Mysteries
Wednesday’s Mystery eBooks
Murder at Beechwood
by Alyssa Maxwell
Rating: 4.5 #ad
For Newport, Rhode Island’s high society, the summer of 1896 brings lawn parties, sailboat races…and murder.
Having turned down the proposal of Derrick Andrews, Emma Cross has no imminent plans for matrimony—let alone motherhood. But when she discovers an infant left on her doorstep, she naturally takes the child into her care. Using her influence as a cousin to the Vanderbilts and a society page reporter for the Newport Observer, Emma launches a discreet search for the baby’s mother.
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(A Gilded Newport Mysteries)
The Heroes
by Joe Abercrombie
Rating: 4.6 #ad
They say Black Dow’s killed more men than winter, and clawed his way to the throne of the North up a hill of skulls. The King of the Union, ever a jealous neighbor, is not about to stand smiling by while he claws his way any higher. The orders have been given and the armies are toiling through the northern mud. Thousands of men are converging on a forgotten ring of stones, on a worthless hill, in an unimportant valley, and they’ve brought a lot of sharpened metal with them.
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(First Law Standalones Mysteries)
If I Die Before I Wake
by Multiplea UAuthors
Rating: 4.3 #ad
TDon’t deny it. Your mind has dwelled for hours on the things you would do if your name was Karma. Malevolence towards those that wronged you festers and there is no relief—until now. Plunge headfirst into these sinister tales where karma finally takes control and vengeance is a dish that is best served hot.
The Better Off Dead series delves into the farthest corners of your mind, where your deepest, darkest fears lurk. These masters of horror will haunt your dreams and stalk your nightmares, taking you to the edge of sanity before pushing you to the brink of madness!
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(The Better Off Dead Mysteries)
Shadow Dance
by Julie Garwood
Rating: 4.7 #ad
Jordan Buchanan is thrilled that her brother and best friend are tying the knot. The wedding is a lavish affair–for the marriage of Dylan Buchanan and Kate MacKenna is no ordinary occasion. It represents the joining of two family dynasties. The ceremony and reception proceed without a hitch–until a crasher appears claiming to be a MacKenna guest. The disheveled and eccentric professor of medieval history warns that there’s “bad blood” between the couple’s clans, stemming from an ancient feud that originated in Scotland, and involving the Buchanan theft of a coveted MacKenna treasure.
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(Buchanan / Renard / MacKenna Mysteries)
Sleeping Dogs Lie
by Samantha Downing
Rating: 4.0 #ad
From the internationally bestselling author of My Lovely Wife and For Your Own Good comes a twisted, entertaining novella about a dog walker swept into a criminal investigation when her client winds up dead.
Shelby works as a dog walker in northern California, and she’s just finished up her bi-weekly trip to the park with a husky named Pluto. When she brings him back to his house, she finds his owner—Todd Burke, a well-known local businessman and founder of an organic supplements company—lying on the bathroom floor, dead…
Broken
by t.g. brown
Rating: 4.5 #ad
At first glance, the figure could have been construed as a large cocoon hanging from the church rafters. But as one moved closer, the outline of a man came into focus, his body strung upside down . . . his thick torso squirming against his restraints as though he was about to be reborn.
While bullfrog hunting on a cloud-covered night in the Louisiana Bayou JOSH INGRAM had no way of knowing the cogs of a grisly nightmare had already begun to turn. A nightmare that takes root with the murder of a priest in Northern Ireland only to find its way to a schoolyard in Louisiana.
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(Josh Ingram Mysteries)
Tuesday’s Mystery eBooks
Murder in Connemara
by Carlene O’Connor
Rating: 4.4 #ad
Former New Yorker and interior designer Tara Meehan is eagerly anticipating the grand opening of her architectural salvage shop Renewals in her newly adopted home of Galway. She’s in the midst of preparations when heiress Veronica O’Farrell bursts in to announce she’s ready for some renewal of her own. To celebrate one year of sobriety, she’s invited seven people she wronged in her drinking days to historic Ballynahinch Castle Hotel in neighboring Connemara to make amends in style.
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(Murder in Galway)
Even Odds
by Fiona Quinn
Rating: 4.6 #ad
If she’s not careful, she’ll lose more than her heart on this mission…
Someone wants the men of Delta Force out of the way. Permanently. Defense intelligence officer Raine Meyers will do whatever it takes to neutralize the threat. But the job would be a lot simpler if she didn’t have to go undercover with her ex-fiancé—the only man she’s ever loved. The man she pushed out of her life seven years ago…
FBI special agent Damian Prescott lost Raine once. It’s not a mistake he plans to repeat. So, he’ll help her take down the terrorist threat against Delta Force, and keep her safe in the process. Then he’ll do everything he can to turn their fake, undercover relationship into a real one. The kind that ends in happily ever after…
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(FBI Joint Task Force Mysteries)
The Father Hunt
by Rex Stout
Rating: 4.6 #ad
All pretty Amy Denovo wants to find the father she has never seen, but she can’t afford Nero Wolfe’s outlandish fees . . . or can she? Suddenly she’s knocking on the oversized detective’s door with a parcel full of bills in hand—and a quarter of a million hidden in her closet. It’s all part of a nest egg left by her unknown father. But when Wolfe and his able assistant, Archie Goodwin, begin to trace the money to the man, they make a startling discovery: Amy’s father murdered her mother—and now he may be after her.
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(A Nero Wolfe Mysteries)
The Longest Echo
by Eoin Dempsey
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Against the backdrop of WWII-ravaged Italy comes a powerful and emotional novel of love, survival, justice, and second chances by the bestselling author of White Rose, Black Forest.
Occupied Italy, 1944. In the mountain regions south of Bologna, Liliana Nicoletti’s family finds escaped POW James Foley behind German lines. Committed to the anti-Fascist cause, they deliver him to a powerful band of local partisans. But when the SS launches a brutal attack against the Resistance, Liliana’s peaceful community is destroyed. Alone and thrown together by tragedy, James and Liliana fight together as Monte Sole burns. Forging an unbreakable bond, they know their only hope of survival is to make it to the Allied lines.
Sidney Sheldon’s Chasing Tomorrow
by Sidney Sheldon, Tilly Bagshawe
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Tracy Whitney never thought she wanted to settle down. With her suave and handsome partner, Jeff Stevens, she’d been responsible for some of the world’s most astounding heists, relishing the danger and intensity of life on the wild side. But there is still one thing missing from Tracy’s perfect life: a baby.
At first “going straight” feels like a new adventure. But as the months pass and Tracy’s longed for pregnancy doesn’t happen, she finds herself yearning for the adrenaline rush of the old days. When a mysterious and beautiful stranger enters their lives, Tracy and Jeff’s once unbreakable partnership is suddenly blown wide open. Jeff wakes one morning to find Tracy gone, vanished without a trace.
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(Tracy Whitney Mysteries)
Sphere
by Michael Crichton
Rating: 4.4 #ad
In the middle of the South Pacific, a thousand feet below the surface, a huge vessel is unearthed. Rushed to the scene is a team of American scientists who descend together into the depths to investigate the astonishing discovery. What they find defies their imaginations and mocks their attempts at logical explanation. It is a spaceship, but apparently it is undamaged by its fall from the sky. And, most startling, it appears to be at least three hundred years old, containing a terrifying and destructive force that must be controlled at all costs.
Restitution
by Chris Lofts
Rating: 5.0 #ad
When technology expert Mo Archer’s father Roland goes missing he is unwittingly dragged into a Nazi art swindle 80 years in the making.
Mo tracks the last known location of the retired art lecturer’s phone to a place that makes no sense. When an old family friend calls, equally desperate to find his father, Mo is drawn in deeper. Emilia Carducci unfolds a decades-old family feud linked to a rediscovered masterpiece that has set the London art world and media abuzz.
Mo refuses to see the link between Roland’s disappearance and the painting until he uncovers what his father left behind. Fuelled by fear and armed with his discovery he turns to the only other person he can trust, his assistant Sapph…
Monday’s Mystery eBooks
Death of an Irish Mummy
by Catie Murphy
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Squiring a self-proclaimed heiress around Dublin has got limo driver Megan Malone’s Irish up—until she finds the woman dead . . .
American-born Cherise Williams believes herself to be heir to an old Irish earldom, and she’s come to Dublin to claim her heritage. Under the circumstances, Megan’s boss Olga at Leprechaun Limos has no qualms about overcharging the brash Texas transplant for their services. Megan chauffeurs Cherise to the ancient St. Michan’s Church, where the woman intends to get a wee little DNA sample from the mummified earls—much to the horror of the priest…
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(The Dublin Driver Mysteries)
Restitution
by Chris Lofts
Rating: 5.0 #ad
When technology expert Mo Archer’s father Roland goes missing he is unwittingly dragged into a Nazi art swindle 80 years in the making.
Mo tracks the last known location of the retired art lecturer’s phone to a place that makes no sense. When an old family friend calls, equally desperate to find his father, Mo is drawn in deeper. Emilia Carducci unfolds a decades-old family feud linked to a rediscovered masterpiece that has set the London art world and media abuzz.
Mo refuses to see the link between Roland’s disappearance and the painting until he uncovers what his father left behind. Fuelled by fear and armed with his discovery he turns to the only other person he can trust, his assistant Sapph…
The Verdant Passage
by Troy Denning
Rating: 4.3 #ad
Return to the apocalyptic deserts of the Dark Sun world as unlikely heroes spark a revolution against an evil sorcerer-king
For thousands of years, the devil sorcerer King Kalak has used vile magic to drain Athas of its precious life-force. Now, his reign is coming to an end—though the city of Tyr, like the rest of the world, is nothing more than a magic-blasted ruin and a desolate place of dust, blood, and fear. All that’s left is desperation—and revolution. Leading this revolution against Kalak are a maverick statesman, a winsome half-elf slave girl, and a man-dwarf gladiator bred for the arenas…
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(Prism Pentad Mysteries)
Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade
by Diana Gabaldon
Rating: 4.6 #ad
It’s been seventeen years since Lord John’s father, the Duke of Pardloe, was found dead, a pistol in his hand and accusations of his role as a Jacobite agent staining forever a family’s honor. Now unlaid ghosts from the past are stirring. Lord John’s brother has mysteriously received a page of their late father’s missing diary—and John is convinced that someone is taunting the Grey family with secrets from the grave. So he turns to the only man he can trust: the Scottish Jacobite James Fraser. But war, a forbidden affair, and Fraser’s own secrets will complicate Lord John’s quest—until James Fraser yields the missing piece of an astounding puzzle and Lord John must decide whether his family’s honor is worth his life.
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(Lord John Grey Mysteries)
Cold Cruel Kiss
by Toni Anderson
Rating: 4.6 #ad
When the daughter of the US Ambassador to Argentina is kidnapped in broad daylight on Christmas Eve, the FBI sends one of its best negotiators to investigate.
Supervisory Special Agent Max Hawthorne arrives at an embassy thrown into chaos as US and local law enforcement hustle to track the young woman. Is this a simple kidnap for ransom, or part of a political agenda? Could it be something more sinister?
Lucy Aston has something to hide. Preferring to stay in the shadows, the lowly, fashion-challenged office assistant resents being assigned to help Max…
The Whispering Dead
by Darcy Coates
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Homeless, hunted, and desperate to escape a bitter storm, Keira takes refuge in an abandoned groundskeeper’s cottage. Her new home is tucked away at the edge of a cemetery, surrounded on all sides by gravestones: some recent, some hundreds of years old, all suffering from neglect.
And in the darkness, she can hear the unquiet dead whispering.
The cemetery is alive with faint, spectral shapes, led by a woman who died before her time…and Keira, the only person who can see her, has become her new target. Determined to help put the ghost to rest, Keira digs into the spirit’s past life with the help of unlikely new friends, and discovers a history of deception, ill-fated love, and murder.
Sunday’s Mystery eBooks
Presumed Guilty
by Tess Gerritsen
Rating: 4.3 #ad
Miranda Wood thinks she has seen the last of Richard Tremain, her rich and married ex-lover—until she discovers him stabbed to death in her bed. With her knife.
Miranda is the obvious suspect, and she looks even guiltier when her bail is posted by an anonymous donor. Was this an act of kindness designed to buy her time to clear her name? Or is someone trying to manipulate Miranda and draw her into the dark and secret world of a murdered man, where everybody’s presumed guilty?
Free Worlds of Humanity
by Anthony Almato
Rating: 4.9 #ad
Perfect for fans of Dune and The Reality Dysfunction, Anthony Almato’s debut, Free Worlds of Humanity, reveals the long-lasting effects of corruption and colonization in a distant future where humankind has discovered interplanetary space travel–and weaponized it.
In the colonized planets forming the Free Worlds of Humanity, a select few, like Henry McWright, live richly as politicians governing the masses through lies and deceit. They proliferate their wars with exhausted soldiers, like Askar, whose wish to die is still unfulfilled. Dissenters, like the legendary resistance leader Isabel Sideris, believe that the only way forward is through a governmental purge. Among the key players hide the pawns: wayward souls like Mace Applegate, who’s been fleeing across space with corporate secrets, and Kathryn Norcross, whose vengeance is a bag of teeth tied at her hip. For all of them, freedom isn’t free, and they’ll pay with blood if not coin.
A Game of Fear
by Charles Todd
Rating: 4.9 #ad
Spring, 1921. Scotland Yard sends Inspector Ian Rutledge to the sea-battered village of Walmer on the coast of Essex, where amongst the salt flats and a military airfield lies Benton Abbey, a grand manor with a storied past. The lady of the house may prove his most bewildering witness yet. She claims she saw a violent murder—but there is no body, no blood. She also insists she recognized the killer: Captain Nelson. Only it could not have been Nelson because he died during the war.
Everyone in the village believes that Lady Benton’s losses have turned her mind—she is, after all, a grieving widow and mother—but the woman Rutledge interviews is rational and self-possessed…
The Awakening of Jim Bishop
by Ben Sharpton
Rating: 4.7 #ad
“Fearless, full of heart, loveable characters, and twists and turns that cause you to lose track of time before you realize you’re half a dozen chapters in.” –Ken Harris, retired FBI and author of The Pine Barrens Strategem
Jim Bishop is alone. His wife died. He lost his job. His brother is on the west coast. But something else, something different, something new is waiting for him.
In uptown Charlotte, the lives of five strangers are bound together as tightly as the twisted metal frame of the bicycle at the center of a horrible hit-and-run accident.
A homeless woman watches as a minister tries to comfort the young computer coder who believes he killed the cyclist, while an exhausted nurse and a power-driven CEO slip off into the night.
The Unknown
by Heather Graham
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Sienna Murray was only fourteen when she pulled her neighbors out of a raging house fire. A decade later, she still can’t explain what happened that night, how she knew to save them at just the right moment—or why she receives the same mysterious warning when it happens again…
New member of the Krewe of Hunters elite paranormal team Detective Ryder Stapleton doesn’t believe in coincidences. So when the suspicious fire he’s called to investigate reveals a cryptic link to Sienna, he can’t help but think the unassuming museum curator has something to hide. But he soon discovers they have more in common than he ever thought—and a growing attraction neither can deny.
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(Krewe of Hunters Mysteries)
A Stranger’s Game
by Colleen Coble
Rating: 4.6 #ad
A wealthy hotel heiress. Even though Torie Bergstrom hasn’t been back to Georgia since she was ten, she’s happy to arrange a job for her best friend at one of the family properties on Jekyll Island.
A suspicious death. But when Torie learns that her best friend has drowned, she knows it is more than a tragic accident: Lisbeth was terrified of water and wouldn’t have gone swimming by choice.
A fight for the truth…
Black Coral
by Andrew Mayne
Rating: 4.6 #ad
For a police diver in Florida, solving a cold-case mystery brings a serial killer out of hiding in a deep, dark thriller by the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Naturalist.
Sloan McPherson and the Underwater Investigation Unit have discovered a van at the bottom of a murky Florida pond. Sealed inside the watery tomb are the bodies of four teenagers who disappeared thirty years ago after leaving a rock concert. To authorities, it looks like a tragic accident. To Sloan, it looks like murder. Every piece of evidence is starting to connect to a string of cold case vanishings throughout Florida. Clue by clue, Sloan navigates the warm, dark waters where natural predators feed, knowing that the most dangerous one is still above the surface—nesting and dormant.
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(Underwater Investigation Unit Mysteries)
Notes on an Execution
by Danya Kukafka
Rating: 4.7 #ad
Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood.
Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide detective—we learn the story of Ansel’s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister’s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly.
Search for Her
by Rick Mofina
Rating: 4.4 #ad
A missing daughter, a family with secrets, a race for the truth…
At a truck stop near Las Vegas, fourteen-year-old Riley Jarrett vanishes from her family’s RV, turning their cross-country dream of starting over into a nightmare. Investigators have their work cut out for them. The massive, bustling truck plaza in the desert is the perfect place for someone to disappear—or be taken.