social media.
Please put BOOK REVIEWER in the subject line. Thank you!
Want to know more about what you’ll be reviewing? Here’s the pitch:
If you can’t forgive and forget, what’s next?
Poeticule Bay, Maine is a coastal village full of secrets.When a student is attacked and run out of town, police and the school administration prove useless. Enraged, Molly Jergins launches a campaign of vigilante justice against the school bully and his nasty family.
As threats and vandalism escalate to a war ending in death, the line between right and wrong blurs. Molly tries to be a good person, but when hunting monsters, the safer route is to become a better monster.
In the end, is revenge the best success?
VENGEANCE IS HERSRELEASES IN EARLY 2025!
About the Author
Robert Chazz Chute is a former crime and science journalist for newspapers and magazines. A graduate of the University of King’s College and the Banff Publishing Workshop, Robert has won fifteen awards for his writing. He pens suspenseful crime fiction with muscle and apocalyptic tales with heart. His hidden headquarters is a blanket fort in Other London. Vengeance is Hers is his twenty-ninth book.
Rereading The Grapes of Wrath after many years, it hits differently now that I’m older. The novel hits so hard, it could have been published yesterday, eerily relevant to our world in the present.
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was originally published in 1939. That is startling given its empathetic allegory about forced immigration and the dangers of unbridled capitalism. This was written long before laypeople had the vocabulary of “late-stage capitalism.” Certain passages are worth reviewing many times.
I was especially taken with how people are transformed into cogs in a machine. When the bank takes their homes, there’s no one to resist. Responsibility falls like a hammer on the most powerless. Evicted from the land they’d worked for generations, the farmers are ground under the weight of an uncaring bureaucracy.
In another passage, car salesmen take advantage of desperate people. The sole focus is money. In pursuit of profit, the salesmen’s contempt for their hapless customers is ferocious. People are dehumanized. The system only serves itself and a select, faceless few. The victims are oppressed, but they don’t understand that which uses and abuses them.
The Grapes of Wrath reflects problems that are easy to see today. You’ve watched the news. The mercilessness of the American health insurance system is evident. A health insurance company denies 32% of claims and becomes startlingly wealthy. It’s an unusual funeral they give their victims, isn’t it? The afflicted are buried in paperwork first, then they die. Kill someone with a gun, and the press goes mad. Kill ill people with paper, and all we get are shrugs of “Well, it’s legal.”
Most frustrating, I still hear media people and pseudo-intellectuals pretend to be mystified when the public shrugs off the assassination of one CEO. They aren’t discussing why people are so fed up they don’t have the spare energy to care. The media isn’t delving into the why of that stance. They aren’t showcasing any of the many cases where people in need are denied tests and treatments they need to survive. Instead, the public’s lack of empathy has become the story. We have twenty-four-hour news channels, but they make no time for the bigger story.
A bunch of pearl-clutching journalists and commentators need to read The Grapes of Wrath. Maybe they’ll glimpse themselves reflected within those pages.Maybe then they’ll better understand our wrath.
Coffee and a book or two are great ways to start a Sunday morning. I’ve found my escape from the news, at least for a little while.
I just got these this morning, and I already know Writers and Lovers is a binge-read.
Sunday Morning, back home in Nova Scotia
When we weren’t arguing about whether I should be imprisoned in the car and taken to church, Sunday mornings used to be magical. Sunday mornings meant listening to CBC’s Sunday Morning and Dad cooking up a hunter’s breakfast. The theme music was “English Country Garden,” a very civilized and incongruous opening for a series of radio reports about the state of the world. My clearest memory of the show comes from November 1978. I know the date because it was when I first heard the gritty details of the Jonestown massacre. Many years later on the same program, they read a letter I wrote on air. It was an ode to my beloved journalism prof, Walter Stewart, upon his death.Read the second paragraph under Early Life and Career on his Wikipedia page, and you’ll understand why I loved him.
Sunday morning: today.
This morning, I awoke to news of rebels capturing Damascus and Bashar al-Assad fleeing to parts unknown. I had to shovel the end of the driveway again because the plows came through. That done, I headed out as CBC reported on the abuse of First Nations people by police. As I drove home from the bookstore, the cantankerous and fun Fran Lebowitz was interviewed. “English Country Garden” is long gone, but the journalistic standards remain.
I was once a journalist and columnist. Now, when I get a weekend newspaper, I skim the news and head for the Books section. I wonder if I’ll pay so much attention to politics and world affairs for the next couple of years. I love to be informed, but I write fiction. It occurs to me that many of my happiest times were when I retreated into the safety of books.
Books are Milestones of Nostalgia
One Christmas, when all I wanted was a train set, I was sick. I went to bed with a tall canister of Smarties and read Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by Ian Fleming. Later, I would read all the James Bond books. They had so little to do with the movies I loved, but I loved the books no less.
University was me putting off toiling in the workforce for four years. It meant hiding in my dorm and reading In Cold Blood and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Once I graduated, I moved to Toronto to work in publishing. I was selling American Psycho and arguing with my bosses about censorship (Them: for; Me: Against).
I ate up Bright Lights, Big City, and related to the story so hard. On a summer night on the 28th floor of my apartment building in downtown Toronto, I devoured my favorite novel, The Color of Light by William Goldman. When I realized he had fooled me again, right down to the last line, I threw the book across the room, partly in exaltation, partly in admiration.
Chase the Cozy
Losing oneself to a novel, there is a coziness that feels like sitting by a crackling fire as a storm rages, a storm you don’t have to face.If you have the privilege of ignoring the violence and disappointments of current events, even for a little while, cherish it.
I encourage you to check out my books and retreat into fictional worlds for some solace. There are plenty of links to your right.
