Tuesday’s Mystery eBooks
Dune to Death
by Mary Daheim
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Just when she thought her honeymoon couldn’t get worse, a newlywed finds someone newly dead. Fourth in the series from the author of Holy Terrors.
Bed-and-breakfast hostess Judith McMonigle and her policeman beau Joe Flynn have finally gotten hitched—and they’re off on a sunny honeymoon to beautiful Buccaneer Beach. But an unfortunate confrontation with a dune buggy run amok puts hubby Joe in hospital traction—leaving his beleaguered blushing bride stranded in paradise with a bad case of ennui by the sea. Luckily irrepressible cousin Renie has selflessly agreed to keep Judith company.
River Road
by Eric Wilder
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Bizarre New Orleans Death Ceremony Ends in Murder
French Quarter paranormal investigator Wyatt Thomas meets a new client at an bizarre death ceremony in a revamped Canal Street movie theater. The man gives Wyatt a bag of cash and a single clue: a solid gold Krewe of Rex, 1948 Mardi Gras doubloon. His only request is for Wyatt to find the person or persons who murdered his mother.
The case isn’t simply cold, it’s 50-years old. When his client is shot dead on the way out the door, Wyatt must go into hiding, solve both murders, or suffer the same fate
Dragon Apparent Complete Series
by Talia Beckett, Jess Mountifield
Rating: 5.0 #ad
The world is guarded by dragons. Lurking in the shadows and keeping out of sight, they keep evil at bay. Or do they?
Scarlet lives an ordinary life in LA. She is going about her life as normal when she finds out the hard way about the creatures that go bump in the night.
With her guardian missing and strange events happening wherever she goes, she is forced to confront the truth and accept her true nature. Will she become what she needs to be?
Better Off Dead
by Lee Child, Andrew Child
Rating: 4.1 #ad
Digging graves had not been part of my plans when I woke up that morning.
Reacher goes where he wants, when he wants. That morning he was heading west, walking under the merciless desert sun – until he comes upon a curious scene. A Jeep has crashed into the only tree for miles around. A woman is slumped over the wheel. Dead? No, nothing is what it seems.
Our Wild and Precious Lives
by A.G. Russo
Rating: 4.6 #ad
“Our Wild and Precious Lives deals with the big questions of Life, Death, Love and Loss set against the backdrop of World War II and the Korean Conflict…it also deals with the social upheaval in families and societies caused by war, on both sides…” Amazon Review
In 1960 Cold War Germany, Tom and Melly McCarron, teenage Army brats, contend with adolescence on a small American base near Bavaria, where their father, a decorated war veteran, begins a three-year tour of duty. As tensions in Berlin rise between the Allies and the Soviets, and threaten to bring about World War III, the base teenagers forge bonds of loyalty and love stronger than any of the adults understand.
The Darkest Evening of the Year
by Dean Koontz
Rating: 4.5 #ad
BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Dean Koontz’s The City.
With each of his #1 New York Times bestsellers, Dean Koontz has displayed an unparalleled ability to entertain and enlighten readers with novels that capture the essence of our times even as they bring us to the edge of our seats. Now he delivers a heart-gripping tour de force he’s been waiting years to write, at once a love story, a thrilling adventure, and a masterwork of suspense that redefines the boundaries of primal fear—and of enduring devotion.
TWICE ON CHRISTMAS
by MCGARVEY BLACK
Rating: 4.3 #ad
A NAIL-BITING PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER WITH ONE OF THE BIGGEST TWISTS YOU’LL READ THIS YEAR.
After choir practice for midnight mass, college sophomore Rose Grandon takes a short-cut through Harbor Park. Grabbed from behind, she is violently assaulted, beaten and left for dead.
The last thing she hears is someone singing Silent Night. Several hours later, the police find Rose lying in a ditch. Badly beaten – but alive.
The Paris Affair
by Melanie Hudson
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong meets Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale in this moving and powerful novel about love, loss and the resilience of the human spirit.
Scarred by his experiences in World War One, German doctor, Sebastian Braun lives a quiet life tending to his patients and his beloved garden. Until Sophie Hathaway bursts into his life and challenges his dearly-held beliefs. And just at the moment Sebastian discovers love for the first time war is on the horizon once again, threatening not just his peace of mind…
ODETTE’S SONG
by A. G. Russo
Rating: 4.3 #ad
What’s going to happen to six-year-old Hunter?
His parents are dead, and his grandmother is dying. He’s left with a family legacy of addiction, depression, and suicide. Hunter’s mother, Odette, wanted the husband she left for another man, to raise him, but Nico, alcoholic, depressed, and full of rage, wants no part of the child. He cannot accept that Odette, his wife and songwriting partner, left him.
During their senior year of high school, the beautiful, multiracial Odette, with an incredible voice and stage presence, joined Nico’s band…
Monday’s Mystery eBooks
A Highland Christmas
by M. C. Beaton
Rating: 4.4 #ad
In the dark, wintry highlands of Lochdubh, Scotland, where the local Calvinist element resists the secular trimmings of Christmas, the spirit of Old St. Nick is about as welcome as a flat tire on a deserted road. Nor is crime taking a holiday, as Constable Hamish Macbeth soon finds himself protecting an unhappy girl, unlocking the secrets of a frightened old woman, and retrieving some stolen holiday goods. Now the lanky lawman must use all his Highland charm and detective skills to make things right.
The Knife Slipped
by Erle Stanley Gardner
Rating: 4.3 #ad
Lost for more than 75 years, The Knife Slipped was meant to be the second book in the series, but shelved when Gardner’s publisher objected to (among other things) Bertha Cool’s tendency to “talk tough, swear, smoke cigarettes, and try to gyp people.” But this tale of adultery and corruption, of double-crosses and triple identities—however shocking for 1939—shines today as a glorious present from the past, a return to the heyday of private eyes and shady dames, of powerful criminals, crooked cops, blazing dialogue, and delicious plot twists.
OFFENBUNKER
by A.G. Russo
Rating: 4.2 #ad
A top secret bunker deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A silo housing a ballistic missile.
Cold War super powers the United States and the Soviet Union are engaged in an intense “arms race” build up of nuclear weapons and face off for control as the fate of the free world hangs in the balance.
The CIA, U.S. military intelligence, spies, double agents, the KGB, Stasi secret police, and assassins engage in a dangerous contest of espionage as Russia wants to spread communism and take control of Europe, and the United States wants to stop them.
What is the personal cost to those who devote their lives to preventing nuclear war?
There Came Both Mist and Snow
by Michael Innes
Rating: 3.8 #ad
A Scotland Yard detective investigates when gunfire disrupts an aristocratic family’s Christmas celebrations in this classic British mystery.
The relatives of Sir Basil Roper are gathering to celebrate Christmas at the family’s ancestral home in Yorkshire. While the ancient estate has remained unchanged for centuries, the surrounding area now features neon signs, a textile mill, and a brewery…
Picasso’s Motorcycle
by Marc Sercomb
Rating: 4.4 #ad
France, 1940.
An unexpected gift of an old motorcycle with a tragically romantic past hurls a young orphan into the thick of things as war breaks out and his life changes forever. Half-French/half-German Daniel must find a way to survive in a world that mercy seems to have abandoned. This book transports the reader to Nazi-occupied France, where Daniel unwittingly and unexpectedly finds himself working for the Resistance, and ultimately to the Russian Front in a twist of fate so startling that no one can see it coming. In turn quirky, heartwarming, beguiling and uncompromising, author Marc Sercomb weaves together many moods and colors to tell young Daniel’s story. Beyond engaging, Picasso’s Motorcycle has been hailed as a genuine “page-turner” by those who have so far encountered it.
The Pantomime Murders
by Fiona Veitch Smith
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Someone is killing fairy godmothers in Cinderella… Can Miss Clara Vale crack the case before the clock strikes twelve?
1929, December: Snow is falling, and Miss Clara Vale is wrapped up against the cold as she braves the icy streets of Newcastle in her latest investigation.
When a young actress from the touring pantomime of Cinderella arrives at her door, Clara isn’t sure what to make of her request. Sybil Langford, the legendary fairy godmother in their production, has mysteriously vanished. Could Clara help track her down?
The Hollow Place
by Rick Mofina
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Book #2 THE HOLLOW PLACE: While driving to Canada with her boyfriend to start a new life, Samantha Moore, a college student from New York City, vanishes from a lonely, low-rent motel in Vermont.
Ray Wyatt, a veteran reporter grappling with the tragic loss of his wife and son, is assigned to delve into the mystery enveloping the young woman’s disappearance.
The Street
by Susi Holliday
Rating: 3.6 #ad
Their neighbours welcomed them with open arms. Now they’ve vanished without a trace.
Anna and Peter desperately need to escape London for a fresh start. And they’ve found just the place: a perfect house on a perfect street in a perfect new development on the Scottish coast. But before they’ve even unpacked, they discover that the community they’ve moved into might be keeping secrets of its own…
Eager to fit in, Anna and Peter spend their first evening with their new neighbours, a couple who turn up on their doorstep to welcome them with open arms.
The Eight Reindeer of the Apocalypse
by Tom Holt
Rating: 4.3 #ad
The team of commercial sorcerers at Dawson, Ahriman & Dawson can help with any metaphysical engineering project, large or small (though by definition they all tend to be pretty large).
They can also create massive great puddles of chaos that might one day swallow up the entire universe.
Take, for example, the decision to recruit a certain bearded fellow whose previous work experience mainly involves reindeer and jingle bells. It might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but is he really the best person to save the world from Tiamat the Destroyer, who has literally gone ballistic?
Sunday’s Mystery eBooks
Miss Riddell’s Cozy Mystery Boxset
by P.C. James
Rating: 4.4 #ad
Boxset: Over 2,300 pages of clues, conundrums, and canny investigating!
Northern England. Miss Pauline Riddell can’t abide injustice. So when she gets tangled up in a suspicious homicide, she sets her sharp mind to unraveling the messy murder. And after unmasking the killer, the eagle-eyed accountant realizes she has a flair for investigation that could change her entire life.
This collection contains all ten volumes in the Miss Riddell series, with adventures spanning from 1953 to 1988. While away the hours immersed in delightfully deft prose, vivid historical details, and humorous-yet-believable plots.
ONCE UPON A MURDEROUS DELUSION
by A.G. Russo
Rating: 4.2 #ad
The year is 1980 in a small, sleepy New England town. Out of nowhere, a series of devastating murders threaten the safety and well-being of the community. A serial killer has begun a deadly game of catch-me-if-you-can with local police, who have dubbed the carnage, “The Mommy Murders.”
Frightened residents are certain the violent rape/murders are in some way connected to the psychiatric unit of Parkhirst General Hospital. Nella, a nurse angst-ridden by her service during the Vietnam War, is new to the area and the hospital. She joins the tight-knit group of nurses on the evening shift. Val, the leader of the group, with her own history of trauma, believes it stems from the prejudice their patients suffer from a community unsympathetic to mental illness. Or is evil closer to home than they think?
Murder at the Merton Library
by Andrea Penrose
Rating: 4.5 #ad
For fans of Miss Scarlet and the Duke and Bridgerton—a masterfully plotted mystery that combines engaging protagonists with rich historical detail and “an unusually rich look at Regency life,” (Publishers Weekly), plus a touch of romance that readers of Amanda Quick and Deanna Raybourn will savor.
Responding to an urgent plea from a troubled family friend, the Earl of Wrexford journeys to Oxford only to find the reclusive university librarian has been murdered and a rare manuscript has gone missing. The only clue is that someone overheard an argument in which Wrexford’s name was mentioned.
Even Steven
by John Gilstrap
Rating: 4.1 #ad
When Bobby and Susan Martin come across a dirty, shivering child at their campsite, the last thing the childless couple expects is to be drawn into an unthinkable crime. But when one of the boy’s kidnappers comes out of the brush waving a gun, Bobby is forced to react. In one chaotic, explosive moment, the predator is brutally murdered. But was he a criminal – or a cop?
With a vicious crime ring closing in on them, and unsure of whom to trust, Bobby and Susan desperately plunge into the heart of danger to save the boy – and themselves.
The Nurses
by Dennis Higgins
Rating: 4.7 #ad
A third-year nursing student, Emma Wilson was excellent in her field. Working rotations in the Chicago Southside hospital, she became fascinated with eight student nurses of the past whose black and white photos were on display in the hospital’s cafeteria. She cared too much for her patients, however, and passion overtook her when she lost one of them. As tears and distress overwhelmed her emotions, she gazed at the photos on the wall and lost consciousness.
When she came to, she was looking up at the faces of two of the nurses from the wall. She had somehow entered the body of a beautiful nursing student named Joanne Walsh back in 1966. Now as Joanne, she had to learn how to deal with life and the lack of medical advances in the past, as well as coming face to face with a mysterious madman.
Fragments of Fear
by Carrie Stuart Parks
Rating: 4.6 #ad
FBI-certified forensic artist Carrie Stuart Parks infuses her real-life expertise into her award-winning suspense novels.
Evelyn McTavish’s world came crashing down with the suicide of her fiancé. As she struggles to put her life back together and make a living from her art, she receives a call that her dog is about to be destroyed at the pound. Except she doesn’t own a dog. The shelter is adamant that the microchip embedded in the canine with her name and address makes it hers.
Courting Betsy
by Judy Ann Davis
Rating: 4.7 #ad
When Betsy Ashmore, adopted sister to a family of four brothers, discovers U.S. Marshal Luke Ashmore is lying wounded in a renegade Indian camp, she can’t refuse to help a brother in peril – especially one she has loved all her life. With the help of a wily Ute Indian, the spunky shopkeeper saddles up to rescue him.
Marshal Luke Ashmore never expected to be bushwhacked while escorting the young boy of a murdered army scout northward to Fort Collins in the Colorado Territory. Outlaws want the boy and believe he knows the location of a hidden treasure.
Saturday’s Mystery eBooks
The Case of the Bouncing Grandma
by Alice K. Arenz
Rating: 4.4 #ad
WAS THERE REALLY A FOOT DANGLING OUT OF THAT CARPET?
Fifty-two-year-old Glory Harper is stuck in a wheelchair with a broken leg, bored, and itching for some excitement. She doesn’t expect it to come in the form of a foot dangling out the back of a carpet as it’s carried into her new neighbor’s house. But Glory’s past “run-ins” with the police makes her latest report more difficult to believe. And, just when she thinks someone’s taking her seriously, Glory realizes Detective Rick Spencer, a Harrison Ford look-alike, appears more interested in her than in her story.
Treason of Sparta
by Christian Cameron
Rating: 4.7 #ad
When the dust settled and the blood dried after the Battle of Plataea, Greeks might have thought that their freedom was secured. But before the corpse of the Great King’s general was cold, Athens and Sparta began to bicker over dividing up the spoils.
After an autumn of victory, it’s a long cold winter among the burned cities and destroyed shrines of Greece, and a hungry spring. And when Arimnestos goes to sea to cruise the Persian-held coasts, he finds that Persia is still not beaten… and that old alliances are now fraying.
O’SHAUGHNESSY INVESTIGATIONS, INC.
by A.G. Russo
Rating: 4.7 #ad
The homefront, summer 1942, Brooklyn, New York. Six months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, America was fighting overseas with the Allies in World War II. Maeve O’Shaughnessy’s fight for survival was different. Her three brothers were shipped out and left her with their new detective agency and fifteen-year-old brother to manage. Before the War, Maeve worked as a secretary. She knew nothing about detective agencies. From the start she struggled to make enough money to feed Jimmy and herself. Vic Marino, a no-nonsense ex-cop, showed up and told her he was going to help her make a go of the agency. Maeve vehemently protested but Vic insisted she had no choice.
Make Her Pay
by Miranda Rijks
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Leonie has the perfect life. Someone wants to take it away.
Leonie is living her best life. Still in her twenties, she’s beautiful, successful and has just met Markus, the man of her dreams.
But Leonie has a secret. Ten years ago, she was involved in an accident in which another driver died. Leonie shouldn’t have been behind the wheel that night – no license, no insurance – so she fled the scene. And ever since, she’s been struggling to deal with the terrible guilt.
Northern Redemption
by Laurie Wood
Rating: 4.3 #ad
Runaway bride Lise Dumont would rather face down polar bears than marry her abusive ex-fiancé. When she returns to Churchill, Manitoba to reclaim her job as a Conservation Officer, the peace of the tundra finally helps soothe her spirit.
Northern Lights Helicopter Tour owner, Rory Gallagher, isn’t looking for a relationship deeper than the one he has with his pet cat; despite his family’s desire for him to settle down and produce grandchildren. Scarred by memories of not being able to save his father from drowning seven years ago, Rory’s fine with being alone…
Intruder in the Dark
by George Bellairs
Rating: 4.3 #ad
A corpse in a country house brings Scotland Yard to an eerily quiet English village, in this tale by a master of British mystery.
Cyril Savage has inherited the home of his wealthy and estranged aunt. But before Savage has the chance to discover her fortune, he is struck dead in the cellar of this once grand country house in the strange, nearly deserted village of Plumpton Bois. The police are baffled and—unable to unearth a motive, let alone a killer—call for the assistance of Scotland Yard…
Read Between the Crimes
by Annalisa Russo
Rating: 4.7 #ad
Chicago 1927. Can love blossom when you meet over a dead body?
Against her affluent family’s wishes, Elise MacMillan leaves her privileged life, and finally lands a paying job as a stenographer. She and her two new friends – a budding actress and a British writer of penny dreadfuls – find a decent place to live with her recluse uncle and madcap scientist, Archibald Lemon, in his sprawling mansion. Her life is the frog’s eyebrows now, but unfortunately, Elise ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Blighted Stars
by Megan E. O’Keefe
Rating: 4.3 #ad
Stranded on a dead planet with her mortal enemy, a spy must survive and uncover a conspiracy in the first book of an epic space opera trilogy by an award‑winning author.
She’s a revolutionary. Humanity is running out of options. Habitable planets are being destroyed as quickly as they’re found and Naira Sharp thinks she knows the reason why. The all-powerful Mercator family has been controlling the exploration of the universe for decades, and exploiting any materials they find along the way under the guise of helping humanity’s expansion. But Naira knows the truth, and she plans to bring the whole family down from the inside.
Bread of the Dead
by Ann Myers
Rating: 4.2 #ad
A Santa Fe chef investigates when murder sours her sweet plans for the Day of the Dead in this culinary mystery series debut.
Life couldn’t be sweeter for Tres Amigas Café chef Rita Lafitte, decorating sugar skulls and taste-testing rich, buttery pan de muerto in anticipation of Santa Fe’s Day of the Dead bread-baking contest. That is, until her friendly landlord, Victor, is found dead next door.
The Clan of Hogan Falls
by Serena Meadows
Rating: 5.0 #ad
Prepare yourself for these eight stories about female wolf shifters whose lives have been in danger since birth. Abandoned by their clans, they all grew up together and now run a successful bed and breakfast.
But it isn’t until they meet their fated mates that everything becomes turbulent again. The enemies have returned, and the women have much more to lose than just their lives. They now also have their hearts on the line.
The Munich Girl
by Phyllis Edgerly Ring
Rating: 4.2 #ad
Anna Dahlberg grew up eating dinner under her father’s war-trophy portrait of Eva Braun. Fifty years after the war, she discovers what he never did – that her mother and Hitler’s mistress were friends.
The secret surfaces with a mysterious monogrammed handkerchief, and a man, Hannes Ritter, whose Third Reich family history is entwined with Anna’s. Plunged into the world of the “ordinary” Munich girl who was her mother’s confidante – and a tyrant’s lover – Anna finds her every belief about right and wrong challenged.