Tuesday’s Mystery eBooks
Murder Most Fowl
by Donna Andrews
Rating: 4.8 #ad
In Murder Most Fowl, Meg Langslow’s in for a busy summer. Her husband is directing a production of Macbeth, and most of the cast and crew are occupying spare bedrooms in their house. She also has to keep an eye on Camp Birnam, where a group of medieval reenactors are commemorating the real-life Macbeth by setting up what they fondly believe is an authentic medieval Scottish military camp.
And then there’s Damien Goodwin, a filmmaker who has been hanging around, trying to document the production. When Goodwin hosts a showing of some of the footage he’s taken, he manages to embarrass or offend just about everyone. The next morning Meg isn’t exactly surprised to find that someone has murdered him.
Check out:
(Meg Langslow Mysteries)
The Sandman
by NEIL GAIMAN
Rating: 4.5 #ad
The first issue of the first volume of Neil Gaiman’s horror/fantasy epic! An occultist accidentally traps Morpheus, the embodiment of Dreams, and holds him for 70 years. Finally free, Morpheus seeks his lost objects of power and rediscovers his place in the universe.
Check out:
(The Sandman Mysteries)
The Souls of Lost Lake
by Jaime Jo Wright
Rating: 4.8 #ad
To save the innocent, they must face an insidious evil.
Wren Blythe has long enjoyed living in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, helping her father with ministry at a youth camp. But when a little girl in the area goes missing, an all-out search ensues, reviving the decades-old campfire story of Ava Coons, the murderess who is believed to still roam the forest. Joining the search, Wren stumbles upon the Coonses’ cabin ruins and a sinister mystery she is determined to unearth.
In 1930, Ava Coons has spent the last several years carrying the mantle of mystery since the day she emerged from the woods as a thirteen-year-old girl, spattered with blood, dragging a logger’s ax. She has accepted she will never remember what happened to her family, whose bodies were never found, and that the people of Tempter’s Creek will always blame her for their violent deaths.
Murder at St Anne’s
by J. R. Ellis
Rating: 4.3 #ad
Winter, snow, murder—and a centuries-dead suspect.
In the chilly depths of a Yorkshire winter, a well-liked rector is found bludgeoned to death in her own church. With no sign of a murder weapon, local superstition quickly pins the blame on the ghost of a medieval monk believed to haunt the building…
Well accustomed to unusual murder investigations, DCI Jim Oldroyd takes on the case, along with his assistant, Sergeant Andy Carter, but they are hampered at every turn by the deepening snow and the threat of the supernatural. Even as possible motives and opportunities begin to reveal themselves, Oldroyd struggles to find a better suspect than the hooded phantom.
Check out:
(A Yorkshire Murder Mysteries)
The Long Way Home from Crete
by Isaac Kal
Rating: 4.0 #ad
As the clouds of war and anti-Semitic feelings gather pace in 1930’s Europe, Abraham recognizes the danger that he and others are facing and decides to leave his comfortable life in Germany and travel with his family to Israel. There he intends to make a new life, far from the gathering storm, but life as an exile means a different set of hardships and as a means to support his family he eventually enlists in the British Royal Pioneer Corps, the only unit in the British military where an enemy alien was allowed to serve.
Within its ranks, fighting in desperate battles in Greece and Tobruk, Abraham must find deep reserves of strength and resilience if he is to survive the conflict and return to his wife, Genia, who is left struggling to raise their young son as a single parent in a new country. As the war drags on interminably, Abraham is left shattered by his wife’s unexpected infidelity. But even greater challenges must be faced by his son, Aaron, who is sent to live in an orphanage.
Under Her Care
by Lucinda Berry
Rating: 4.2 #ad
From the bestselling author of The Perfect Child comes a shocking thriller about the disturbing complexities of a mother’s love and the deadly consequences of unravelling family secrets.
On a humid summer day in Alabama, a mayor’s wife turns up brutally murdered under a railroad bridge. Standing next to her body is fourteen-year-old Mason Hill, the autistic son of former Miss USA Genevieve Hill. The locals are quick to level their verdict on young Mason: he did it…
A Trace of Deceit
by Karen Odden
Rating: 4.6 #ad
A young painter digs beneath the veneer of Victorian London’s art world to learn the truth behind her brother’s murder…
Edwin is dead. That’s what Inspector Matthew Hallam of Scotland Yard tells Annabel Rowe when she discovers him searching her brother’s flat for clues. While the news is shocking, Annabel can’t say it’s wholly unexpected, given Edwin’s past as a dissolute risk-taker and art forger, although he swore he’d reformed. After years spent blaming his reckless behavior for their parents’ deaths, Annabel is now faced with the question of who murdered him—because Edwin’s death was both violent and deliberate. A valuable French painting he’d been restoring for an auction house is missing from his studio: find the painting, find the murderer. But the owner of the artwork claims it was destroyed in a warehouse fire years ago.
Check out:
(A Dangerous Duet)
Living Dead in Dallas
by Charlaine Harris
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Even though Sookie has her own vampire to look out for her—her red-hot, cold-blooded boyfriend, Bill Compton—she has to admit that the bloodsuckers did save her life. So when one of the local Undead asks the cocktail waitress for a favor, she feels like she owes them.
Soon, Sookie’s in Dallas using her telepathic skills to search for a missing vampire. She’s supposed to interview certain humans involved. There’s just one condition: The vampires must promise to behave—and let the humans go unharmed. Easier said than done. All it takes is one delicious blonde and one small mistake for things to turn deadly…
Check out:
(Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries)
Monday’s Mystery eBooks
A Crafter Knits a Clue
by Holly Quinn
Rating: 4.3 #ad
When a heartbroken Samantha “Sammy” Kane returns to her hometown of Heartsford, WI, for her best friend Kate’s funeral, she learns that Kate’s much-loved craft store is in danger of perishing with its owner. Confounding all her expectations of the life she would live, Sammy moves back home with her golden retriever and takes over Community Craft. A few doors down Main Street, fellow new arrival Ingrid Wilson has just opened the Yarn Barn, a real “purl” of a shop. But when Sammy strolls over to see if Ingrid could use a little help, she finds Ingrid’s dead body—with a green aluminum knitting needle lodged in her throat.
Check out:
(A Handcrafted Mysteries)
The Becoming
by Nora Roberts
Rating: 4.7 #ad
The world of magick and the world of man have long been estranged from one another. But some can walk between the two – including Breen Siobhan Kelly. She has just returned to Talamh, with her friend, Marco, who’s dazzled and disoriented by this realm – a place filled with dragons and faeries and mermaids (but no WiFi, to his chagrin). In Talamh, Breen is not the ordinary young schoolteacher he knew her as. Here she is learning to embrace the powers of her true identity. Marco is welcomed kindly by her people -and by Keegan, leader of the Fey. Keegan has trained Breen as a warrior, and his yearning for her has grown along with his admiration of her strength and skills.
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(The Dragon Heart Mysteries)
Black Pudding Murder
by Stephanie Parker McKean
Rating: 4.2 #ad
When aging friends form a detective agency in their Scottish village, their likelihood of success seems dubious. One is blind, two have hearing problems, one uses a crutch—and the two youngest members are from America, not Scotland.
Dubbing themselves the Fog Busters, the friends vow to solve a murder that local police have labeled as Death by Misadventure. Indeed, misadventure seems to follow the Fog Busters when the killer attempts to stop them from investigating.
Add in a lost treasure of rare Scottish coins, a false prophet, a string of house breakings and dog nappings, and a dog fighting ring – and the Fog Busters have the recipe for laughter and danger.
Afterburn
by Biba Pearce, Without Warrant
Rating: 4.4 #ad
A fast-paced, engrossing crime thriller set in sultry southern Florida from bestseller Biba Pearce.
When missing heiress Natalia Cruz’s body is found in the Everglades, journalist Kenzie Gilmore is assigned the case. Is she the fourth victim of a sexual predator stalking women in Miami…
…or is her killer trying to make it look like she is? Ex-cop Reid Garrett doesn’t appreciate bodies turning up in his backyard.
The Everglades is his turf… …but there’s been four murdered women in as many months.
Check out:
(Kenzie Gilmore Mysteries)
The November Girl
by Lydia Kang
Rating: 4.4 #ad
Winner of the Nebraska Book Award in 2018!
I am Anda, and the lake is my mother. I am the November storms that terrify sailors and sink ships. With their deaths, I keep my little island on Lake Superior alive. Hector has come here to hide from his family until he turns eighteen. Isle Royale is shut down for the winter, and there’s no one here but me. And now him.
Hector is running from the violence in his life, but violence runs through my veins. I should send him away, to keep him safe. But I’m half human, too, and Hector makes me want to listen to my foolish, half-human heart. And if I do, I can’t protect him from the storms coming for us.
BARRIE HILL REUNION
by Lisette Brodey
Rating: 4.1 #ad
Eight people. One weekend. Eight lives forever changed.
In the mid-1960s, at an elite college in the quaint town of Barrie Hill, Connecticut, a group of literary-minded students met regularly off-campus at the Vanessa Grand Hotel. Often late into the night, they would discuss the day’s news, analyze literature, philosophize, trade barbs, and socialize.
Twenty years after graduation, in 1986, the group’s founder, Clare Dreyser, organizes a weekend reunion. Seven former Barrie Hillers and one guest get together, eager to re-create an extraordinary time in their lives and reunite with old friends…
The Best of Jules de Grandin
by Seabury Quinn
Rating: 4.3 #ad
“Hercule Poirot meets Fox Mulder . . . raises genuine shivers. “ – Kirkus Reviews
A collection of the 20 greatest tales of Jules de Grandin, the supernatural detective made famous in the classic pulp magazine Weird Tales.
Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.