In the heart of a bustling city, single mother Angela navigates the relentless demands of her career while cherishing every stolen moment with her bright, enigmatic son, Jimmy. Haunted by the sudden disappearance of Jimmy's father, Frank—a man she once loved deeply—Angela has built a life of quiet resilience, balancing ambition, loneliness, and the unyielding pull of motherhood. But when echoes of the past resurface, secrets unravel, and unexpected encounters challenge her carefully constructed world, Angela must confront the ghosts that have shaped her journey.

With little evidence, would-be author P.J. Larkin serves a “nibble” on the trendy new social media app Crave, accusing editor George Dunn of stealing the novel she submitted to him for publication. The nibble shoots to the top of the site’s Popular Menu Items, and before you can say “unpaid literary labor,” George is embroiled in a scandal, his job and book deal in jeopardy. P.J.’s novel is snapped up amid the publicity, but has she revealed her sister Mia’s secrets in the book? Some diners on Crave think so, and now it’s P.J.’s turn to feel the public’s scorn.

Mark is a philosopher of pain, a self-proclaimed scholar of suffering, and a man whose thoughts burn brighter than the cigarette between his fingers. Ronan is the friend who tries to pull him back from the abyss. And Emma? Emma sees the scars beneath the cynicism, the poetry behind the madness.

Set against the backdrop of university nights filled with deep conversations, rooftop confessions, and the slow unraveling of what it means to love and be loved, A Philosophy of Scars is a book for the lost, the broken, and those who think too much.

Former minor-league baseball player Jimmy Bailey leaves prison after serving time for a crime he didn't commit. He can't wait to smell freedom again, to get his life back on track. On the day his sister, Debbie, picks him up, one of the prison guards attempts to harass her. She shuts him down, embarrassing him in front of other guards. This incident has a domino effect on both Jimmy's and her lives, leading to crime, kidnapping, stalking, and even murder. Will Jimmy ever get back to playing baseball? And will Debbie's professional life be the way she'd planned?

Private Investigator, Jimmy Quinn, rescues a child from a predator, posing as a pastor of an unaccredited church. With the child being safe and with his assailant behind bars, Jimmy thinks "open and shut", but...not really. Jimmy gets to know the child's mother and takes a special interest in the child himself, a 10 year-old boy, Tommy. Others notice more than a passing resemblance between the two of them, and while getting to better know Tommy's mother, Brenda, he unfurls a tangled web of lies, scandal malicious mischief and deceit.

At the height of the Cold War, Sienna Barrett was an unremarkable and otherwise anonymous child.
​
She would spend the next two years participating in the most closely guarded secret in human history. No president, prime minister, or general knew of the project’s existence until 30 years after every piece of it had been disassembled and the pieces incinerated.
​
And then she was abruptly sent home and given the impossible task of resuming her life as if nothing had happened.
​