Giving upcoming authors a chance to shine

Mara Williams is twenty-four years old, drowning in debt, and running out of time. Working double shifts at Mel's 24-Hour Diner on Flatbush Avenue while her mother Clara fights cancer at Kings County Hospital, Mara exists in that brutal space between survival and collapse-too proud to beg, too desperate to keep pretending the math works. When she crosses paths with Dominic "Dom" Reyes at a Crown Heights loft party, the attraction is immediate but the danger is undeniable. Dom controls drug territory across the neighborhood with a quiet ruthlessness that commands respect from men who fear nothing, yet something about Mara pulls at him in ways he hasn't allowed himself to feel in years. What begins as a transaction-Mara making courier runs to cover her mother's bills-slowly becomes something neither of them planned for. Crown Heights is their backdrop: its brownstones and bodegas, its soca music and territorial corners, its beauty and its blood. As the rival Haitian crew led by Jean-Baptiste Laurent pushes into Dom's territory and a childhood friend's obsession turns lethal, Mara finds herself caught between the woman she was raised to be and the woman survival has made her. Keisha, her best friend, is fighting her own battle against an abusive partner. A determined detective is building a case that could imprison everyone Mara loves. Crown Heights is a slow-burning interracial love story about the price of surviving a world designed to crush you-and what it costs to find redemption once you've already paid. ©️ _RelleLebby_// R.H.

She was not supposed to be this easy to lose. He came home from eighteen months overseas to a city that had moved forward without him and a best friend who had promised herself to a man with a beautiful face and a controlled smile and something underneath it that Nicholas Kwon could not name but could not stop seeing. He said nothing. He waited. He watched from a distance while the distance grew into something he could no longer pretend was manageable, and by the time he found the words, there was a ring on her finger and the door was already closing. She thought she was making a choice. She did not know that choices can be engineered, that love can be manufactured as a trap, that the man who shows you the world is sometimes already calculating how to own it. By the time she understood what she had walked into, the exits had been sealed so gradually she had not noticed them closing. This is not a love story that arrives easily or ends without cost. It is a story about what it takes to fight for someone who cannot yet fight for themselves, about what control looks like when it lives in a mansion and wears the right shoes and speaks in the right voice. It is a story about a woman who loses herself in the worst possible way and finds the long road back through art and grief and the patient, unshakeable presence of the one person who refused to stop being there. ©️ _RelleLebby_//R. L.

Han Jisoo did not make mistakes. He planned, he executed, and he did not stop until the thing he was chasing had been brought to its knees. Four years of calculated movement across continents, four years of shedding every softness he was born with, and he was finally close enough to the truth about his mother's death to feel it in his bones. He was not supposed to acquire a variable. She was not supposed to be there. Sable Mercer had no intention of becoming anyone's complication. She came to Seoul on her own terms, chasing distance and a byline, and she would have left the same way if the wrong street at the wrong hour had not placed her directly in the path of a man with nothing left to protect and a situation that demanded an immediate solution. She was not passive, she was not manageable, and she was not staying quiet about any of it. She did not choose this world. She would survive it anyway. But quiet was no longer the most dangerous thing in the room. Somewhere behind them, a woman who claimed what was hers had noticed. And what she claimed, she would not release without a fight that none of them were prepared for. Her jealousy was neither small nor soft. It was precise and well-built. The trail moved from Seoul to Hong Kong, from Tokyo to Macau, from Macau to Paris. A Korean mafia enforcer whose entire existence had been constructed around a single purpose. A Black woman from Memphis who was in the wrong place and refused to be erased because of it. A former boyfriend with secrets that restructured everything she thought she understood. A possessive love that had curdled into something dangerous. ©️ _RelleLebby_//R. L.

She was a trophy. A possession. A widow to her own life while still breathing. Trapped in a gilded cage by the man who orchestrated her parents' murder, Imani has spent eight years as the perfect wife to a Yakuza oyabun-silent, obedient, dead inside. Until him. Hiroshi Matsumoto-her new bodyguard, a former enforcer with blood on his hands and ghosts in his eyes. He's supposed to protect her. Keep her in line. Make sure she never escapes. But somewhere between the stolen glances and the dangerous proximity, between the lies they tell themselves and the truth their bodies can't deny, everything changes. One touch. One kiss. One moment of weakness that will set Tokyo on fire. Because loving her is treason. And she's already carrying the evidence. In a world built on violence and honor, they'll burn it all down for a chance at freedom. ©️ _RelleLebby_//R. L.

She had arrived in Seoul with a scholarship, a suitcase, and a quiet determination to build a life that belonged entirely to her. Raquel Sinclair, known as Rocky to those who had earned her trust, had expected the city to challenge her. She had not expected it to make her question everything she thought she understood about belonging, loyalty, and the boundaries she had carefully drawn around her heart. Kwon Jae Hyun had already lived inside a carefully constructed future. His music was gaining attention, his relationship looked secure, and the people around him knew the version of him they had always trusted. He had learned how to remain composed beneath expectations, how to keep difficult emotions hidden behind discipline, and how to make uncertainty look like confidence. Then an ordinary connection had begun to feel anything but ordinary. Between university halls, crowded streets, late nights, rain-soaked sidewalks, and a city that seemed incapable of standing still, something had quietly shifted. Their connection had carried a weight neither of them had expected, forcing questions that had no convenient answers and feelings that refused to remain neatly contained. What had begun as familiarity had slowly become something more complicated. In Seoul, where appearances could speak louder than truth, and expectations could shape an entire future, three lives had existed in the space between desire and consequence. Some connections had arrived quietly. Some choices had changed everything. And some feelings had become impossible to ignore once they had finally been seen. ©️ _RelleLebby_//R.L.

They were told it was routine. Seventeen teenagers from seven countries. Different cities, different lives, one needle, administered in the kind of clean, credentialed clinic that governments endorsed and parents trusted. They went home. They went to sleep. They woke up different. Myra Sanches was never supposed to be at the center of anything. Seventeen, sharp-tongued, and quietly devastating to anyone who underestimated her, she had already lost more than most people lose in a lifetime when the wrong door opened, and she walked through it. What happened to her body after the injection was not a gift. It was not a blessing. It was evidence of a plan that predated her by more than a decade, of a corporation that decided what she was for before she was old enough to decide anything for herself, of a facility beneath a building that did not appear on any public record, where teenagers from six other countries were waiting. The lights were always on, and no one was coming. No one, that is, except them. The Onyx Project is a dark, character-driven sci-fi novel about identity, power, and what it means to be called a weapon when all you have ever wanted is to be a person. It does not flinch from its casualties. It does not promise that survival means safety. It is told across five parts, in a building with no windows, by people who found their way out of it anyway. No one is coming to save them. So they will have to save themselves. ©️ _RelleLebby_// R. L.