Wednesday’s Mystery eBooks
PLOTTED IN CORNWALL
by JANIE BOLITHO
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Rose Trevelyan is making quite a name for herself as an artist. After the success of her solo exhibition, she is commissioned to paint the portraits of two sisters in a remote farmhouse on Bodmin Moor.
But there’s something curious about the sisters . . .
With no partners or children between them, the sisters are on their own. They want their portraits painted ‘just for fun’, as there will be no one left to remember them when they’re gone.
The Persuasion
by Iris Johansen
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Forensic sculptor Eve Duncan and ex-Navy Seal Joe Quinn are about to give Seth Caleb their trust for the most important duty of his life: keeping their daughter, Jane, safe at any cost. Her talent as an artist has caught the attention of a brilliant psychopath with a violent past.
Seth, Jane’s strongest ally and fiercest protector, is determined to keep her out of danger, but that becomes nearly impossible when Jane is forced to take matters into her own hands and confronts the madman who wants her for himself . . . and wants Seth Caleb dead.
The Pelican Trees
by Patrick Higgins
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Shelby McKinney thought she had it all…a great marriage, three wonderful children and a beautiful house in Summerville, South Carolina. On the surface, everything appeared near-perfect until her beloved grandfather, Luther Mellon, died and purposely left her out of his will in order to get her full, undivided attention.
Everything quickly crumbles, rendering Shelby completely inconsolable, until she mysteriously hears from her late-grandfather, Luther Mellon, from the grave. In this hand-written letter, he informs his granddaughter that he hadn’t forgotten about her after all. But if she wants her inheritance, she must find it buried six-feet beneath the sand somewhere in the state of Florida.
From the Shadows
by James R. Benn
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Southern France, 1944: Ex-Boston cop and wartime military investigator Billy Boyle is given a dangerous assignment—to extract a British Special Operations Executive officer from Crete and take him to France to serve on a security detail to identify fascist sympathizers. The mission gets even more complicated when Billy realizes how many enemies the officer he must protect has accrued. In the aftermath of the failed, and costly, Vercors uprising, tensions among Resistance groups are running high, and the mission turns far deadlier than expected.
The Lying Room
by Nicci French
Rating: 4.1 #ad
One little secret between a married woman, her lover, and a killer.
In this thrilling standalone from the internationally bestselling author of the Frieda Klein series, a married woman’s affair with her boss spirals into a dangerous game of chess with the police when she discovers he’s been murdered and she clears the crime scene of all evidence.
It should have been just a mid-life fling. A guilty indiscretion that Neve Connolly could have weathered. An escape from twenty years of routine marriage to her overworked husband, and from her increasingly distant children. But when Neve pays a morning-after visit to her lover, Saul, and finds him brutally murdered, their pied-à-terre still heady with her perfume, all the lies she has so painstakingly stitched together threaten to unravel.
Queen’s Bounty
by Fiona Buckley
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Ursula Blanchard is rudely shaken on receipt of a threatening letter from the exiled Anne Percy, Countess of Northumberland, whose treasonous plot against Elizabeth I Ursula helped foil a few months previously.
Ursula dismisses the countess’s letter as idle threats, but then a series of strange events rocks Ursula’s household—and Ursula herself is accused of witchcraft. Could Anne Percy really be orchestrating a plot against Ursula from her exile in the Netherlands? And, if so, how can Ursula prove it before she is hanged as a witch?
Grave Descend
by Michael Crichton
Rating: 4.1 #ad
Leagues below the sparkling blue water of the Caribbean Sea lies the mysterious wreckage of the Grave Descend. Protected by a wall of coral reef and blood-thirsty sharks, the corpse of the sunken yacht has been deemed unrecoverable by every diver in the world. Until James McGregor is offered a shot at it.
For McGregor, a thirty-nine-year-old diver with a long history of unsavory salvage jobs, it’s his last chance at a big payday. But the more he learns about the wreck, the more questions he uncovers—because none of the survivors are telling the same story. How did the ship really sink? What was its cargo? And why is this whole project starting to feel like a suicide mission?
Song of the Pearl and Oyster
by Patty Duffy
Rating: 4.4 #ad
Nora is a surprise guest at her mother’s 75th birthday party, and she’s not sure her mother will be happy about it. Nora was sent away from home when she was six years old. Song of the Pearl and Oyster is based on real events following three generations of women. Beginning in 1938 with a Japanese pearl diver and a dream, the narrative charts a path to America’s internment camps, post-war change, and the journey of a lonely, young girl. When young Nora overhears her grandmother speaking bitterly about her Japanese father in California, she makes a decision. She’ll leave the woman’s sharp-tongued abuse and run away to find him with only their shared last name to guide her. Nora dreams that her violin will help her find a place in a culture that has no place for her.
Tuesday’s Mystery eBooks
The Cthulhu Casebooks
by James Lovegrove
Rating: 4.5 #ad
It is the autumn of 1910, and for fifteen long years Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson have battled R’lluhloig, the Hidden Mind that was once Professor James Moriarty. Europe is creeping inexorably towards war, and a more cosmic conflict is nearing its zenith, as in a single night all the most eminent members of the Diogenes Club die horribly, seemingly by their own hands. Holmes suspects it is the handiwork of a German spy working for R’lluhloig, but his search for vengeance costs an old friend his life.
Red Vengeance
by Uzi Eilam
Rating: 4.5 #ad
If you wish for peace… Be ready for vengeance.
Gideon Ben-Ari is officially retired, trading the exciting life of global counterterrorism for a career as an international security expert. He is confident that the fate of Israel and the free world is safe in the hands of his successors – his innovative daughter Noam, her genius husband Dan, and their common friend “Erik” – son of Iranian doctor Nimer al-Khaldi, Gideon’s nemesis-turned-collaborator.
But in a world like Gideon’s, nothing lasts forever – especially peace.
House
by Frank Peretti
Rating: 4.1 #ad
A mind-bending supernatural thriller from the creators of This Present Darkness and Sinner.
Ted Dekker and Frank Peretti—two of the most acclaimed writers of supernatural thrillers—have joined forces for the first time with this non-stop thrill ride. Enter House—where you’ll find yourself thrown into a killer’s deadly game in which the only way to win is to lose . . . and the only way out is in.
One game. Seven players. Three rules. Game ends at dawn.
The Long Weekend
by Gilly Macmillan
Rating: 3.9 #ad
Dark Fell Barn is a “perfectly isolated” retreat, or so says its website when Jayne books a reservation for her friends. A quiet place, far removed from the rest of the world, is exactly what they need.
The women arrive for a girls’ night ahead of their husbands. There’s ex-Army Jayne, hardened and serious, but also damaged. Ruth, the driven doctor and new mother who is battling demons of her own. Young Emily, just wed and insecure, the newest addition of this tight-knit band. Missing this year is Edie, who was the glue holding them together, until her husband died suddenly.
Madman in the Woods
by Jamie Gehring
Rating: 4.6 #ad
One woman’s haunting sixteen-year account of her youth when she and her family lived closer than anyone to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.
As a child in Lincoln, Montana, Jamie Gehring and her family shared their land, their home, and their dinner table with a hermit with a penchant for murder. But they had no idea that the odd recluse living in the adjacent cabin was anything more than a disheveled man who brought young Jamie painted rocks as gifts. Ted was simply Ted, and erratic behavior, surprise visits, and chilling events while she was riding horses or helping her dad at his sawmill were dismissed because he was “just the odd hermit.” In fact, he was much more—Ted eluded the FBI for seventeen years while mailing explosives to strangers, earning the infamous title of Unabomber.
Murder Under a Red Moon
by Harini Nagendra
Rating: 4.4 #ad
When new bride Kaveri Murthy reluctantly agrees to investigate a minor crime to please her domineering mother-in-law – during the blood moon eclipse, no less – she doesn’t expect, once again, to stumble upon a murder.
With anti-British sentiment on the rise, a charismatic religious leader growing in influence, and the fight for women’s suffrage gaining steam, Bangalore is turning out to be a far more dangerous and treacherous place than Kaveri ever imagined—and everyone’s motives are suspect.
Missing Daughter
by Rick Mofina
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Life can change in an instant. For Ryan and Karen Lane, it happens on the morning they discover their twelve-year-old daughter’s window open, their beloved Maddie missing from her bed. Police investigate. Suspicions swirl. The Lane family is thrown into turmoil. Then detectives turn their sights on them.
No one is ruled out. Not Karen, with her tragic past, who argued with her daughter. Not Ryan, with his violent streak. Not Maddie’s thirteen-year-old brother, Tyler, who heard voices in her room the night she vanished.