Gerri Brightwell

A 2023 Forward INDIES Award winner"Turnback Ridge is a triumph; a timely, terrifying thriller..."--KAREN DIONNEA literary thriller set in a near-future Alaska in which global warming and immigration policy are wreaking havoc on lives and land. In the wake of his wife's mysterious disappearance, Nash Preston is trying to hold his family together. As the Alaska summer heats up, he ignores his expired visa--and now immigration bounty hunters are after him as he flees for the border with his sons. Their already fraught journey takes an alarming turn when his youngest, Robbie, picks up a mysterious fossil that makes him sick. When his boys are snatched and taken to a sinister detention facility, he must find a way to save them. Turnback Ridge engages with current and complex issues such as changes to immigration policy and attitudes, climate crisis, and the danger of the potential monetization of climate solutions. Fast-paced and thought-provoking, it expands upon the growing trend of literary fiction that embraces the tropes of genre fiction to examine climate change--such as Alex DiFrancesco's All City or Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow.

London, 1893. Elderly Mrs. Bentley is on her deathbed, and her son Robert has returned from France. But in the Bentleys' well-appointed home, everyone has their secrets, including Robert's beautiful and elusive wife, the orphan maid she hires from the country, and the mysterious young woman who arrives, claiming to be the bride of Robert's drowned brother. Robert is quickly developing a reputation in anthropometry, the nascent science of identifying criminals by body measurements. Yet soon he is caught up in the deceptions swirling around him, for no one under his roof is quite what they seem. When an intruder enters the house and ransacks the study, a chain of events is set in motion that threatens not only the genteel, comfortable life the Bentleys have managed to secure but also their very survival. A fascinating portrayal of a vanished England as well as an unconventional mystery, "The Dark Lantern" exposes the grand "upstairs" of a Victorian home and the darker underbelly of its servants' quarters. The clash between the classes makes for a suspenseful novel of mistaken identities, intriguing women, and dangerous deceptions.