Discover the Shelf – All Indie Books in One Place

Browse the complete SelfPubShelf catalog featuring every listed book across all genres and categories. Start your indie reading journey here.

The Last Refuge

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."  Samuel Johnson Iraq, 1991: Operation Desert Storm. In a terrible friendly fire incident, a U.S. helicopter massacres a small convoy of American MPs. Among the dead: a mysterious American civilian engineer discovered by the soldiers behind enemy lines.San Diego, CA, 1993: A freelance journalist is hired to write a story about a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the dead engineer's widow against the government and the defense contractor he worked for. The problem: the government insists the lawsuit does not exist, and the contractor claims the engineer did not work for them. Worse, someone is willing to kill to keep it that way.Peter Bra...
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Empty Places

He warned her. People die in lonely and empty places. But she didn't listen.Peter Brandt is a war-scarred news service reporter who has seen more than he can bear to remember. Returning to the States, he discovers his former wife, TV reporter Robin Anderson, brutally murdered and the local cops doing nothing to find her killer. Driven by guilt and regret over his failed marriage, Peter sets out with an old friend, retired cop Matt Banyon, to find Robin's killer. Following clues she left behind, Peter and Matt unearth a shadowy world of sex, drugs, political corruption, and a wealthy Cuban freedom fighter with a suspicious past. Peter and Matt soon become the hunted, and Peter must finally fa...
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The Butcher's Bill

2017 Best Mystery/Suspense Novel (Best Independent Book Awards)2018 Clue Award for Best Thriller (Chaticleer International Book Awards)Meet William Butcher, aka The Butcher, former Navy SEAL, now a disgraced ex-NCIS agent.Those who stole $9 billion in cash from Iraq want him dead.The cops want him for murder.Butcher's only hope is his former NCIS colleague and closest friend, Linus Schag.Together Schag and Butcher tear away the veil of conspiracy, uncovering a criminal enterprise reaching into the highest levels of government.Ripped from today's headlines, this sequel to Martin Roy Hill's highly praised The Killing Depths takes the reader from the California mountains to the coastal waters o...
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The Killing Depths

A submarine. A secret mission. And a serial killer.

A killer lurks beneath the waves of the western Pacific Ocean. 

The USS Encinitas, the first attack submarine crewed by both men and women, stalks the Crescent Moon, a renegade Iranian sub armed with nuclear-tipped missiles. But another predator hides aboard the American sub, a murderer who has already left a trail of dead women behind on shore.

While the crew of the Encinitas plays a deadly game of hide-and-seek with the Crescent Moon, NCIS investigator Linus Schag must discover the killer’s identity before his – or her – blood lust leads to the submarine’s total destruction.

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The Financial Syndicate

Alex Colton is a young, idealistic recent college graduate, received an incredible career opportunity at boutique asset management firm Carrington Capital Partners. After the death of the chief executive officer, the leading CEO candidate creates a toxic security threatening to upend and possibly bankrupt the whole financial system. Through the help of the deceased CEO’s family and the company receptionist Lynda, Alex battles through corporate and political intrigue, along with learning secrets about himself and how he is personally and professionally linked to the ongoing saga regarding him, his family, and his place with his employer.

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Benign Flame: Saga of Love

The attractions Roopa experienced and the fantasies she entertained as a teen shaped a male imagery that ensconced her subconscious. Insensibly, confident carriage came to be associated with the image of maleness in her mind-set. Her acute consciousness of masculinity only increased her vulnerability to it, making her womanliness crave for the maleness for its gratification. However, as her father was constrained to help her in becoming a doctor, she opts to marry, hoping that Sathyam might serve her cause though the persona she envisioned as masculine, she found lacking in him. But as he fails to go with her idea, she becomes apathetic towards him, and insensibly sinks into her friend ...
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Jewel-less Crown: Saga of Life

It's perilous penning this blurb.It's fine when man is modest about his work.It even affords him the aura of an invisible crown!But what about his work?Were it an art or craft, it is there for all to see.What of a literary work of an unheralded author?Well, lauding the same might raise one's eyebrows.Failing to praise wouldn't make a 'jewel-less crown' either!Why not see, if this is the great Indian novel.This is the story of the rise and fall of an ambitious man, the decline, and the decay of his conniving wife, the trials, and tribulations of their wayward son as well as the grit and gall of a spirited woman, who enters into his life.This depiction of their life and times not only pictures...
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Crossing the Mirage - Passing through Youth

If passing through youth was like crossing the mirage of life for Chandra and Nithya, it proved to be chasing the mirage of love for Sathya and Prema though for plain Vasavi, Chandra's pitiable sibling, it was the end of the road.As life brings Chandra, who suffers from an inferiority complex for his perceived ugliness, and Nithya, who was bogged down being jilted by Vasu, together, they script their fate of fulfillment.And as poetic justice would have it, Sathya, who caused Prema's heartburn, himself was led down the garden path by Kala, doing a Sathya on Sathya.Just not that, life has in store just deserts for Vasu owing to Nithya's retribution as he tries to stalk her.Besides, after many ...
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Glaring Shadow - A stream of consciousness novel

In a stream of consciousness mode, Glaring Shadow is the self-account of the life and times of a man, who liquidates his immense wealth only to consign it to the flames.The agony and ecstasy of his life as he makes it big in our materialistic world and the way he loses his soul in the bargain, only to regain it when tragedy strikes him makes one ponder over the meaning of success in life.This philosophical ‘novel of a memoir’ is a compelling read that is conducive to contemplate about the nature and scope of human relationships. Chapter Titles1. Glaring Shadow                     ...
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Prey on the Prowl - A Crime Novel

Even as Detective Dhruva was enamored of Kavya, whom he rescues from her kidnapper, Radha, an alleged murderess on the run, gatecrashes into his life.But when Kavya too joins him after her man was poisoned there ensues the tussle of a love triangle, which gets unraveled in a poignant end, but not before a series of murders.So, then who could have poisoned Ranjit the realtor, Shakeel the Inspector, Pravar the criminal and Natya his accomplice?Well the needle of suspicion tilted towards Pravar that was till he perished with his mate, but then who was the one? Could it be Radha under the scanner for her role in the death of her husband Madhu and his mistress Mala, Pravar's sister?Or was it...
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Of No Avail: Web of Wedlock

Lured by the pitch - All marriages are made in heaven but some are delayed on earth: We endeavor to hasten them all - Priya goes to Renuka Marriage Bureau.

Scanning the prospects, when she spotted Venu, whom she slighted long ago, she rushes to him to bring about a dramatic encounter.

What brought about Priya’s change of heart to seek her former suitor and how Venu responds to his old flame’s fresh overtures lend suspense to their romance in this eclectic novella. 

Contents

1 – Surprises of Life

2 – Flows of Fate

3 – Wedlock in Deadlock

4 – Furies of Falsity

5 – Ordeals of Ambition

6 – Falling in Line

7 – Breaking the Barrier

8 – Making the Thaw

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Stories Varied – A Book of Short Stories

This is a collection of the author’s short stories that deals with women's dilemmas in the Indian social milieu accompanied with unique denouements. While 'Ilaa's Ire' contrasts woman's lot of the day with her eminence in the Vedic Age, '201' Qualms" depicts her predicament, torn between personal loyalty and citizen's responsibility. As "?" addresses woman's marital stress in an alien land, 'Cupid's Clue' is about her acting on rebound in her native place. Even as 'Autumn Love' lets woman discover the marital void in her life, 'A Touchy Affair' makes her amenable to her man's other woman. Just as 'Love's How's That' inflames woman's old flame, 'A Hearty Turn' brings her...
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Onto the Stage – Slighted Souls and other stage and radio plays

This is a compendium of the author’s Indian stage and radio plays:"Slighted Souls" is a poignant love story set in rural Telangana, beset with feudal exploitation of the downtrodden dalits. Besides forcing the dalits to toil in the fields as bonded labor without impunity, the land owning doras had no qualms in reducing the womenfolk of this ilk as sex slaves in the gadis, which leads to an armed resistance engulfing an young couple.Men at work on Women at work" is a tragic-comic episode depicting the fallout of sexual harassment at the workplace in the Indian urban setting with its traditional cultural underpinnings."Castle of Despair", built on the ...
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Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A Critical Appraisal of Islamic Faith, Indian Polity ‘N More)

The sublimity of Muhammad's preaching in Mecca and the severity of his sermons in Medina make Islam a Janus-faced faith that forever bedevils the mind of the Musalmans. This thought-provoking work, besides dissecting the anatomy of Islam, steeped in the Quran, seeks to depict the psyche of the Musalmans, shaped by the proclivities of their prophet, vicissitudes of his life and the attitudes of his detractors, which the mechanism of their umma perpetuates. More to the point, aided by “I’m Ok – You’re Ok”, the path-breaking work of Thomas A. Harris and Roland E Miller’s “Muslim Friends–Their Faith and Feeling”, this book, for the first time ever, psycho-analyzes the...
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Inane Interpolations in Bhagvad-Gita (An Invocation for their Revocation)

The Manusmriti, the social doctrine of yore, and the Bhagvad-Gita, the spiritual tome in vogue that lay down the discriminatory dharma (duties) of the four social classes (castes) have been the bugbears of the Hindu backward classes. However, to their chagrin, of late, as the latter is being mindlessly promoted even though the former was constitutionally debunked, they began advocating that it too should be dumped in a dustbin.Ironically, the improbability of their progenitor Krishna, the architect of the Gita, relegating his own ilk to the social margins failed to dawn upon these that Gita supposedly slights, even to this day! Thus, their intellectuals, instead of seeking to reclaim their p...
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