Tuesday’s Mystery eBooks
The Vatican Secret
by David Leadbeater
Rating: 4.2 #ad
You’ve cracked the Da Vinci code, now uncover the Vatican secret…
The deepest secrets are kept in the darkest places. When ex-MI5 operative Joe Mason is sent to Rome to guard an elderly professor and his daughter, he thinks he’s in for an easy ride.
But on their first day in the Vatican secret archives, a masked assassin gains entry, shoots Joe’s client in cold blood and steals an ancient manuscript. Giving chase, Joe can’t imagine what could lie within those pages that would make someone willing to kill.
The Knowledge
by Martha Grimes
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Robbie Parsons is one of London’s finest, a black cab driver who knows every street, every theater, every landmark in the city by heart. In his backseat is a man with a gun in his hand—a man who brazenly committed a crime in front of the Artemis Club, a rarefied art gallery-cum-casino, then jumped in and ordered Parsons to drive. As the criminal eventually escapes to Nairobi, Detective Superintendent Richard Jury comes across the case in the Saturday paper.
Two days previously, Jury had met and instantly connected with one of the victims of the crime, a professor of astrophysics at Columbia and an expert gambler. Feeling personally affronted, Jury soon enlists Melrose Plant, Marshall Trueblood, and his whole gang of merry characters to contend with a case that takes unexpected turns into Tanzanian gem mines…
The Resentment
by T. O. Paine
Rating: 3.8 #ad
Would you forgive your son’s kidnapper? Lauren Kaine has everything she ever wanted — a fabulous home, a shiny Lexus, a bright sixteen-year-old son, and a loving husband with a lucrative internet career. Tonight, she walks hand-in-hand with William beneath the lustrous Seattle sky, celebrating twenty-two years of marriage.
But they’re not alone. A mysterious black Audi comes out of nowhere and chases William onto a bridge. He shouts, “They’re here for the card,” and falls to his death. Enraged, Lauren attacks the car, but the tinted windows hide the driver’s face, and it speeds away.
Boy in the Box
by Marc E. Fitch
Rating: 4.1 #ad
Ten years ago a mysterious and tragic hunting accident deep in the Adirondack Mountains left a boy buried in a storied piece of land known as Coombs’ Gulch and four friends with a terrible secret.
Now, Jonathan Hollis and brothers Michael and Conner Braddick must return to the place that changed their lives forever in order to keep their secret buried. What they don’t realize is that they are walking into a trap – one set decades earlier by a supernatural being who is not confined by time or place: a demon that demands a sacrifice.
A Painted Goddess
by Victor Gischler
Rating: 4.4 #ad
When the gods go to war, who will stand against their divine fury?
In the thrilling conclusion to the A Fire Beneath the Skin trilogy, the enchanted kingdom of Helva faces a nightmarish future of endless bloodshed, and Rina Veraiin—a young warrior-duchess armed with mysterious, magical tattoos—must use her fantastic powers to save her home from eternal war.
As her far-flung friends scour Helva for additional tattoos to increase her formidable abilities, Rina reckons with an enigmatic death priest…the one whose contract grants her extraordinary magic but demands an awful price. When her debt comes due, can Rina make the ultimate sacrifice?
Defy The Stars
by Cathrina Constantine
Rating: 3.8 #ad
Circus grunt. Charmer. Fire wrangler
Growing up within the grind of the enchanted Circus Faire, Crew’s unique talents have blossomed. Though, he’s been warned that the King of Hawkswing is determined to eradicate a certain species, and for his own sake Crew must keep his formidable gifts under wraps.
Relations between interspecies caused an imbalance of power and now are strictly forbidden. Dolorans, like Sage and her sister, are being hunted and persecuted because of their intense powers, leaving them no choice but to run, escaping the genocide of their kind…
November Road
by Lou Berney
Rating: 4.3 #ad
Set against the assassination of JFK, a poignant and evocative crime novel that centers on a desperate cat-and-mouse chase across 1960s America—a story of unexpected connections, daring possibilities, and the hope of second chances from the Edgar Award-winning author of The Long and Faraway Gone.
Frank Guidry’s luck has finally run out.
A loyal street lieutenant to New Orleans’ mob boss Carlos Marcello, Guidry has learned that everybody is expendable. But now it’s his turn—he knows too much about the crime of the century: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Monday’s Mystery eBooks
Secret Sleuth Box Set
by Patricia McLinn
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Book 1: Death on the Diversion: Sheila Mackey has a secret. To the world, she’s author of a blockbuster book. Her wily great-aunt, the actual author, orchestrated this mutually beneficial masquerade. Now the aunt’s retiring and Sheila must draft Act Two of her own life. This cruise is supposed to be the perfect time to do that…
Book 2: Death on Torrid Avenue: Sheila turns her back on a Manhattan lifestyle and the publishing world that once defined her to put down roots near the Ohio River in North Bend County, Kentucky. Here, she finds a new life, a new home and a new love: Gracie, the rescue collie. Then Gracie discovers a body at the dog park, a ticklish situation for an amateur sleuth with a big secret of her own…
Unleashing Magic
by D. J. Dalton
Rating: 5.0 #ad
She changed the fate of the land. Can she survive the terrifying consequences?
Keren Stewart’s fight has just begun. With the elf that kidnapped her best friends still on the run, she devises a daring rescue. But they aren’t the only ones in need of saving. When a mysterious illness befalls her fire-breathing friends, she rebels against the elder sorcerer to fight for the dragon races’ very existence.
Embarking on a doomed adventure, she refuses to give up on family, friends, and the ailing hatchlings fighting for their lives. But with traitors on her team and deadly clifftop battles, Keren’s rescue quest feels destined for disaster.
Check out:
(Twisted Curse Series)
House of Skin
by Jonathan Janz
Rating: 4.2 #ad
“Fans of ghost stories like The Haunting of Hill House and Hell House will love this book.” – Horror Maiden
Myles Carver is dead. But his estate, Watermere, lives on, waiting for a new Carver to move in. Myles’s wife, Annabel, is dead too, but she is also waiting, lying in her grave in the woods. For nearly half a century she was responsible for a nightmarish reign of terror, and she’s not prepared to stop now. She is hungry to live again…and her unsuspecting nephew, Paul, will be the key…
The Prime Minister’s Secret Agent
by Susan Elia Macneal
Rating: 4.4 #ad
World War II rages on across Europe, but Maggie Hope has finally found a moment of rest on the pastoral coast of western Scotland. Home from an undercover mission in Berlin, she settles down to teach at her old spy training camp, and to heal from scars on both her body and heart. Yet instead of enjoying the quieter pace of life, Maggie is quickly drawn into another web of danger and intrigue. When three ballerinas fall strangely ill in Glasgow – including one of Maggie’s dearest friends – Maggie partners with MI-5 to uncover the truth behind their unusual symptoms. What she finds points to a series of poisonings that may expose shocking government secrets and put countless British lives at stake.
The Luck of Han’anga
by Thomas Watson
Rating: 4.3 #ad
An age of peaceful exploration has ended.
The centuries old dream of meeting an intelligent, nonhuman species has finally come true, in the form of the people known as the Leyra’an. But the dream soon becomes something darker when the Leyra’an prove to be more than just humanoid. They are like us to a degree that cannot be explained by chance alone. The search for the answer to this mystery will reveal a universe stranger and more dangerous than the crew of the probeship William Bartram could have imagined, and expose both Humanity and the Leyra’an to the threat of extinction.
Check out:
(War of the Second Iteration Mysteries)
Death on Gokumon Island
by Seishi Yokomizo
Rating: 4.3 #ad
Loosely inspired by Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the brilliant Gokumon Island is perhaps the most highly regarded of all the great Seishi Yokomizo’s classic Japanese mysteries.
Detective Kosuke Kindaichi arrives on the remote Gokumon Island bearing tragic news–the son of one of the island’s most important families has died, on a troop transport ship bringing him back home after the Second World War. But Kindaichi has not come merely as a messenger–with his last words, the dying man warned that his three step-sisters’ lives would now be in danger. The scruffy detective is determined to get to the bottom of this mysterious prophecy, and to protect the three women if he can.
Ripple
by Jim Cosgrove
Rating: 4.5 #ad
A chilling investigation into the unsolved “boy in the woods” murder; journalist Jim Cosgrove chronicles his decades-long struggle to uncover the truth of a family friend’s disappearance and death — perfect for fans of I’ll be Gone in the Dark and Memorial Drive.
For nine years, South Carolina officials struggled to identify “the boy in the woods,” a young man whose body had been discovered just south of Myrtle Beach in a fishing village called Murrells Inlet.
Meanwhile, 1,200 miles away in Kansas City, Missouri, Frank McGonigle’s family searched for him at Grateful Dead concerts and in the face of every long-haired hitchhiker they passed.
Highland Secrets
by Elizabeth Rose
Rating: 4.3 #ad
Will her secret start or stop a war?
The Lady Captive Being a daughter of one of the Legendary Bastards of the Crown proves to be a blessing as well as a curse for Fia Douglas. Having both English and Scottish blood, she is being fostered in England along with her sister and cousins, having been chosen by the late queen to be in her secret society of strong women.
When a war breaks out between the English and the Scots, Fia finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. While visiting the queen’s secret garden, she comes across a wounded Highland spy. Fia helps him, but he ends up kidnapping her in return. As a prisoner in her own homeland, she uses her skill of reading people to help her escape, as well as to find out how Alastair really feels about her.
Check out:
(Secrets of the Heart Series)