Hello all!
We hope you are surviving the November cold and getting ready for some wonderful holiday celebrations! At BookGo we kicked off the party season a few weeks early this year with our first ever book launch – so exciting!
We began the weekend with a book launch in the rarefied surroundings of the Harvard Club in Midtown Manhattan and ended it with readings from authors in a bar in Brooklyn.
We welcomed guests from around the world, all of whom came to hear our authors read and raise a glass to our shared love of stories. Thanks to all who came to celebrate with us. Here’s to you and to many more books to come.
In this week’s newsletter, we’ve got a write-up of our book launch from BookGo’s founder, Michael, followed by highlights from some of the first reviews of the first trio of books we debuted: Come Up Big, Redeemed, and The Glamour of Evil.
But we’re not only focusing on what we’ve achieved. We’re already focused on the future. So read on for details about our inaugural flash fiction and poetry competition, which is accepting submissions until December 15. And we’ve also got new poetry and author interviews to share with you. Here’s everything that’s in store:
Feature: “How to Launch a Book (or Three)” by Michael McKinley
Poem of the Week: “Coldly Crashes in November” by Sarah Fymme
Author Interview “He said… She said…” with the husband and wife writer team of the new thriller The Glamour of Evil
Reviews: What readers are saying about Come Up Big, Redeemed, and The Glamour of Evil
Competition: $500 winning prize and 3 x $100 runner-up prizes in BookGo’s first flash fiction and poetry competition!
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By Michael McKinley
The first book launch I ever went to was the one I threw myself. I have written about twenty books, most of them with my name on the cover. But on November 7, 2025, I went to my first book launch party ever, for a company I had helped to create. It was the best one ever.
I am not joking, even given my lack of comparables. What a launch party is supposed to do is to welcome friends and colleagues to celebrate the beginning of a new book, or company, or in this case new books and a new company. And that is what we did in spades.
BookGo’s launch party was held, appropriately, in the Gordon Reading Room at the splendid Harvard Club of New York City, thanks to the fact the man who cooked up BookGo, Chuck Wardell, had gone to Harvard and was a member of the club, and thanks also to his typical generosity in covering our not inconsiderable tab for the party.
We ate wonderful appetizers and took our pleasures from a full bar and engaged with each other over the stories we had brought to life thanks to BookGo. We cheered Squawk 7700, the thriller that Nancy Bell and I had written with Dr. Robert Hacker, and Come Up Big, which Chuck had written to tell us about his extraordinary life. We gave huzzahs to Redeemed, by Alain Orozco and Bianella Orozco-DeLaHoz, which chronicles how they found their way forward after their mother was murdered. And we raised a jar to The Glamour of Evil, which I also wrote with Nancy Bell, a thriller that chronicles how a secular New York TV producer becomes the Vatican spy agency’s Jane Bond.
But better than that was the fact we caught up with friends old and new, all in the name of the written word. Our Director of Media, Tom Elliott, flew in from London, and our YourFlick representative Barbara Shearer flew in from Toronto. Chuck came up from Florida, while our author Andy Kimball and his wife Janet flew in from Colorado. Andy’s brilliant thriller Whore’s Kiss comes out this Spring.
We also welcomed our author Christina Christadoulou and her husband Vineet from New Jersey, along with Christina’s parents. Her remarkable book, Those Who Trespass, about how her Greek Orthodox grandfather, a priest, rescued Jewish children from the Nazis in Greece in World War II. Christina’s book also comes out in 2026.
Other friends came from Massachusetts and Yonkers and the Jersey Shore along with the five boroughs of NYC. All to wish BookGo well as it stepped out into the world.
So, my first book launch party will not be my last, as the challenge now is how to top the first.
Maybe the idea is not to top it, but to continue the tradition of producing great books that friends will want to welcome into the world. Along with everyone else on the planet who will want to buy them.
That’s the aim, at any rate, as we now get our Spring 2026 titles ready for takeoff. You will hear more about them as we get closer to the date, but for now, all I can say is that BookGo’s launch was a thing of beauty. And it has inspired us all to keep going forward, and to have as many of these launch parties as we can. I am already addicted after just one sip.
By Sarah Fymme, November 2013
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Sweaters gone Coats are on Leaf pile play All blown away Leaf bits tumble As corners crumble Into reddy dust Gone in one gust In shorter days In front doorways Pumpkin smiles Are rotting down Now they only drool and frown Trickertreaters are now done Not anymore their costumed fun With candy happy they did haunt Only empty wrappers taunt My sunshine theft Dark all that’s left Now I remember The ugly cold Not yet the glowing snow to behold But windy knives of icy slashes Coldly crashes in November
Sarah Fymme is a New York City-based teacher, writer and YA poet: Sarah is deaf and a member of the Deaf Poet’s Society. Her work has been published in Private Press.
Michael McKinley and Nancy Merritt Bell, the husband-and-wife duo behind the new spy thriller The Glamour of Evil, share their thoughts on the book and the process of writing it!
BookGo: Where did the book come from?
She said: Michael began to write The Glamour of Evil about 10 years ago. He made a documentary about the Vatican and learned their spies were the best in the world, and it was the oldest spy agency. But you don’t ever hear about their spies, so they must be really good! Michael had to write that book about the Vatican’s James Bond!
He said: I was raised in an Irish-Catholic household and the affairs of the Vatican were present from the get -go. I made my first film about who would succeed Pope John Paul II and got inside and up close at the Vatican. I then made a couple more films inside the Vatican, and during the most recent one, which was about a decade ago, I learned that they had a spy agency. The largest in the world, and according to the famed Nazi catcher Simon Wiesenthal, the best. So I started reading about it, and of course, came to learn that pretty much since the beginning of the Church they have had eyes and ears everywhere. So I thought, hmmm, the Vatican needs its own James Bond. Secular, maybe shakily Catholic, who gets roped in somehow. That led to The Glamour of Evil.
BookGo: How did you become involved with the book?
She said: The original Glamour had a male central figure named Geo Lynch, and was quite complex with bad and good people working both sides of the moral fence. As Michael’s wife, I became the editor–how could I say “no” and risk losing my favorite chef, who is my husband. But I’ve always loved the book. As an editor, you always get a sense about a book, that it will be made. And here it is!
The book was not getting published, so I told Michael, “Maybe the lead is not the Vatican’s James Bond, but Jane, Jane Bond.” I thought a female lead would bring the book to life, set it apart, and also highlight the old patriarchy in the Church, in politics, and in journalism, and give it a kick in the systemic nuts! But when I said “Jane”, Michael’s eyes lit up. I knew the lead would be female, would be our Maddie Lynch, and the book would be “ours” because I would come on as a writer.
He said: When Nancy said, “Not James Bond, but Jane Bond,” I knew we had our Vatican spy. Making the protagonist a woman really opened up the story, and of course, plugged into a reality that any Catholic of whatever standing knows: the Church has always been a force of female talent and ingenuity. It’s called The Holy Mother Church for a reason, and yep, women are at the heart of its story, but they have been sidelined by power grabbing men, and by those who have forgotten that the ministry of Jesus was funded by women, first among them Mary Magdalene. Women have been at the heart of the story from the beginning of it (Hail Mary, full of grace…”) so it was time to plant one at the heart of the Vatican’s spy agency.
BookGo: How did the book evolve over the years?
She said: When Michael first wrote Glamour, he created rough political divisions in the US and an oddly populist GOP leader on the rise. Time passing has confirmed Michael’s vision, so there was not too much to revise. The book also became tighter and faster. And yet there is more action and description so you can see the people and worlds Maddie travels through, which I think I helped with, and also her world, her cosmology has grown in vitality.
He said: One of the things that has changed is the Middle East. The book is set, partly, in Israel and Lebanon, and because of the war that has engaged the people of that region for more than the past two years, we had to address its ending, and the reality of that, in the book, while the war was continuing. So we tried to do that with a light touch, as the role of Israel in this story is about the presence of Christianity there, both of the evangelical ilk and the Catholic ilk, and how, in Glamour, they are going to collide.
BookGo: What is it like to be married and business partners and also writing partners?
She said: It can be intense. It is like living 2 lives, even more, at once. If Michael is working on a project, I know all about it. If he stubs his toe, my foot hurts. We also respect and are in awe of each other’s differences. Being dyslexic, I literally “see things differently” so when I look at the first chapter of a book, I already have an idea of what the next 20 look like. Michael can write: his sense of language is glorious–Shakespearian. He makes every single line worth reading.
He said: I can’t imagine anything better, and my imagination is not too bad. Nancy is a great editor, which means she sees how stories can be better, and how to make them so. Which she does as a writer. Her dyslexia is a great editorial strength, and I have always loved language, so I can spin it out and Nancy can give it shape.
BookGo: What are your favorite parts of The Glamour of Evil?
She said: I have loads of favorite parts! I adore the main character, Maddie, who is smart and yet almost outsmarts herself from living a full life with romance–almost that is, and I won’t give away more. Also, there is a very evil character who comes over to the side of good! Love it!
He said: Well, from the title on in. The title comes from the Catholic baptismal ritual, when the godparents and the congregation have to stand up for the child being baptized against the various plots of Satan. And the question is asked of them: “Do you reject the glamour of evil?” I always loved the question for posing Satan as some kind of alluring, well-dressed, bon vivant, and not as a fang toothed serpent. That in itself opened up all kind of possibilities for how our protagonist, Maddie, encounters evil.
BookGo: What about hard parts?
She said: There is a Vatican and WW2 backstory that drives the book, which places the book deeply in our world. And you also don’t want your backstory to weigh down your “front story” as it were: Maddie’s story. So, the careful unfolding of the backstory, how the old world affects the new, took talent. Lots of talent. And it really works.
He said: Getting the research of the backstory right. Pope Francis opened up the Vatican Secret Archives, and the years covering WWII, which had been sealed. So that was a gift, and we used it.
BookGo: What do you think about his/her writing?
She said: Michael can really write and I always love to read his work. His characters are smart, chatty, and burdened with desperate secrets. But as his editor and co-writer, I know he likes to let his characters hang out in bars and drink and chat. So, I make sure those charming chatty types are on the move, maybe even have guns in their hands and jeopardy in their lives. Then their terrible secrets rise up and make them need to ruin the lives of others. Drama!
He said: People hang out in bars and drink and chat. Nancy calls our local The Office. So I have no problem with characters doing stuff that they would do so long as it’s true to them, and to the story. Drama, I believe, can also come from words.
BookGo: What do you think you bring to the book?
She said: I bring action. I also bring dark motives and psychology, which is why I love flawed characters and how their surprising strengths and reversals come from those flaws–which is why I love it when the evil character turns good!
He said: The Vatican and how it rolls.
BookGo: What’s next for Maddie Lynch?
She said: That’s still on the drawing board, but I can say that much of the action of book one is turned upside down in book two. The monsters that were thought dead are alive, kinda of a resurrection, and they’ve brought friends!
He said: It was conceived as a three book series, to start. The Trinity, if you will. So Maddie continues the journey she began in Glamour, and follows its arc IN A FAR COUNTRY, and then finds resolution to the story in THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME. Which, of course, sets her off to face another evil.
BookGo: Any spy thrillers that inspire you?
She said: Slow Horses! But I feel I adore the TV series now more than Mick Herron’s books. This is because the ingenious Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb is more brilliantly disgusting than the Lamb in the book. Thank you, Gary!
He said: I, too, like Slow Horses, both the books and the TV series, as well as the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming. Fleming is a very interesting guy, and I love how Bond has taken on a much more complex persona under Daniel Craig. It’s all in the books but nice to see it come out on the screen.
Here’s what readers and critics are saying about BookGo’s first trio of books!
“Come Up Big is an inspiring and deeply human memoir that captures not just the remarkable journey of Charles “Chuck” Wardell III, but also the indomitable spirit that carried him through every obstacle life placed in his path. From his premature birth—when doctors doubted he would even survive—to his rise through Vietnam, Harvard, the White House, and the upper echelons of international business, Chuck’s story is a testament to perseverance, humor, and sheer willpower.” @rutuja_ramteke
“If you love fast-paced thrillers with moral complexity, global stakes, and a protagonist thrown into an unexpected world, this one’s for you. Also perfect for readers who enjoy espionage, religion-politics confluences, or stories that push you to question who’s really pulling the strings behind power.” @readers.wave
“Redeemed is more than a memoir. It is a journey from loss to light, from blood to grace. It reminds us that even in darkness, there is a chance for healing. Written simply yet powerfully, it feels like a confession and ends like a prayer. This book will move anyone who believes in courage, faith and the power of love to overcome pain.” @bestbookhunter
BookGo is currently accepting submissions for its inaugural writing prize. We are accepting submissions on any topic, fiction or non-fiction, of flash fiction or poetry, up to a maximum of of 500 words!
Our winner and three runners up will receive a free development session with BookGo’s team of writers and editors, and their work published next year.
Deadline: 15 December 2025
That’s all for this week! We’re so excited to be heading into the holiday season with a new raft of books on the market, and we’ve got big things planned for 2026. If you like what we’re doing, do please like, share, or leave your thoughts in the comments below. It really helps us as we build a new chapter in publishing!
And if you’re on the socials, we’d love to see you there as well! You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Linkedin. 💛
Thanks for reading!
The BookGo Team 💖
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