The Insider's Guide to Book Publishing Success - a review

At 155 pages, 27 of which are dedicated to someone else's success stories on making it in the big time, this guide on publishing can hardly be called expansive however it does cover the basics and brings someone considering writing a book some food for thought.
As a recently self-published author myself it does help by giving the writer an idea of what type of questions to go over with their publisher, and publisher's marketing staff and gives food to the thought of what is ahead in getting the book to sell at a top performance level.
I would have liked to read more about the one question soon to be first-time authors ask of me, and I asked of others, how do I find an agent, because lets face it, without them most writers just can't even get to the publisher. The book did address, quite well, how the indie publisher is surging ahead in today's market and they seem to put more focus on that chapter in the publishing world than that of agent searching, perhaps rightly so.
I enjoyed reading this and reminding myself of what lays ahead with my next novel looming; it can be a little over-whelming and the guide sure does help refocus on what to remember to do next

A Trace of Smoke, by Rebecca Cantrell - a review

Crime reporter with the Berliner Tageblatt, Hannah Vogel, masquerades under the name Peter Weill to disguise the fact that the tough-writing hardened journalist is really only a woman, while her brother Anton disguises his manhood in the guise of a flamboyant cross-dressing lounge singer performing in the fashionable gay clubs of Berlin in the early 1930s.

When Hannah recognizes her brother’s photograph on display in the Hall of The Unnamed Dead in the basement of the Berlin police station, she is thrown in a mystery. It will take every ounce of the investigative reporter she really wants to be in order to discover how her younger brother’s body ended up in the river and placed alongside all the other unidentified bodies found by the police.

Fired from her job and on the run from Hitler’s storm troopers, her investigation leads her to top ranking gay Nazi party leaders such as Ernst Rohm. She attempts to blackmail Rohm over sexually graphic letters she discovered in her brother’s possession in order to coerce the truth while kidnapping a young boy that Rohm is using in order to present his more austere front. Historically correct in the treatment of its setting from places to dates and politics to dramatics, “A Trace of Smoke” sucks you in like an unfiltered cigarette, burns as you breathe it out, but ultimately satisfies like only a true mystery can.