Friday’s Mystery eBooks
A Poisonous Page
by Kitt Crowe
Rating: 4.3 #ad
It’s summer festival time in Confection, Oregon, and that means a barrage of tourists making cash registers ring at Sweet Fiction Bookshop. But what should be bookseller Lexi’s most lucrative time of year turns disturbing when a member of the chamber of commerce suddenly dies of a heart attack. Not entirely unexpected—considering her family history—but it’s a different story when another chamber member dies just one week later…also, presumably, of natural causes.
Something about this doesn’t read right to Lexi. And it gets more unfathomable when her friend Dash—who dated both women – stands accused of murder!
Red Storm: Complete Series
by James Rosone, Miranda Watson
Rating: 5.0 #ad
Deep in Siberia, a plan was hatched…
…to restore Communism to its rightful place. Will Eastern Europe fold as they expect?
A sleeping giant is awake, but it’s not the one the world expects. The first spark hits a powder keg on the Black Sea, but this is only the beginning. Soon, dominos fall across Asia, and China will factor into a different type of war.
When bullets turn to bytes… will the allies be ready?
The Dark Door
by Lisa Unger
Rating: 4.2 #ad
Pip Duke’s life has descended into chaos following the death of her father, a bestselling horror writer. She now hears voices all the time, saying troubling things like: Your father’s friends and family are after his money, or you shouldinherit everything. The voices also say she killed her dad, and the police are after her.
To silence these disturbing thoughts, Pip checks herself into an inpatient therapy center. However, the place is far from calming. She can’t trust the staff, and the voices in her head continue to say terrible things. There are those who want you released—only so they can continue to profit off your father’s name. A different voice says some wish to claim her inheritance by getting her declared insane…
The Wife List
by J.A. Schneider
Rating: 4.4 #ad
Has a group of men conspired to murder each other’s wives – figuring their perfect alibis will save them? That is what Beth Kemp starts to suspect, but is she losing her mind? Her husband says he fears so…
I’ll give this marriage one more try, Beth Kemp thinks. She is a successful crime writer in New York City, who regrets that tension has crept into her relationship with her husband, Brad. He too is a writer who, after early success, finds his career fading.
Brad urges that a move to the country would make them happy again – and safe, especially Beth, to avoid the city’s stress that triggers her severe asthma attacks. Beth wavers, until her close friend is murdered and the friend’s husband has a perfect alibi. She finally accepts that the city with its surging crime has become too hard for her…
The Heretic’s Apprentice
by Ellis Peters
Rating: 4.7 #ad
In the summer of 1143, William of Lythwood arrives at the Benedictine Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul, but it is not a joyous occasion—he’s come back from his pilgrimage in a coffin. William’s body is accompanied by his young attendant Elave, whose mission is to secure a burial place for his master on the abbey grounds, despite William’s having once been reprimanded for heretical views.
An already difficult task is complicated when Elave drunkenly expresses his own heretical opinions, and capital charges are filed…
Death in the Off-Season
by Francine Mathews
Rating: 4.3 #ad
When Rusty Mason, scion of one of Nantucket’s oldest and wealthiest families, is found dead in a flooded cranberry bog one foggy fall night, thirty-two-year-old detective Merry Folger is faced with her first murder case. Merry is the daughter of the local police chief and granddaughter of his predecessor; her father is a strict boss and Merry feels pressure to go the extra mile to prove her promotion to detective isn’t just nepotism.
But the Mason murder is a demanding first test. Merry’s investigation brings to light all the tensions that plague the tiny community of Nantucket: the decades-old grudges, the skyrocketing real estate that only wealthy weekenders can afford, the resentments of the old Nantucket families who are barely keeping their homes and heritage fishing businesses alive. But Merry knows the island and its politics in a way only a local can.
The Brave New World Collection
by Aldous Huxley
Rating: 4.7 #ad
Aldous Huxley’s dystopian classic about a perfectly engineered society, and his book of essays reflecting on it almost three decades later, in one volume.
Brave New World: Half a millennium from now, no matter what class of human you are bred to be—from the intellectual Alphas to the Epsilons who provide manual labor—you are a part of the efficient, well-oiled whole, nourished, secure, and blissfully serene thanks to the freely distributed drug soma.
Brave New World Revisited: Nearly thirty years after the publication of his groundbreaking novel, Huxley composed this collection of essays comparing the “future” of 1958 with his vision of it from the early 1930s.