Five Stories, One Vision: Announcing the New Collection from James Yoke
There's a particular kind of magic that happens when you spend years developing stories—when characters become so real they argue with you, when plots twist in directions you didn't plan, when you finally understand the deepest truth your narrative is trying to tell. Today, I'm thrilled to share five of those stories with you. A Conviction of Love, Hidden Blood, Borrowed Time, 12 Dates of Christmas, and Shadow Protocol represent the range of what I love most about storytelling: complex characters facing impossible choices, worlds that feel disturbingly possible, and the intimate human moments hidden within larger, darker dramas.
This collection drop marks a significant moment for me as an author. These aren't quick releases or passion projects churned out between other commitments. Each of these novels was meticulously crafted, revised, and refined to capture something essential about the human experience—whether that's the fragility of love against institutional pressure, the way secrets corrode families from within, or how individual choices ripple outward with consequences we can never fully predict. They span genres because I refuse to be limited by them, but they're united by a consistent vision: stories that matter, characters who feel real, and narratives that linger long after you've turned the final page.
A Conviction of Love: When Heart Meets Principle
Sometimes the most powerful love stories aren't about grand gestures or perfect timing—they're about choosing someone despite every reason not to. A Conviction of Love explores what happens when two people from opposing worlds find themselves drawn together, their connection tested by loyalty, belief, and the question of whether love can survive when everything else falls apart.
The protagonist knows exactly who she should love. Her family has expectations. Her community has traditions. The man she's drawn to represents everything she was taught to avoid. Yet as they navigate a relationship that feels both inevitable and impossible, both characters discover that conviction—the deeply held beliefs that define us—can become either a bridge or a barrier. This is a contemporary romance for readers who want depth beneath the passion, who understand that the most meaningful love stories are about two people choosing each other not despite their differences, but while fully acknowledging them.
A Conviction of Love moves beyond the typical romance formula to explore identity, family pressure, and the quiet bravery it takes to follow your heart when your head is screaming warnings. It's a story about growth, vulnerability, and the discovery that sometimes the person you're meant to love is nothing like what you expected.
Hidden Blood: The Secrets Families Keep
What your family doesn't tell you can kill you. Hidden Blood is a crime mystery that begins with a death that shouldn't have happened—and spirals into the discovery of secrets buried so deep that uncovering them threatens to destroy everything the protagonist thought she knew about the people she loves most.
When a seemingly ordinary family catastrophe forces the protagonist to investigate, she stumbles onto a pattern. Financial inconsistencies. Unexplained cash. Connections to people she's been taught to avoid. As she pulls the threads, she discovers that her family's comfortable middle-class existence has been built on a foundation of lies, and worse—on complicity with forces she never knew existed in her own home.
Hidden Blood is a psychological crime thriller about loyalty and betrayal, about the moment when you realize the people closest to you are strangers, and about the impossible choice between protecting your family and protecting yourself. It's for readers who understand that the most dangerous crimes aren't always the ones making headlines—sometimes they're the ones happening behind closed doors, in the lives of people you trust absolutely. With complex family dynamics, a protagonist driven by genuine need rather than convenience, and a mystery that unfolds through meticulous investigation rather than lucky breaks, this novel explores what happens when discovering the truth feels like losing everything.
Borrowed Time: The Future Isn't Fixed
What if the technology designed to save us became the weapon used against us? Borrowed Time is a science fiction thriller set in a world where a breakthrough in temporal manipulation has given society a dangerous gift: the ability to see and subtly influence the future. Governments secure it. Corporations weaponize it. And ordinary people find themselves caught in the crosshairs of forces using tomorrow's knowledge to control today.
The protagonist works within this system, convinced they're part of something necessary—a safeguard against catastrophe, a way to prevent suffering before it begins. But as they gain access to more sensitive information, they begin to question whether prediction and prevention are as clean as they've been told. When they encounter evidence of temporal manipulation being used for purposes far darker than official channels admit, they face a question that will define the rest of their life: Do you blow the whistle and risk everything, or do you stay silent and become complicit in atrocities you could have stopped?
Borrowed Time blends hard science fiction concepts with the intimate psychological terror of someone trapped between conscience and survival. It's a story about institutional corruption, the seduction of certainty, and what happens when the future you're trying to prevent is being deliberately created by those in power. For readers who love speculative fiction that asks difficult questions about technology, free will, and the cost of security, this novel offers a chilling exploration of a world we might actually create.
12 Dates of Christmas: Love in the Season of Certainty
Sometimes the most healing thing that can happen is meeting someone when you're finally ready to be found. 12 Dates of Christmas is a contemporary romance set during the holiday season in a small town where both characters have come to escape their complicated lives and found something they didn't know they were searching for.
She's a woman rebuilding after loss, learning to believe in second chances and new beginnings. He's someone who thought he'd figured out his life—until she arrived and made him question every comfortable assumption. Over the course of twelve days, from early December through Christmas, they navigate the vulnerability of new connection, the fear of repeating past mistakes, and the quiet certainty that sometimes you meet the person you're meant to know at exactly the right moment.
But this isn't a simple feel-good romance. 12 Dates of Christmas honors the real complications of finding love when you're both carrying histories. It explores the fear of being truly known, the risk of opening yourself to someone new, and the way that love, real love, requires the kind of bravery that has nothing to do with grand gestures and everything to do with showing up, day after day, willing to be vulnerable. With a setting steeped in seasonal warmth and two characters who feel like people you'd actually want to know, this novel is for readers who believe romance is most powerful when it's grounded in genuine human connection.
Shadow Protocol: The Price of Loyalty
In the highest corridors of power, there are protocols that don't exist in any official record. There are decisions made in rooms without witnesses, actions taken that will never be publicly acknowledged, and people who live and die to maintain the machinery of state in ways the public will never fully understand. Shadow Protocol is a political thriller about the men and women who operate in those shadows, and what happens when one of them decides the price has become too high.
The protagonist has spent their career in service to something bigger than themselves—or so they've believed. They've rationalized, compartmentalized, and convinced themselves that the small compromises of conscience are acceptable in service to national security. But when they're ordered to cross a line they can't uncross, they face a reckoning: continue following the protocol and live with the consequences, or become a target of the very system they've served.
Shadow Protocol is a taut, intelligent thriller that takes the reader inside the world of classified operations, black budgets, and the psychological toll of secrets. It's a story about the erosion of ethics that happens one small decision at a time, about the moment when you realize you've become the thing you always opposed, and about the terrible cost of trying to do the right thing when you're trapped in a system designed to prevent exactly that. For readers who appreciate procedural detail, morally complex characters, and the kind of political intrigue that feels disturbingly plausible, this novel offers a deep dive into the shadow world most of us only glimpse in headlines.
Stories That Matter
What connects these five novels isn't genre—it's a consistent commitment to characters who feel real, situations that matter, and narratives that explore the consequences of choice. Whether your protagonist is falling in love against the odds, uncovering family secrets, navigating a dystopian future, finding healing through connection, or trapped in the machinery of institutional power, what drives the story forward is the same thing: people trying to figure out who they are and what they believe in worlds that make that question increasingly difficult.
I've written these stories because I believe in the power of fiction to help us understand ourselves and each other. I believe that a great thriller should make your heart race. A great mystery should make you think. A great romance should make you believe in the possibility of connection. And all of them, regardless of genre, should linger with you long after the final page, shifting how you see the world just slightly.
This collection represents years of development, revision, and refinement. These are stories I'm proud to share with you.
Visit JYokeCreations.com
All five novels are available now at JYokeCreations.com. Whether you're a devoted reader of one particular genre or someone who appreciates stories that span the full spectrum of human experience, you'll find something here that speaks to you. Browse the full collection, read extended excerpts, and discover the worlds and characters waiting within these pages.
Thank you for being here, for supporting storytelling that takes risks, and for believing that novels matter. These five stories are yours now.
Welcome to the collection. We hope you'll lose yourself in the reading.
For more information about James Yoke's work, visit JYokeCreations.com
