Friday’s Mystery eBooks
Plantation Shudders
by Ellen Byron
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Secrets, suspects, and Southern hospitality abound at Maggie Crozat’s Louisiana B&B in this first installment of the Cajun Country cozy mystery series
It’s the end of the summer and Prodigal Daughter Maggie Crozat has returned home to her family’s plantation-turned-bed-and-breakfast in Louisiana. The Crozats have an inn full of guests for the local food festival—elderly honeymooners, the Cajun Cuties, a mysterious stranger from Texas, a couple of hipster lovebirds, and a trio of Georgia frat boys. But when the elderly couple keels over dead within minutes of each other—one from very unnatural causes—Maggie and the others suddenly become suspects in a murder.
A Deadly Affair
by Agatha Christie
Rating: 4.5 #ad
From the Queen of Mystery—this all-new collection of stories about love gone horribly wrong will get your heart racing.
Love can propel us to our greatest heights . . . and darkest depths. In this new compendium of Agatha Christie short stories, witness the dark side of love—crimes of passion, games of the heart, and deadly deceits. This pulse-pounding compendium features beloved detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, master of charades Parker Pyne, the enigmatic Harley Quin, and the adventurous Tommy and Tuppence, all at the ready to solve tantalizing mysteries.
Powerful Enemies
by Terry Toler
Rating: 4.5 #ad
#1 International Best-Selling and Award-Winning Series. Terry Toler does it again with another book of page turning suspense.
New CIA director, Neal Fuller, has it in for Jamie and Alex. He’s determined to shut down AJAX and have the two of them arrested for treason. Alex and Jamie have their own plan.
Their enemies are powerful. Good vs. evil. Who will win in the end?
Stolen Innocence
by Elissa Wall, Lisa Pulitzer
Rating: 4.7 #ad
Stolen Innocence is the gripping New York Times bestselling memoir of Elissa Wall, the courageous former member of Utah’s infamous FLDS polygamist sect whose powerful courtroom testimony helped convict controversial sect leader Warren Jeffs in September 2007. At once shocking, heartbreaking, and inspiring, Wall’s story of subjugation and survival exposes the darkness at the root of this rebel offshoot of the Mormon faith.
Homeless and Dead
by William Mansfield
Rating: 3.7 #ad
A homeless man is found dead and butchered in a dumpster. This leads to a series of heinous murders. Alex Wright, Laguna Beach real estate appraiser, discovers the second body while surfing at Salt Creek and feels the need to help uncover the mystery of why these homeless men were chosen for such a grisly death. A note from the killer suggests the homeless crisis in Orange County may be the killer’s motivation or maybe it’s just a symptom of a psychologically twisted pervert. Alex leads an all-in effort among the rich and powerful elite of Orange County to end homelessness. The action develops as both the FBI and the Newport Beach Police race to solve the case leading to a shocking conclusion.
Trail of the Fallen
by Bart Paul
Rating: 4.3 #ad
A suspense-filled western noir thriller set in California’s Sierra mountains—for readers of Craig Johnson and C. J. Box.
Tommy Smith, former sniper and Army combat veteran, wants nothing more than to be left alone to raise his young family with his deputy-sheriff wife, Sarah, as they run a wilderness outfitting business in the eastern Sierra ranching country where they grew up.
A mass breakout at Folsom Prison shatters their mountain idyll and brings back the PTSD that Tommy hoped he’d left on the battlefields of Afghanistan. Although Folsom is a hundred fifty miles west, every new atrocity by the convicted killers places them closer and closer to Tommy and his family…
Sign Your Fears Away
by Martha Carr, Michael Anderle
Rating: 4.3 #ad
Norah Wintry is a Witch with a dream job. A Hollywood agent getting magical actors’ parts in blockbuster films.
It’s a niche field with unique problems. Somebody gets shrunk down to toadstool size and suddenly everyone’s upset. Welcome to L.A. No worries. Norah will fix it. She has a great family, a crackerjack assistant, and her business is taking off. Until things start going wrong.
Actors are being injured, magic is causing accidents, and someone is hunting down former Silver Griffin Agents. Which makes it her business. Her parents are Silver Griffin agents in hiding.
Norah never intended to get involved in her parent’s line of work. Whole other kind of agent – with real weapons and injuries that are harder to fix.
The Hive
by Gregg Olsen
Rating: 4.0 #ad
In the Pacific Northwest, detective Lindsay Jackman is investigating the murder of a young journalist found at the bottom of a ravine. Lindsay soon learns that the victim was writing an exposé. Her subject: a charismatic wellness guru who’s pulled millions into her euphoric orbit…
To hear Marnie Spellman tell it, when she was a child, a swarm of bees lifted her off the ground and toward the sunlight, illuming her spiritual connection with nature—an uncanny event on which Marnie built a cosmetics empire and became a legend, a healer, and the queen of holistic health and eternal beauty. In her inner circle is an intimate band of devotees called the Hive. They share Marnie’s secrets of success—including one cloaked in darkness for twenty years.
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.
Thursday’s Mystery eBooks
A Killer Ending
by Karen MacInerney
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Bookseller and recent divorcée Max Sayers has risked her life savings to start a fresh chapter with the purchase of Seaside Cottage Books in cozy Snug Harbor, Maine. But she’s barely opened the shop’s doors when her new storybook life takes a dark turn. The morning after the grand opening–featuring a famous author who shows up at the store on the arm of Max’s ex-husband–Max’s rescue dog Winston finds a dead man on the beach behind the shop. The murder weapon? An antique flatiron doorstop… from Max’s bookstore.
Will Max solve the case before the murderer strikes again?
THE PATIENT MAN
by JOY ELLIS
Rating: 4.5 #ad
SHORTLISTED FOR CRIME AND THRILLER BOOK OF THE YEAR AT THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS 2021. JACKMAN AND EVANS’ MOST DANGEROUS ENEMY IS BACK TO FINISH THINGS OFF.
The domestic bliss of Detective Inspector Rowan Jackman of Fenland Constabulary doesn’t last long. His nemesis, serial killer Alistair Ashcroft, is back in town and ready to tidy up unfinished business.
Ashcroft sends a sinister text to DS Marie Evans. His opening move in what will prove to be a lethal game of cat-and-mouse. Yet for all his taunts, where is he? In a county crawling with police on the lookout for him, Ashcroft is nowhere to be found.
EVERYONE JACKMAN CARES ABOUT IS IN DANGER.
The Black Ascot
by Charles Todd
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Scotland Yard’s Ian Rutledge seeks a killer who has eluded Scotland Yard for years in this next installment of the acclaimed New York Times bestselling series.
An astonishing tip from a grateful ex-convict seems implausible—but Inspector Ian Rutledge is intrigued and brings it to his superior at Scotland Yard. Alan Barrington, who has evaded capture for ten years, is the suspect in an appalling murder during Black Ascot, the famous 1910 royal horse race meet honoring the late King Edward VII. His disappearance began a manhunt that consumed Britain for a decade. Now it appears that Barrington has returned to England, giving the Yard a last chance to retrieve its reputation and see justice done. Rutledge is put in charge of a quiet search under cover of a routine review of a cold case.
The Near-Death Experience of Justin Parks
by R.A. Williams
Rating: 4.6 #ad
The past three years haven’t been easy for Justin, causing him to lose faith in a loving, personal God. His fiancée gets killed by a drunk driver a week before their wedding. A year later, after enrolling in the police academy in a misguided effort to avenge his fiancée’s death, he mistakes a Black church pastor for an armed robber, shoots him in the chest, and nearly kills him. In the following months, he struggles with the backlash from the public outrage caused by negative media attention. And just when his life has seemingly returned to normal, a blow to the head sends him to a watery death, only for him to be revived by paramedics a few minutes later.
When Justin awakes from a coma in the hospital, he remembers nothing about the moments leading up to his death or the time between his death and resuscitation. He learns from his doctor that as his traumatic brain injury heals, fragments of memory from the moments before and after his death will eventually return…
Women of the United Federation Marines Trilogy
by Jonathan P. Brazee
Rating: 4.6 #ad
The Women of the United Federation Marines is the omnibus version of the three books in the series. Each book follows the career of one of three women who first cross paths while members of the Second Battalion, Fourth Marines before the needs of the service lead them on her own journey of service to the United Federation.
Gladiator
Sniper
Corpsman
The Family Secret
by Lorhainne Eckhart
Rating: 4.5 #ad
It’s never a good thing when a corpse appears when you least expect it…especially in this dark romantic crime thriller.
Just what is the mystery behind Raymond O’Connells disappearance?
NY Times & USA Today bestselling author Lorhainne Eckhart brings you The Family Secret, an O’Connell family novel, when a body is discovered at the edge of town, rumors, circumstantial evidence and a chance for revenge lead to one family members’s arrest, and an all out effort to take several other O’Connells down as well.
“Wow what drama, what tension, what suspense.” Susan Jordens
The Sword of God
by Mark Dawson
Rating: 4.5 #ad
A man called Milton walks into town…
On the run from his own demons, John Milton treks through the Michigan wilderness into the town of Truth. He’s not looking for trouble, but trouble’s looking for him. He finds himself up against a small-town cop who has no idea with whom he is dealing, and no idea how dangerous he is.
But Milton is double crossed and badly injured. Unarmed and alone, he flees into the remote Porcupine Mountains with a posse on his tail. His enemies thought they could hunt him down. That was a mistake and, where Milton is concerned, one mistake is all you get.
The Pelican Trees
by Patrick Higgins
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Shocking… Left out of her grandfather’s will for no apparent reason, Shelby McKinney mysteriously receives a post-dated letter a few days later, stating 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.
Exciting… The only available clues – limited as they are – were stored in a bank safe-deposit box somewhere in the Sunshine State. Shelby is given 90 days to locate the bank, decipher all clues and find her buried inheritance. If she doesn’t find it within the 90-day time frame, she’ll be forced to forfeit it altogether. Riveting…
Losing Jon
by David Parrish
Rating: 4.4 #ad
David Parrish was in disbelief when he learned that nineteen-year-old Jon Bowie’s body had been found hanged from a backstop at the local high school’s baseball field and the death declared a suicide. David had known Jon and his twin brother since they were boys. He had coached them on the baseball field and welcomed them into his home for sleepovers with his own sons. However, when David learned how Jon’s body was found, he felt compelled to find the facts behind this incomprehensible tragedy.
Soon, David would learn of a brutal incident at a local motel where Jon and his brother had been severely beaten by police officers, the charges filed against those officers, and the months of harassment and intimidation Jon and his brother endured.
Cody
by Jesse Storm
Rating: 4.4 #ad
The year is 1880 and Cody Cameron is recovering from a gunshot wound. The sheriff confirms to Cody that the leader of the outlaws responsible for the massacre at the local post office is Otis Bonney.
The infamous outlaw Otis is known for having his wife by his side. Sheila Bonney is crazier than he is. And Sheila is the one who orders the shooting at the post office, killing for the thrill rather than the money.
Cody vows to seek justice for everyone who died that day, and vengeance for Judy, whom he is certain he would ask for her hand in marriage…
The Munich Girl
by Phyllis Edgerly Ring
Rating: 4.5 #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. With Hannes’s help, she retraces the path of two women who met as teenagers, shared a friendship that spanned the years that Eva Braun was Hitler’s mistress, yet never knew that the men they loved had opposing ambitions.