It’s cover reveal day for Call Me Sonny by Steve Lazarus. We LOVE how this cover nails the dark crime fiction vibe of this Bryce Chandler mystery, and we can’t wait for the release of Call Me Sonny in the fall!

ABOUT CALL ME SONNY

Shortly after a corrupt attorney pays a visit to an inmate serving a life sentence in a federal supermax prison, people from the inmate’s past start to die. Bryce Chandler, a retired FBI Agent eking out a living as a private investigator in the Florida Keys, ties the string of killings to a shadowy murder-for-hire organization operating on the Dark Web, and in the process he discovers the final name on the list is his own.  At the same time, a simple divorce case turns out to be much more than meets the eye, as Bryce’s investigation of the defendant leads him down a path of international drug smuggling, money laundering, and violent henchmen bent on keeping him silent. The two storylines run parallel to one another until they eventually converge in a final bloody outcome.

About the author

Steve Lazarus is a first-time author, retired FBI Special Agent, and United States Air Force veteran. He served twenty-two years in the FBI, spending the first half of his career investigating drug trafficking organizations and violent street gangs. Later, he became a full-time bomb technician, an assignment which led him to Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan as part of the Global War on Terror.  After retiring from the Bureau, he spent several years as a national security instructor in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Steve lives outside Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, with his partner Susan and their amazing wonder dog, Aspen.

Follow our blog and social media to keep up with release developments for Call Me Sonny!

It’s cover reveal day for Tina Davidson’s stunning memoir, Let Your Heart Be Broken: Life and Music from a Classical Composer.

Tina Davidson is three-and-a-half when she is adopted from her foster home in Sweden by a visiting American professor. Soon she is the oldest of five children, living with her mother and stepfather in Turkey, Germany, and Israel. She studies music and becomes a prolific pianist and composer. But something about her birth remains unnamed and hidden. When she returns to Sweden, she contacts the Swedish adoption agency. “Come,” says the voice on the phone, “I have information for you.”

In Let Your Heart Be Broken, Tina Davidson juxtaposes memories, journal entries, and insight into the life of an artist and a mother-at work. Along the way, Davidson meets Ernest Hemingway and Carl Sandburg, survives an attack by nomads in Turkey, and learns her birth father is a world-famous scientist. And throughout, there is the thread of music, an ebb and a crescendo of a journey out of the past and into the present, through darkness and into the light.

Let Your Heart Be Broken will be released to all markets on March 14, 2023. Preorder it here.

TINA DAVIDSON, a highly regarded American composer, creates music that stands out for its emotional depth and lyrical dignity.  Lauded for her authentic voice, the New York Times praised her “vivid ear for harmony and colors.”  Philadelphia Inquirer writes that she composes “real music, with structure, mood, novelty and harmonic sophistication – with haunting melodies that grow out of complex, repetitive rhythms.”

Over her forty-five-year career, she has been commissioned and performed by well-known ensembles such as National Symphony Orchestra, The Philadelphia Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, OperaDelaware, VocalEssence, Kronos Quartet, Cassatt Quartet and Grammy award winner, Hilary Hahn. 

Long-term residencies play a major role in Davidson’s career. She was composer-in-residence as part of the innovative Meet The Composer “New Residencies” and with the Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia.  Championing composing in public schools, she created the city-wide Young Composers program to children how to write music through instrument building, improvisation, and graphic notation.

Tina Davidson was born in Stockholm, Sweden and grew up in Oneonta, NY and Pittsburgh, PA.  She currently resides in Lancaster PA.

Praise for Let Your Heart Be Broken

“Rarely does a composer tie together life events and inner creative propulsion in a narrative that speaks directly to their audience. Ms. Davidson’s music is lyrical and vulnerable, as is her voice in words. Her book will allow listeners and musicians alike to build their own connections to Ms. Davidson’s work in all of its forms.” –Hilary Hahn, violinist and Grammy winner

“Let Your Heart Be Broken is a poignant telling of a life inextricably entwined in the art of making music. It is a rare peek into the inner workings of the mind and its desires, joys, and fears, and how that affects the process of wrestling notes onto a page; a memoir filled with the twists and turns of the soul, it is a rewarding read.”  –Jennifer Higdon, Pulitzer Prize composer

“Whether she is writing about the hauntings of childhood or the day-to-day practical work of a leading American composer, Tina Davidson writes with precision and poetry, bringing us into her remarkable life.”  –Tim Page, author and  former New York Times music critic

Listen to an exclusive Spotify playlist with music from the book here!

COVER REVEAL! Stop the Road: Stories from the Trenches of Baltimore’s Road Wars will be released worldwide on 10/01/22.

Stop the Road is a microcosm of a clash over values and ideas about cities and the transportation systems that provide the lifeblood of the urban economy. That Baltimore avoided committing “urbanicide” (a term coined by Baltimore Sun news columnist James Dilts) was a testament to the astonishing victory of a ragtag band of community activists, environmentalists, and preservationists that turned the tables on the economic and political establishment. They won three major expressway battles, eliminating two highways and rerouting a third, thereby saving the waterfront that later became the bedrock of Baltimore’s late-1900s revival. However, the lasting impact of the highways that were built through the city’s African American communities (including Baltimore’s infamous “Highway to Nowhere”) tells quite a different story. Here we see highway plans that reflected racial inequities and discriminatory practices deeply embedded in Baltimore’s history. This is a storyline that still resonates today, as the country faces up to a long-overdue reckoning over racial issues.

Enlivened by the up-close-and-personal stories of the Road Warriors (much of it gained from 53 interviews of those involved), Stop the Road charts a course that is engaging on a human-interest level. This is a story of Baltimore at its best and at its worst all at the same time; a story of the mob retaking “Mobtown”; a story of monumental struggle for the “Monumental City.”

“Paull’s surgical dissection of the 40-year battle produces a book that is essential for understanding today’s Baltimore—and the many other American cities which experienced similar highway wars.”
Antero Pietila, author of Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City.

“Stop the Road is an engrossing saga of Baltimore, not just because the events depicted are so significant for our city, but also because the history is enlivened by in person storytelling. You will marvel how this combination of community protectors, civil rights activists, preservationists, 1960’s idealists, and environmental advocates gained the upper hand over the road building establishment.”
M. J. (“Jay”) Brodie, former Baltimore Housing Commissioner and President of Baltimore Development Corporation.

“If you think about the things that have really changed the face of Baltimore as we know it today, to me there is nothing more important than the road wars.”
C. William Struever, Baltimore developer and urban strategist

Evans Paull is a retired city planner, living in northwest Baltimore with his wife, Rosemarie. He has three children and one grandchild. Paull’s career started in the Baltimore City Department of Planning where he worked with quite a few of the interviewees featured in this book (but he had no direct involvement in either transportation planning or the Road Wars). In mid-career he shifted from generalist planner to specializing in the redevelopment of brownfields (vacant former industrial or commercial properties, the reuse of which is complicated by contamination).  He started and managed Baltimore’s Brownfields Initiative; then went on to work on these same issues at a national level, working first for Northeast-Midwest Institute, later acting as Director of the National Brownfields Coalition, later still starting and running his consulting business, Redevelopment Economics. You can find previously published articles and papers on the Redevelopment Economics website. Paull has won a number of awards, including: Brownfields Leadership Award; Phoenix Award (for brownfields redevelopment); Governor’s Smart Growth Award; and Professional Achievement in Economic Development Award, Maryland Chapter American Planning Association.