Powerful families rarely fall apart because of a single secret. In Nick Haskins’ Dark Waters series, the Waters family has spent decades creating a Philadelphia legacy built on influence, respect, and the position of Judge Keenan Waters. What lies behind that public image is far less secure. Betrayal, buried secrets, shifting loyalties, and consequences that can turn deadly steadily threaten the family from within. With the third book arriving September 8, the series brings its long-running struggle between reputation and reality toward its conclusion.

The Dark Waters series follows the rise and fall of one of Philadelphia's most powerful families. 

Judge Keenan Waters and his family have spent decades building a legacy of power, influence, and respect. But behind the perfect public image lie buried secrets, betrayal, and deadly consequences that threaten to destroy everything they've built. 

As loyalties are tested and relationships crumble, the Waters family is pushed closer to the edge of ruin. With shocking twists and intense family drama, the Dark Waters series keeps the readers turning pages until the very end. 

Perfect for fans of Black & African American Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Fiction, the first two books are available now, with the shocking conclusion, Dark Waters 3, arriving September 8, 2026.

The Waters family gives this series a strong central pressure point: the very legacy its members have spent decades building is also what they stand to lose. Judge Keenan Waters’ position means the family’s conflicts unfold against an established public reputation for power and respect, making every buried secret potentially damaging on more than a personal level. Haskins builds the larger story around loyalties being tested and relationships deteriorating as those secrets and betrayals surface. With Dark Waters 3 positioned as the conclusion, readers can follow that accumulation of consequences across the series rather than encountering a family crisis that neatly resets at the end of each installment. 

The Dark Waters series is a natural match for readers who prefer suspense driven as much by family relationships as by external danger. The focus on an influential Philadelphia family makes reputation, loyalty, betrayal, and the consequences of long-kept secrets central to the tension. Readers of Black and African American mystery, thriller, and suspense fiction who enjoy interconnected stories will also have the advantage of entering the series as its larger arc reaches its conclusion. Those who particularly like watching a carefully maintained public image fracture under private pressure should find the Waters family an intriguing one to follow. 

Nick Haskins is the author of the Dark Waters series, as well as novels She's Obsessed, Betrayed, My Husband's Wife, and On the Edge of Heat. 

Known for his suspenseful storytelling and unforgettable characters, Haskins has spent more than a decade building a catalog of contemporary drama and suspense that has attracted readers across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. 

Born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, where he still resides, Haskins began his publishing career in 2011 and has remained committed to independently producing professional, reader-focused books. In addition to writing novels, he is creating film and visual media projects based on his work. 

Haskins continues to connect with readers while developing new stories to expand his publishing catalog.

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The most interesting threat facing the Waters family is not simply that secrets exist, but that they have something substantial to destroy. Decades of influence and respect have created a public legacy, while betrayal and deteriorating relationships threaten its foundation from inside the family itself. That gives the Dark Waters series room to connect suspense with the consequences of protecting appearances for too long. With Dark Waters 3 bringing the series to its conclusion on September 8, readers can now see how far the Waters family’s carefully constructed legacy can bend before it finally breaks. 

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Spiritual influence can spread far beyond a local congregation before anyone stops to ask who is responsible for testing the person behind it. In The Self-Chosen One: When Prophecy Replaces Accountability, pastor Kevin P. Horath examines what can happen when prophetic authority, personal charisma, and the reach of modern platforms outpace accountability. His concern is not an argument for eliminating prophecy. Instead, Horath approaches the subject from within a belief in the work of the Holy Spirit, asking how churches can distinguish spiritual gifts from self-appointed authority without abandoning either discernment or genuine spiritual vitality.

When Prophecy Replaces Accountability

What happens when someone claims to speak for God—but refuses to answer to anyone? 

In today’s platform-driven culture, prophetic voices can gain influence almost overnight. But when charisma grows faster than character and authority operates without accountability, the Church becomes vulnerable to confusion, manipulation, and spiritual harm. 

In The Self-Chosen One: When Prophecy Replaces Accountability, pastor Kevin P. Horath addresses this growing challenge. Writing from the perspective of a pastor who deeply values the work of the Holy Spirit, Horath does not reject prophecy. Instead, he calls the Church to restore it to its proper place within humility, character, and biblical oversight. 

In this book you will discover:

The Self-Chosen One is a warning and an invitation—helping the Church recover a healthy balance between Spirit and Scripture, passion and discernment.

Horath tackles a distinction that matters to the argument of The Self-Chosen One: questioning an individual's claim to prophetic authority is not the same thing as rejecting prophecy itself. That allows the book to concentrate on the structures surrounding spiritual influence—character, biblical oversight, church accountability, and the responsibility to test what is being claimed. Its attention to social media adds another dimension because influence no longer has to develop within the boundaries of a congregation or established ministry structure. For Christians trying to think carefully about how spiritual authority should be recognized and evaluated, the book offers a framework built around discernment rather than either automatic acceptance or wholesale dismissal. 

This book speaks most directly to Christians who are interested in the relationship between spiritual gifts and responsible church leadership. Pastors and ministry leaders may find Horath's focus on protecting congregations particularly relevant, while church members who encounter prophetic claims online or in person can approach the book as a guide to the questions that should accompany spiritual influence. It should also appeal to readers interested in how social media has changed religious authority, especially when a compelling personality can develop a substantial audience without the accountability structures that traditionally surround local church ministry. 

Kevin P. Horath is the Lead Pastor of Hillside Bethel Ministries in Decatur, Illinois, where he also oversees Hillside Bethel Christian School. After nearly thirty years as a healthcare human resources executive, he stepped into full-time ministry with a passion for helping people apply biblical truth to everyday life. Kevin writes and teaches about healthy church leadership, spiritual discernment, and the practical work of building strong Christian communities. He and his wife, Kathy, live in Decatur and enjoy time together sailing on Lake Decatur and serving their local church and community. The Self-Chosen One reflects his heart for protecting the Church while preserving genuine spiritual vitality. 

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The central question behind The Self-Chosen One reaches beyond whether a particular prophetic message sounds convincing. Horath asks readers to consider what surrounds the person delivering it: character, accountability, biblical oversight, and a willingness to have spiritual claims tested rather than simply accepted. His background in both organizational leadership and pastoral ministry gives that concern a practical dimension, while the book's attention to platform culture places it firmly within the way religious influence can operate now. For churches attempting to preserve openness to spiritual gifts without surrendering discernment, that balance is precisely the conversation Horath wants to bring into the open.

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Cressida Troy is returning to Earth carrying considerably more than the responsibilities of an empress. She is human, she rules the Lunarians who conquered her species, she is grieving her husband, and she is about to face Queen Victoria while trying to build an alliance against an approaching Martian war. Cressida’s Circle, the ninth book in Mikala Ash’s Empire of the Sky series, places that divided loyalty at the center of a story where witchcraft, Victorian politics, extraterrestrial power, and complicated desire are already pulling in different directions. Lady Neva’s plan to seize both the crown and control beyond Earth raises the political stakes, but Cressida’s search for redemption gives this steampunk conflict its particularly personal edge.

In a world overthrown by witchcraft, a giant love has been lost. Can Cressida be saved?

Mourning the loss of her husband, Cressida Troy is on her way to Earth. Her mission; to meet the Queen of England and cement relations between the Lunarians and humans to present a united front in the approaching war with the Martians. For Cressida, the mission has a much deeper and personal meaning. Being human, as well as the Lunarian Empress, Cressida is plagued by doubt and guilt and seeks redemption for what is seen by many as the betrayal of her species. Matters are complicated when she is kidnapped by the pernicious witch, Lady Neva, who is hell-bent on revenge against Queen Victoria. Armed with unlimited magical power, Lady Neva is planning to usurp the crown and rule both Earth and space. 

Meanwhile Jacob McLeary, Cressida’s former fiancé, is under the watchful and lascivious eye of Lavinia Branscombe, a Lunarian agent. Knowledge of the dark secret at the heart of the Lunarian society fuels Jacob’s loathing of the aliens, but with so much at stake, can love overcome the barrier of hate? Will Cressida find redemption?

The most intriguing tension in Cressida’s Circle comes from Cressida occupying two identities that cannot easily be reconciled: she is both human and Lunarian Empress. Her diplomatic return to Earth therefore carries the weight of a homecoming, a political negotiation, and an encounter with people who may regard her as responsible for their conquest. Mikala Ash complicates that conflict further by setting it against an alternate Victorian world where Queen Victoria, lunar society, Martian warfare, witchcraft, and spacecraft all belong to the same political landscape. The result is a story concerned not simply with who holds power, but with what loyalty, love, and redemption mean when allegiance to one world can look like betrayal to another.

Readers who have followed the Empire of the Sky series will find Cressida facing consequences that reach across both her private life and her rule, while newcomers drawn to elaborate alternate histories may be intrigued by the collision of Victorian monarchy, lunar conquest, Martian conflict, and powerful witchcraft. The book also has a strong fit for those who like their steampunk unapologetically adult and their romance tangled into questions of political allegiance. Cressida’s need for redemption, Jacob’s hostility toward the Lunarians, and Lady Neva’s designs on Queen Victoria make personal relationships part of the same struggle that could determine who controls Earth and space. 

Aussie Mikala Ash used to be a mild-mannered training & development consultant by day, and a wild sci-fi and paranormal adventure writer by night. Now she is a brazen full-time writer and nature photographer who is concentrating on having among other things, “… bags, and bags of fun!” Mikala can be found on Facebook and on Twitter.

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Cressida’s Circle gives its heroine an unusually difficult homecoming: Earth is the world she belongs to by birth, but she returns as empress of the society that conquered it. That contradiction makes her meeting with Queen Victoria, the threat from Lady Neva, and the coming Martian conflict more than separate pieces of an adventure plot. Each one presses on the same question of where Cressida belongs and what redemption would actually require. Add Jacob’s resentment of Lunarian society and the series’ mixture of spacecraft, magic, Victorian power struggles, and adult romance, and this ninth Empire of the Sky story has several worlds circling the same deeply personal conflict.

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Jim Peters knows numbers, and the numbers at Ramsey Motors tell him something is badly wrong. In Turtle Lake: The Wild Card Syndrome, a comptroller's discovery of a scheme threatening employees' retirement and insurance benefits becomes the starting point for an unconventional crime story built around observation, strategy, and the behavior of predators. Rather than confront corporate corruption on its own terms, Peters begins constructing an elaborate response shaped by lessons drawn from the natural world. The result places the calculating instincts of human beings beside those found in nature—and asks what happens when an ordinary man decides he has studied both closely enough to act.

Turtle Lake
The Wild Card Syndrome

Crime Thriller / Suspense

Date Published: September 7, 2026
Publisher: Mission Point Press

Turtle Lake is a gripping tale of revenge, survival, and the intricate interplay between human nature and the natural world. The story follows Jim Peters, the comptroller at Ramsey Motors, who uncovers a corrupt scheme by the company and its insurer, U.S. Underwriters, to defraud employees of their retirement and insurance benefits before moving operations overseas. Infuriated, he devises an elaborate extortion plan to expose their corruption and protect the employees through a spectacular plot that ends up achieving national headlines. To accomplish his plan, Peters uses simple, everyday methods and lessons learned from alpha predators in the natural world.

The machinery behind Turtle Lake is unusual for a crime thriller because Peters' strategy grows from two seemingly unrelated areas: his position inside a company where he can recognize financial wrongdoing and his understanding of predator behavior in nature. That combination shifts the tension away from conventional police work and toward planning, observation, and anticipation. His objective adds another complication. Peters is responding to a scheme he believes will strip fellow employees of retirement and insurance benefits, yet the method he chooses is extortion. The conflict therefore sits in uncomfortable territory between motive and method, with the book's interest in human instinct providing the bridge between corporate behavior and Peters' own increasingly elaborate response.

Turtle Lake should be especially interesting to crime and suspense readers who prefer schemes assembled through patience and calculation rather than protagonists who rely primarily on force. Peters' role as a comptroller gives the corporate wrongdoing at the center of the story a financial dimension, while his use of lessons from alpha predators introduces a natural-world perspective rarely paired with an extortion plot. 

Readers intrigued by morally complicated protagonists, workplace corruption, strategic retaliation, and stories that examine human behavior through comparisons with nature will find those elements at the heart of this one.

Bob Milne has been hailed throughout his 60-year career as one of the best ragtime/boogie-woogie piano players of all time. A solo concert performer, he traveled all over the world playing for dignitaries and celebrities as well as small town audiences. He was given the title of National Treasure by the Library of Congress and deemed an Ambassador of Music by the U.S. Department of State. 

Bob’s extraordinary musical abilities were the subject of numerous brain studies, which have inspired a popular RadioLab podcast. 

Little did they know that Bob was also a talented writer. 

For years he wrote articles about his saloon-playing days for music publications. Many of these stories were compiled into a book called The Journeyman Piano Player: Adventures in Gracious Dining. Bob has written reams of poetry, some of which became lyrics to songs that he composed. The longest piece of poetry he ever wrote was the lyric book for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a grand opera he composed and orchestrated. 

Mr. Milne has been fascinated by nature his entire life. At a young age he realized that instincts are present in all species of birds, mammals (including humans), and literally every living thing in nature. He has used this information countless times over his lifetime to predict what the human species will do in future situations. 

Bob is now retired from the long piano tours and is enjoying his woodland home. Today he spends his time studying nature in the woods. Signed copies of his book may be purchased through his website.

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What makes Turtle Lake stand apart is the way its central crime grows from Jim Peters' habit of studying systems—first the financial system inside Ramsey Motors and then the instinctive systems operating in nature. Once he recognizes what is being done to the company's employees, he does not simply expose what he knows. He builds a counterstrategy. That choice transforms a story of corporate fraud into a contest of observation and calculated behavior, with Peters testing whether lessons learned from predators can be applied to people just as effectively. For suspense readers interested in the planning behind a crime as much as its execution, that is a distinctive premise to explore.

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Language can be a passport, a barrier, and occasionally the reason an ordinary workday goes spectacularly sideways. In Fluent in Faux Pas: A Guide to Accidentally Getting Everything Wrong, Daniela Hristova looks back on arriving in England with two degrees, professional experience, and almost none of the English she needed to explain either one. Her memoir follows the jobs, misunderstandings, cultural collisions, and unexpected encounters that became part of building a new life in the UK. Beneath the linguistic mishaps is another story altogether: one about starting over when the person you know yourself to be cannot yet be fully expressed in the language everyone around you understands.

Fluent in Faux Pas

A Guide to Accidentally Getting Everything Wrong

Memoir, Non-Fiction

Date Published: September 7, 2026

A night shift in an abandoned psychiatric hospital.

You learn to laugh. Fast.

Arriving in England for a fresh start, the author quickly discovers that the English language is a minefield of polite confusion, baffling idioms, and linguistic traps. Without the vocabulary to express who she is, daily life becomes a high-stakes game of translation roulette at the absolute bottom of the career ladder. 

Spanning decades through the beating heart of the British workforce—from factory lines and catering at Heathrow to securing film sets and government buildings—her biggest opponent isn't the long hours; it's the English dictionary. 

Navigating professional environments with a mismatched vocabulary leads to spectacular, unintentional blunders. From mixing up sound-alike words to translating idioms far too literally, every shift becomes a lesson in how easily things get lost in translation. 

Yet, behind the comedy lies a deeply personal struggle: the quiet isolation of startingcover. When pressure peaks, remarkable encounters and a profound return to faith offer a path to true transformation.

Fluent in Faux Pas is a warm, witty, and wonderfully honest memoir—a celebratory story of resilience and an inspiring reminder that the best parts of life are often found when we are completely lost in translation.

Hristova's premise gives this memoir an unusually specific lens on starting over: what happens when education, professional experience, and personality all have to squeeze through a vocabulary too small to represent them. The settings make that reinvention especially interesting. Her working life moves from factory lines and Heathrow catering to security work on film sets and in government buildings, allowing language mistakes to unfold across very different corners of British working life. The comedy has consequences beyond a collection of amusing misunderstandings, too. Fluent in Faux Pas connects those mistakes with isolation, resilience, career rebuilding, and Hristova's return to faith, giving the memoir a more personal foundation beneath its wordplay.

This memoir belongs on the reading list of anyone fascinated by the everyday realities of beginning again in another country, particularly the awkward territory where language and identity collide. Its movement through factories, Heathrow, security work, film sets, and government buildings should also appeal to readers who like memoirs built around varied working lives rather than a single career. The linguistic blunders provide the humor, but readers interested in immigration experiences, professional reinvention, family, resilience, and faith will find equally important threads running beneath them.

Daniela Hristova arrived in the UK with an English vocabulary consisting of little more than "teabag" and a background as a multi-media journalist, actress, and singer who had spent years working in television, radio, newspaper, and stage in her home country. With a diverse professional journey that later ranged from wielding a mop to building a career in leadership and court security, she has navigated life's twists with a steady faith, a sharp eye, and a wonderfully dry sense of humor. Channeling her unique experiences and cultural blunders into the written word, she has penned a witty tribute to the resilience it takes to start over. When she isn't writing or tackling new adventures, she enjoys spending time with her family and her dog, Dea. Fluent in Faux Pas is her debut memoir.

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A memoir about getting words wrong becomes, in Hristova's hands, a record of finding ways to be understood. That distinction is what makes Fluent in Faux Pas worth noticing. The mismatched words and literal translations may supply its most immediately comic moments, but the larger story concerns the distance between arriving in England unable to communicate freely and eventually building a career, a family life, and a story she could tell in her own voice. For readers who appreciate memoirs in which humor and difficult transitions occupy the same page, Daniela Hristova's account offers an intriguing way to mark today's release.

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