By Her Own Hand: War and passion in a woman's wounded heart

5 Star Review

Click HERE to Purchase Your Copy Today!

Editorial Book Review:

By Patty Demarco

There's a particular kind of novel that refuses to let you put it in a neat box, and By Her Own Hand is absolutely that kind of book. John W. Deveny starts with a woman escaping domestic violence, takes her to the mountains of Afghanistan, then drops her into the shadows of the international arms trade, and somehow makes all of it feel like one continuous, inevitable story. That's not easy to pull off. He pulls it off.

Madeline is the kind of protagonist you genuinely worry about. She carries so much from the very beginning, a violent home, a first love that feels like rescue, a war that takes more from her than she signed up to give. When she's accused of a war crime she didn't commit, the injustice of it lands hard precisely because Deveny has already made you care so deeply about how far she's come just to get here.

And then Mira arrives. The relationship between these two women is where the book really gets complicated in the best possible way. What starts as salvation, two people who understand each other's losses in a way few others could, gradually reveals itself to be something far more dangerous. The slow unraveling of Mira's true nature is handled with real skill. You feel the pull of the connection even as you start to sense the trap closing.

What Deveny is really writing about is the way women who have been let down by every system around them, family, military, justice, find themselves reaching for connection wherever they can find it, even when that connection comes with a cost they haven't fully seen yet.

The writing is taut and genuinely cinematic. This is a book that stays with you.

About the Author

John W Deveny

Jack Deveny writes fiction based on strong female leads facing impossible odds. As an empath, he finds it easier to write from a woman’s point of view. 

His first novel, “Blind Triangle” received five-star reviews from two of Amazon’s top reviewers. His second novel, “By Her Own Hand” deals with a woman struggling to hold on to love amidst war. He’s also had a play produced and several poems published. 

When he’s not writing, he’s dancing Argentine tango with his beloved wife, Jackie as you can see from his author photo. Tango was Jack’s idea, but Jackie quickly gravitated to it. 

He has an MA in psychology and worked for a time as a psychotherapist.