Books published by Black Opal Books

Psychic phenomenon, prophetic dreams, lost gloves, and found avocados. Join Valerie on her raucous personal journey toward greater self-knowledge, happiness and empowerment. Be inspired to commence your own sojourn and grow your intuition, wisdom, and joy.

Tap dance with Valerie on her raucous journey up steep inclines and down sudden drops with pedophiles, weird witches, day court, night nurses and plain old crazy New Yorkers at her side. Her insight and silliness will tickle your funny bone while lightening your load with irreverent and magical perspectives on the sad, the wonderful, and the inexplicable.

A continuation of the serendipitous saga commenced in RAVING VIOLET, Valerie Gilbert''s first non-fiction collection of short stories, MEMORIES, DREAMS & DEFLECTIONS: My Odyssey Through Emotional Indigestion, picks up the sojourn of this sassy, single mystic, mired in her mind and cloistered above the streets of New York City.This volume explores Valerie''s intrepid and irreverent search for healing inside and out (both medical and mystical), the quest for peace (and quiet), and, as always, true love.

Greg Martens and his wife, former Interpol agent Anne Rossiter, are called back to Vienna by Anne’s former boss at Interpol, since their beautiful Russian friend, Julia Saparova, who is now responsible for monitoring nuclear material at various sites in Russia, has disappeared. Afraid that the “merchants of evil” from the former Soviet Union, who are deeply involved in human trafficking, are behind her disappearance, Greg and Anne embark on an international search for Julia, getting drawn into a messy and disturbing web of human and arms trafficking that takes them first to Hungary and then to Montenegro in a desperate bid to rescue, not only Julia, but a group of girls trafficked from Chelyabinsk oblast as well—girls held hostage to facilitate a nuclear heist…

What if you woke up one day, living with a family member who had changed into an entirely different person? What if she were an older sibling you had always admired and strived to be like? And what if you were an insecure preteen when it all started? What would that do to your life? In Nothing Like Normal, after an idyllic childhood, the strains of adolescence send one sister spiraling down into a mental breakdown, leaving her younger sibling and family to cope with the aftermath. The author must face her fears, while navigating the ups and downs of her own volatile teen years, and find her truth or be pulled in the same direction as her former mentor. Her struggle to survive and move forward on a journey of self-discovery will resonate with anyone who has known the heartbreak of mental illness in their family, while inspiring hope and healing as well.

Siblings Matthew and Elizabeth Janssen, eighteen and seventeen, together with their parents, take a long family vacation in Cape Cod, since Matthew leaves for college in the fall. Curious, the two teenagers start exploring and discover a secret room in the cottage they’re renting for the summer. In this room, they find a dusty old grandfather clock with a letter hidden inside. This mysterious letter alleges that the clock is actually a time travel device. The letter writer, John, claims that, in 1927, he went back in time to save his cousin Alice, who was murdered in 1907, and whose ghost is doomed to forever flee down the beach, trying to escape her murderer—but to no avail. However, something happened, and John got stuck in 1907. He begs whoever finds the letter to figure out what went wrong with the clock and fix it, returning him to his own time of 1927. Is it all a hoax, or could it possibly be true? And once Matthew and Elizabeth figure out what went wrong, fix it, and return John to his own time, will they be able to resist temptation to try it on their own? After all, the clock’s been fixed, so what could possibly go wrong?

A Hidden Past…Six years as a covert operative had left Jon Morton with a lot of memories—most of them bad, all of them bloody. He returned to civilian life, seeking refuge in commercial fishing. This simple, somewhat solitary, life allowed him to avoid the dark side of humanity. Hopefully the ocean would, in time, wash away his mind-searing memories. He had learned to live with them, and the occasional flashback, accepting the fact that this was just how it was going to be—the price he had to pay. That was, until one ordinary day that was to become the first in a series of unusual events, which spawned a reawakening of one deadly memory, and the beginning of a very real nightmare.

At forty-two, Dana Cohen has retired from her twenty-two-year career as a detective in the NYPD and moved back home to the rocky cliffs above Long Island Sound to take stock of her life. Her drinking has become problematic, and she increasingly relies on it as her life becomes more complicated. Her estranged husband, Pete Fitzgerald, surprises her at her house, armed with flowers and promises to finally be faithful. Although Dana sends him packing, when he''s later accused of murder, she jumps to his defense. He swears he''s innocent, and she wants to believe him. But with all the evidence pointing directly at him, reasonable doubt is a very scarce commodity.