Catalyst Press

In this intense drama of family life, old wounds and the search for redemption in the cracks of past experiences leads to the coming apart and the piecing together of self and the group of people we call family. 

When 16 year old Leo's mother vanishes, he is left with more responsibilities at home taking care of his younger siblings. Interrogation of his father over his missing mother leads nowhere. As the days pass, his unease grows and when he finds a mysterious untitled file on the family shared drive, his curiosity gets the better of him and he discovers it is his mother’s secret memoir. Needing to understand his mother’s disappearance, Leo begins to read the book, searching for clues.

Meanwhile, Leo’s life is complicated when Aaron, a handsome boy, shows up in the middle of the school year and is assigned as his study partner. Old stresses in his friend group begin to tear apart his long standing relationships while he wonders if Aaron reciprocates his growing attraction. As he reads his mother’s book, he begins to see her in a new light, propelling him to look for the lost side of his family that still lives in Spain potentially setting off a chain reaction of unintended consequences of old grudges and shady pasts.

In 1995, after hearing Madeleine Albright say on national television that she felt sacrificing 500,000 children to punish Saddam Hussein was “worth it,” Quaker pacifist Joseph Olejak became a political activist. As a form of civil disobedience, he refused to pay income tax, since his tax dollars would go to fund a war he opposed. This was the beginning of a twenty-year journey towards peace–initially by non-compliance with the military industrial complex. Sentenced to 26 weekends in the country jail for failure to pay income taxes, Olejak kept a journal and wrote about his experiences, as well as his growing awareness of peace, justice, and the U.S. prison system. 

You know when I sit
You know when I stand
You know every move I make

God knows everything about you.
God delights in you and watches over you for good.

This powerful, poetic retelling of David’s beloved Psalm 139 encourages kids and adults alike in their spiritual journeys with an all-powerful, all-perceptive God.

A realistic novel of female spies and coming of age in the Cold War era of British Intelligence.

A Nicollette Beverley Spy Novel

From the jungles of Thailand to the sheep-covered hills of the Falkland Islands, Nicollette Beverley's skills as a special operative in the service of her home country England are put to the test. After a dangerous mission in southeast Asia, Nicollette is accused of betraying her country. Defending herself successfully under the intense scrutiny of her male superiors, Nicollette goes undercover once again--completely alone in a remote Atlantic archipelago off the coast of South America. Her mission has serious international repercussions and puts her life in jeopardy. Will she have the strength and determination to succeed?

The stable atmosphere of Peter Lindenfeld’s childhood in Vienna is destroyed by the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, and the young boy and his mother flee to North America. This forced exodus leads him to Vancouver, then New York, and finally, the academic world in New Jersey. Molded by his original Austrian-Jewish culture and carved by his new environment as an immigrant, Peter, a physicist, crosses paths with Jewish social societies and scientists shaping the new atomic world. Through the microcosm of one man’s life, Peter unfolds the story of immigration, assimilation, destruction and rebirth of home and relationships in post war North America.

Peter Lindenfeld turned 100 years old in March 2025, editing and revising this book right up to his hundredth birthday. Retired from a storied academic career at Rutgers University, Peter lives with his partner in a retirement home only a few blocks from the house that was his home for many decades.

A realistic novel of female spies and coming of age in the Cold War era of British Intelligence.

A Nicollette Beverley Spy Novel

It’s 1976 and on the prompting of her coach and former teacher, Nicolette, a star field hockey defensive back with a typical factory job in rural England, applies for a governmental job. What she doesn’t realize is that the man in the well cut suit at the back of the spectators at her matches, in consultation with her application, is evaluating her, and not just for her prowess on the field, but for her attention to detail, her conduct at school, and her academic record.

When an invitation for a 4 week training at a nearby Royal Air Force Base arrives, Nicolette must decide whether she wants to continue her safe village life or whether to pursue a shadowy world of espionage and secrets in a first for the British government — an all female unit of code breakers and communication specialists.

Nicollette’s journey will change her and her new compatriots as they enter a male dominated world of Cold War deception, sexism, and danger. They will be tested to the limits of their resources as they are given directives leading them into difficult moral choices. Some of them will not not make it through training and those who do will face the constant pressure of secrecy and bodily harm while constantly pushing against glass ceilings. 

From murders and kidnappings in South America to audacious bank robberies in California to extracting sensitive files from the Middle East, a privately owned secret intelligence unit in the heart of downtown San Francisco works covertly to assist various global banking corporations in their fight to maintain security for their clients and assets. 

Dan Holmes, security expert at 2nd National Bank, runs a private covert securities operation unit adjacent to his bank. Unit 33, often working with connections cultivated in government intelligence and foreign spy agencies such as Mossad, works to expose financial crimes and malfeasance. In this collection of nine stories, written in the sparse style of classic short crime narratives, Unit 33 and its agents interrogate criminals, skirt the edges of the law, and find their personal lives invaded by the violence of their professional lives.

In the chaos of disaster, finding other people may bring salvation or a new set of dangers where menace, death, friendship, and love are found in the surprising fissures of a drowning world. 

18-year-old Jack wakes from a blackout to find an apocalyptic landscape, the earth split open and a violent flood engulfing the farming valley where he lives. Orphaned and homeless, Jack begins searching for signs of life. But someone, or something, is stalking him. Through flooded farmlands and mountain terrain, survival rests on a razor-thin edge, the loss or discovery of food and tools the difference between life and death. Jack struggles through a transformed world and into a new life, haunted by the demons and scars of the old.

Set in the near future, Ship in the Sky is a coming-of-age literary work of fiction. Cormac McCarthy's The Road for young adults.

An aspiring teen journalist (whose curiosity is outshone only by her bravery and dedication) and an adventurer with one last wish on his bucket list team up to uncover the mystery behind “The Boy in the Shadows”– a long-forgotten prodigy of the successful authors Mr. and Mrs. Paradise. 

The unusual pair becomes an even stranger triad when the teen’s explorer uncle joins the quest, hoping to bring wisdom and experience into the wild exuberance of youthful adventure.

Mr. and Mrs. Paradise grew up in hard knock lives, each wounded by their past while also overcoming the odds to mold themselves into successful authors, lauded in the literary world and toasted by the elite. Finding enduring love in each other, the couple built a life around their child. “A genius” in the vein of their own lauded success, they proclaimed, shielding the boy from a childhood of pain and struggle, providing him every advantage they themselves had lacked. Years later, what had become of this child, the offspring of giants in their field, given every opportunity for success?

Young and Hungry is a modern parable of the triumphs and follies of parenthood, the motivations of becoming and being, and the wisdom of living a full spectrum life, each character an archetype found among our own peers and within ourselves.

Quantum Nightmares, a collection of dystopian sci-fi stories, contains the nuggets of bizarre psychological truth that help explain today’s divisive United States, where myth collides with belief and fact is hard to find.

The first short story details how Betty Hill (the infamous first woman to report she was abducted by aliens) offers up her eggs to save a future infertile human species, connecting her mind to the whole stream of human consciousness–past, present and future–in the process. Betty Hill’s dreams frame each of the fifteen stories in the collection. From “The Gender Revealing Party,” set in a not-too-distant future, where scientists have eliminated sexual dimorphism; to “The Five Hives,” in which teens are commanded to belong to a particular hive, each faction is led by one teen who manipulates their hive through social media to be compliant; to “Vicarious Intruders,” which explores how the infamous Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele experimented on his son, this dystopian account warns of a possible future America if it doesn’t return to some semblance of the natural world in both society, politics, and technology.

This collection of short stories can be compared to Clifford Simak’s Dusty Zebraand Other Stories or Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others.

Nothing is as wicked (or mean) as massive small town malfeasance.

EMS Captain turned sleuth Brighid Doran suspects that all is not what it appears on the surface at The Branston Club — a swanky ski lodge being built in her rural Vermont town. While dodging danger and digging up dirt, Brighid faces the ire of small town politics, crooked cops, and an ever deepening hole of deceptions, all the while struggling to cope with the constant deployment of her wife Major Sarah (Sam) Ann Musgrave. With help from attorney Morgan Chadwick and a hovering FBI, Brighid must determine the truth of a scheme with the potential of defrauding her friends and neighbors of millions… but at what cost to her own relationships and where she calls home?

Stolen Mountain is part of The Trowbridge Vermont Series, which includes The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County (2024) and The Trowbridge Dispatch (2025), a collection of short stories.

Laura Richards was a shy American nurse who moved to a remote North China village in 1929 to take in castaway babies. Through 22 years of famines, bandit invasions and wars, she lived in the same poor conditions as the Chinese peasants, while managing to save the lives of nearly 200 destitute children. So why did she refuse the Chinese Communist Party’s offer to make her a national heroine? Laura Richards’ story was too dangerous to tell when she returned to the U.S. in 1951. But when she died thirty years later, the old letters, photographs, and scattered bits of memoir that she left behind were so intriguing to her second cousin Becky Cerling Powers, that Becky began a 25-year quest to discover her quiet relative’s amazing story. Eventually that quest led Becky to China and the orphans themselves. Today, over half a century after Laura left China, her story and her children’s story can finally be told.

An “R” rated absurdist comic strip for the 12 year old boy hidden in all of us, Dickie critiques western cultural pillars in an age of political and social tribalism.

Imagine Charlie Brown dropping out of highschool, moving to Belgium, and developing a bit of a drinking problem. Meet Dickie, a Belgian yokel with good intentions but dubious critical thinking skills, navigating a modern world with inadequate emotional intelligence. Like the football yanked out from under Charlie, he always ends up on the wrong side of every situation.

This satirical cartoon skewers modern society, shining an uncomfortable light into the dark recesses of our civilization, where our individual, well-meaning choices conflict with our culture’s values and morals. It’s the dark humor of The Far Side and the social/political satire of The Simpsons, a sophisticated humor wrapped in disarmingly simple illustrations with unending tragic consequences for our favorite antihero. Dickie will cause you to laugh out loud while simultaneously blushing – hoping no one will ask you to explain what is so funny.

Dr. Green's prized research bonobo is kidnapped and now the hunt for this unusually intelligent primate has exploded into violence.

...Rory's in a tight spot. Technically, she's in a lab refrigerator, hiding for her life. Who just stormed the primate facility with a gun, leaving the lab tech Andy shot through the neck, dead in a pool of his own blood? For Rory, survival consists of folding herself into the only hiding place available to live another day, affording her the opportunity to search for answers to the violence raging around her. And of course, the mystery of her missing research primate.

A quiet life in Columbus, Ohio is upended as scientist Rory Green finds herself playing the part of sleuth, searching for one of her company’s kidnapped primates as the authorities’ disinterest and dragging feet make life unbearable. Absent colleagues and antagonistic bosses aren’t helping either.

Rory’s research involves animal/human communication. At one time a hot field in military research, it is now in the hands of a small group of scientists dedicated to the behavior and techniques of interspecies understanding. This core of scientists, at one time, included her late father and one of his associates Dr. Porter, a professor at Butler University and Rory’s “adopted” intellectual mother. As she struggles to find clues, Rory recruits old and new friends to help, and in the process digs up shocking secrets that threaten to blow up more in her life than her scientific endeavors, endangering the primates around her–both human and primate.

A trans pastor’s fascination with the Scripture inherited from his closeted, fundamentalist father.

When his dad died, Malcolm Himschoot inherited his father’s Bibles. He chose to re-read them, examining his dad’s notes in the margins, teasing out the details of his upbringing and gender identity amid the structures and forms of biblical narratives. For Malcolm, coming out meant exile and verbal excommunication; he embodied all his gay father tried to hide. In Reading Secrets, Malcolm travels alongside the ghost of his father, exploring their inherited homophobia and the American culture that shaped their triumphs and tragedies. With these poetic and evocative meditations, Malcolm transforms the Scripture he inherited, and finds a place in it for himself.

Can your tail help you fly? asks the bird. 

Can your tail help you swim? asks the beaver. 

Can your tail swat bugs away? asks the bison.

It turns out the bear’s tail does none of these things... and no matter how many creatures and critters he meets, he still doesn’t know why he's got one. But does that mean Bear shouldn’t love his tail?

Join Bear on his journey to learn all the reasons why some animals have tails—and that you never really need a reason to love your own body.

A Booklist Starred Review 

A big-hearted coming-of-age debut about a tiger, a Russian, a model airplane, unexplainable disaster, and a bewildered twelve-year-old boy just trying to find his place in the world.

It’s 1981 in Texarkana, Texas, and Noah Ellis is trying hard to remember. Still reeling from the loss of his father in a suspicious tragedy, Noah is in a tragedy of his own—one that results in another inexplicable death, this time leaving Noah to suffer from severe amnesia. 

After that day, everything changes. Noah becomes an unwitting star in a highly publicized trial. Girls start to notice him, and kids who once bullied him now allow him to run with their pack—at a cost. Standing as always in his big brother’s shadow, Noah also has a little sister he must look out for. But Noah’s still stuck on that day and the accident he can’t remember. As town secrets come to light and summer draws to a close, Noah must find a way to salvage all that he’s lost, and to learn what is truly precious.

Long after they’re gone, childhood friendships can define and destroy us—or be the one thing that saves us.

In a small Swedish coastal town in 1986, 12-year-old Elliot dreams of being a video game designer. When he meets Calvin, a stuttering outcast with a knack for drawing, the two make a pact to create the greatest game ever made. Together with neighborhood friends Lisa and Skye, they gather their ideas in a folder, but external influences pull at the strings of their tight knit group.

More than twenty years later, Elliot is a pariah, his status as a highly sought-after designer in the games industry squandered after he sabotages his own studio. But his biggest regret is his estrangement from Calvin—whose tragic passing means that any chance of repair is now gone. But when Elliot receives Calvin’s old folder with their unfinished project, the past unravels before him. He sets out to honor his late friend’s dying wish, gathering the studio back together to build the game of their dreams—while slowly picking up the pieces of his life.

Celebrated Swedish novelist Andreas Roman’s English language debut is a deeply affecting redemption story that explores why we hurt the people we love, and how to come back from it.

A fascinating and darkly funny novel giving readers front-row access to the world of EMS and other first responders — and the stink, sweat, and sex that accompanies long days caring for others at their most vulnerable.

Following in the footsteps of their beloved Boston cop father, Alex Flynn trains as an EMT, and spends years chasing emergencies in an ambulance. But the person Alex becomes is a far cry from the hero they signed up to be.

Over four decades in public safety, Alex encounters a changing America, where veterans are left to rot on streets, women are welcome in dangerous fields but abusers still walk free, and service providers are subjected to intense public scrutiny while being denied the resources they need. After moving from bustling Boston to small town Vermont, Alex discovers an escalating feud between emergency operators and must decide which to protect: their community, or their legacy.

Join Chip the dog and Chatti the cat on their first adventure in the countryside — which soon becomes a race against the clock to help new friends in need!

Since their family left them in this strange new home, Chip the dog and Chatti the cat have been feeling stuck. So when they meet Twinkle, a sly little mouse who grants wishes, they know just what to ask for: a way out into the countryside! Soon their wish is granted, and this funny trio—joined by a traveling man named Bingo who can speak their language—is off to the great unknown.

With the help of friendly forest creatures—from deer and rabbits to woodchucks and badgers—they arrive at a farm owned by Farmer Nils. But this farm is not what it seems. Farmer Nils is missing, and the grumpy man who took his place is not looking after the farm animals. And when Chatti is taken, Chip, Twinkle and Bingo must team up with their new pals to save her and get the farm back in working order.

Chip and Chatti Save the Farm is a heartwarming story of unlikely friends, big adventures, and finding the courage to do what’s right.

Finalist in the Best Thriller Book Awards.

When a missing person’s case becomes a hunt for an active serial killer, Detective Kaitlyn Kruse must use her greatest asset: a supernatural ability to remember her past lives. But the killer may be closer to home than she’s willing to believe.

When a local woman’s body is found in a shallow grave on one of Seattle’s pristine hiking trails, Detective Kaitlyn Kruse and her partner Joe Riley are under pressure to find her killer as swiftly as possible. But more than one body is recovered at the site, and—alarmingly—they all look a bit like Kaitlyn.

Fortunately, Kaitlyn has a secret weapon. She dreams of her past lives, and their memories are always eager to help her solve the crime at hand. But Kaitlyn’s dreams are getting more desperate every night, like one of her past selves is trying to tell her something… and a shady black sedan is tracking her every move. It may be too late to stop the inevitable—but Kaitlyn is determined to get justice for the dead before she becomes one of them. In this rousing crime debut with a touch of the supernatural, the first in her Detective Kaitlyn Kruse series, Karoline Anderson proves she’s got a knack for the thrill.