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?