Mysteries
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.
Saturday’s Mystery eBooks
5 Bodies to Die For
by Stephanie Bond
Rating: 4.6 #ad
The body count keeps rising… The Charmed Killer is on the loose in Atlanta and Carlotta Wren is caught up in the terror–especially when her body-moving side business brings her dangerously close to the action.
And then… She’s forced to take refuge in her former fiancé’s house–much to the chagrin of other interested parties… Her brother Wesley begins to behave as if he has his own death wish… And someone close to her is implicated in the mass murders.
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(A Body Movers Mysteries)
Case Files of an Urban Witch Complete Boxed Set
by Martha Carr, Michael Anderle
Rating: 5.0 #ad
Magic is real, but the world isn’t ready to know it. It’s up to the Silver Griffins to keep it a secret. It’s harder than it sounds, especially in Los Angeles.
Lucy Heron is a mom with three kids, and a baker with a happy marriage in sunny Echo Park. She’s also Silver Griffins Agent 485. She has to balance family life, PTA meetings and her secret agent duties. She has a wand and a mission. Can she get it all done?
Grab the complete series boxed set to set off on a magical adventure!
Killed
by Thomas Enger
Rating: 5.0 #ad
Investigative journalist Henning Juul follows a dangerous trail to find his young son’s murderer, in the explosive, heart-breaking finale to the international, bestselling Henning Juul series.
Crime reporter Henning Juul thought his life was over when his young son was murdered. But that was only the beginning…
Determined to find his son’s killer, Henning doggedly follows an increasingly dangerous trail, where dark hands from the past emerge to threaten everything. His ex-wife Nora is pregnant with another man’s child, his sister Trine is implicated in the fire that killed his son and, with everyone he thought he could trust seemingly hiding something, Henning has nothing to lose … except his own life.
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(Henning Juul Mysteries)
Terminus
by Proto Dagg
Rating: 5.0 #ad
Following a period of violent unrest, the city of Terminus is divided into color-coded zones – each block outside of the green zone brings citizens deeper into unguarded chaos. At an exclusive green-zone club, Matt hears about a new street drug called Peace. Receiving a cryptic invitation, he attends a series of ceremonies that uses the entheogen to bring about transformative experiences. As the movement grows across the zones, Peace threatens the powers who control Terminus, and Matt finds himself at the center of a struggle for the soul of the city.
Command Authority
by Tom Clancy, Mark Greaney
Rating: 4.4 #ad
Decades ago, as a young CIA analyst, President Jack Ryan Sr. was sent out to investigate the death of an operative—only to uncover the existence of a KGB assassin codenamed Zenith. He was never able to find the killer….
In the present, a new strongman has emerged in the ever-chaotic Russian republic—the enigmatic President Valeri Volodon. But the foundations of his personal empire are built on a bloody secret from his past. And none who know of it have lived to tell. For he has set a plot in motion—a plot to return Russia to its former glory.
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(A Jack Ryan Mysteries)
New Orleans Dangerous
by Eric Wilder
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Some say vampires came to America through New Orleans. Many believe they are still there.
When French Quarter private investigator Wyatt Thomas is hired by the Greater Archdiocese of New Orleans to investigate a possible satanic ceremony that may have occurred at the Old Ursuline Convent, he soon learns that more is involved than Satan, The platform where the ceremony allegedly occurred is possibly a satanic altar placed in the convent by a secret society for the specific purpose of devil worship. The Order of the Blood, an offshoot of Freemasonry, has a centuries-old secret guarded by codes, old French ciphers and a web of deceit.
The bizarre case takes Wyatt to a vampire club in the French Quarter, the home of a real vampire, and leads to a magical encounter with a beautiful ghost who resides in the convent.
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(French Quarter Mysteries)
MURDER AT THE PUB
by JANE ADAMS
Rating: 4.4 #ad
Meet Rina Martin, a retired actress with a taste for tea, gardening and crime solving. She played a TV sleuth for years, but now she has to do it for real. On a lazy summer’s day in Frampton, what could be better than a refreshing pint in a country pub?
Too bad Rina’s local just became a crime scene. A man is stabbed to death on the pub doorstep. And that’s not the worst of it. The skeleton of a mystery woman is uncovered during excavations at a local airfield. Forensics say she’s been dead twenty years at most, and she didn’t die on site — leaving Detective ‘Mac’ MacGregor with not one but two baffling murder cases on his hands.
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(Rina Martin Murder Mystery Mysteries)
Friday’s Mystery eBooks
Murder in Galway
by Carlene O’Connor
Rating: 4.4 #ad
Jump right into the beauty and splendor—and murder—of Tara’s Irish adventure! With a gorgeous setting, suspicious characters, and a deadly mystery—Murder in Galway will have you packing your bags…
Tara never imagined her introduction to Ireland like this—carrying her mam’s ashes to honor her final request: “Tell Johnny I’m sorry…Take me home.” She’s never met her mam’s estranged brother, Johnny Meehan, who owns an architectural salvage business in Galway. Although Tara is immediately charmed by the medieval city, the locals seem wary of strangers and a gypsy warns her that death is all around.
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(Murder in Connemara)
Runner
by Tracy Clark
Rating: 4.4 #ad
Chicago in the dead of winter can be brutal, especially when you’re scouring the frigid streets for a missing girl. Fifteen-year-old Ramona Titus has run away from her foster home. Her biological mother, Leesa Evans, is a recovering addict who admits she failed Ramona often in the past. But now she’s clean. And she’s determined to make up for her mistakes—if Cass can only help her find her daughter.
Cass visits Ramona’s foster mother, Deloris Poole, who is also desperate to bring the girl home. Ramona came to Deloris six months ago, angry and distrustful, but was slowly opening up…
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(A Chicago Mysteries)
Prunes for Breakfast
by John Searancke
Rating: 4.1 #ad
‘Many years after the deaths of my parents, my aunt handed me a box filled with letters that my father had written to my mother over the period from 1940 to 1945. This was the starting point of a journey for me to rediscover the father I had never really known…’
This is the story of John Searancke’s parents, told mostly from the side of his father, Eddie Searancke, from the time of his calling up in early 1940 to his release from a prisoner of war camp in Germany in 1945, thence his return to England to try to pick up the pieces of his old life. Nothing could ever be quite the same afterwards.
The letters take readers through five captivating years, telling of the ups and downs, the plots and counterplots, as Eddie rose through the ranks to end his war as a captain, elevated to that rank in the field as his troops faced the formidable might of the SS Panzers…
The Third Gate
by Lincoln Child
Rating: 4.2 #ad
Deep in a nearly impassable swamp south of the Egyptian border, an archaeological team is searching for the burial chamber of King Narmer, the fabled pharaoh. Narmer’s crown might be buried with him: the elusive “double” crown of the two Egypts. Amid the nightmarish, disorienting tangle of mud and dead vegetation, strange things begin to happen. Could an ancient curse be responsible? Jeremy Logan, history professor and master interpreter of bizarre and inexplicable enigmas, is brought onto the project to investigate. What he finds raises fresh questions … and immediate alarm.
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(Jeremy Logan Mysteries)
Taken
by Robert Crais
Rating: 4.6 #ad
When Nita Morales hires Elvis Cole to find her missing daughter, she’s sure it’s a ruse orchestrated by the girl and her boyfriend. She’s wrong. They’ve been taken by bajadores—border bandits who prey on the innocent by buying, selling, and disposing of victims like commodities.
Cole and Joe Pike start an undercover investigation to find the couple, but their plan derails when Cole disappears, leaving Pike to burn through the murderous world of human traffickers to find his friend as well as the missing young people. But he may already be too late…
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(Elvis Cole and Joe Pike Mysteries)
Where Shadows Dance
by C. S. Harris
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Regency London: July 1812. How do you set about solving a murder no one can reveal has been committed? That’s the challenge confronting C.S. Harris’s aristocratic soldier-turned-sleuth Sebastian St. Cyr when his friend, surgeon and “anatomist” Paul Gibson, illegally buys the cadaver of a young man from London’s infamous body snatchers. A rising star at the Foreign Office, Mr. Alexander Ross was reported to have died of a weak heart. But when Gibson discovers a stiletto wound at the base of Ross’s skull, he can turn only to Sebastian for help in catching the killer.
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(Sebastian St. Cyr Mysteries)
My MacArthur
by Cindy Fazzi
Rating: 4.2 #ad
The year is 1930. The place: Manila. Douglas MacArthur is the most powerful man in the Philippines, a United States colony. He’s fifty years old, divorced, and he falls in love at first sight with a ravishing young Filipino woman. He writes her a love note on the spot. Her name is Isabel Rosario Cooper, an aspiring movie actress. One glance at his note and she thinks of him as my MacArthur.
MacArthur pursues his romantic obsession even though he’s breaking numerous taboos. She reciprocates his affection because he could open doors for her financially struggling family. That MacArthur happens to be handsome compensates for the fact that he’s as old as her father.
When MacArthur is appointed the U.S. Army chief of staff, he becomes the youngest four-star general and one of America’s most powerful men. Out of hubris, he takes Isabel with him to America without marrying her.
Shake Loose the Border
by Andrea Matthews
Rating: 4.6 #ad
With Will and Maggie’s wedding just a week away, the last thing they need to stumble upon is Johnnie Hetherington’s dead body tied to a tree, especially one that’s so close to their cottage. Recognizing it as a sure sign that Johnnie has betrayed the family once too often, Sergeant Richie Carnaby gathers Will and his family together for questioning, though it seems obvious only a fool would kill a man on his own land. Then who did murder the rogue, and why?
Feeling confident it wasn’t any of the Fosters, Richie allows Will and Maggie’s wedding to proceed, but the couple has barely exchanged vows when the Armstrongs attack in force. Geordie is determined to rescue his niece from the clutches of Will Foster, whether she wants to go or not. And if he happens to make her a widow in the process, so be it. Will senses the danger and implores Dylan to get Maggie away to safety, no matter where — or when — that may be.