Friday’s Mystery eBooks
Cookies and Chaos
by C. A. Phipps
Rating: 4.5 #ad
When Murder comes to town! Using her bakery and expertise, Madeline Flynn helps the sheriff’s twin nephews with their cookie sales – until strange things happen at the community center where they sell them.
With a puzzling death, vandalism and a nasty scam, the danger on their doorstep can’t be ignored. Maddie is once again whisked up in an investigation that will take all her sleuthing skills.
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(Maple Lane Mysteries)
The Great Train Robbery
by Michael Crichton
Rating: 4.4 #ad
London, 1855, when lavish wealth and appalling poverty exist side by side, one mysterious man navigates both worlds with perfect ease. Edward Pierce preys on the most prominent of the well-to-do as he cunningly orchestrates the crime of his century. Who would suspect that a gentleman of breeding could mastermind the extraordinary robbery aboard the pride of England’s industrial era, the mighty steam locomotive? Based on fact, but studded with all the suspense and style of fiction, here is a classic historical thriller, set a decade before the age of dynamite—yet nonetheless explosive…
Star-Crossed Dragons
by Chris Cannon
Rating: 4.4 #ad
Ice-princess, Sara Sinclair, is the most un-Blue Blue Dragon of her Clan. And now her parents signed a marriage contract to an absolute asshat. Sara has no interest in being one half of a snobby Blue power couple. In fact, all she can dream about is biting her obnoxious fiancé’s head off and burying him in the garden. Since that can’t happen, her future seems like a lost cause, until she meets Ian, a fire-breathing Red Dragon—who is everything her fiancé is not.
Now Sara’s jumped from the frying pan into the fire because dating outside of your Clan is against Directorate law. Ian could be thrown in jail or executed without a trial. But now that she knows what love feels like, she can’t imagine being with anyone else.
Flesh for Punktown Collection
by Jeffrey Thomas
Rating: 4.4 #ad
Three stories of body modification and genetic engineering in the nightmarish future city its citizens call Punktown.
OPEN MINDED – H. P. Lovecraft’s “Mi-Go” feature in this story about a secretive alien race and the conscience-stricken human technician who’s working for them.
TRANSFORMATION – A young woman working in a brothel that caters to jaded rich people with extreme tastes asks a flesh artist to turn her into…a werewolf.
SACRED MEAT – A man obsessed with an alien actress in adult movies tracks her down to an exclusive club where the darkest of fantasies are fulfilled.
Close Up
by Amanda Quick
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Welcome to Burning Cove, California where 1930s Hollywood glamour conceals a ruthless killer…
Vivian Brazier never thought life as an art photographer would include nightly wake-up calls to snap photos of grisly crime scenes or headshots for aspiring male actors. Although she is set on a career of transforming photography into a new art form, she knows her current work is what’s paying the bills.
After shooting crime scene photos of a famous actress, the latest victim of the murderer the press has dubbed the “Dagger Killer,” Vivian notices eerie similarities to the crime scenes of previous victims – details that only another photographer would have noticed – details that put Vivian at the top of the killer’s target list.
The Munich Girl
by Phyllis Edgerly Ring
Rating: 4.4 #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.
All He Ever Wanted
by Anita Shreve
Rating: 4.2 #ad
“A marriage is always two intersecting stories.”
This realization comes perhaps too late to the husband of Etna Bliss-a man whose obsession with his young wife begins at the moment of their first meeting, as he helps Etna and her companions escape from a fire in a hotel restaurant, and culminates in a marriage doomed by secrets and betrayal.
Written with the intelligence and grace that are the hallmarks of Anita Shreve’s bestselling novels, this gripping tale of desire, jealousy, and loss is peopled by unforgettable characters as real as the emotions that bring them together.
Rejectors
by Kyle Watson
Rating: 4.0 #ad
What would you do as last of the Rejectors? They are coming. Run.
Rejecting the system has a price, and the last rejectors are on the run and must outpace the evil forces that are hunting them. Vowing to never bend to the will of evil leader, will the rejectors be able to escape capture and avoid the delusion that overtakes those who are forced to accept the system? Wrestling with the reality that the battle is taking place in both the seen and unseen realms, the rejectors will stop at nothing to fight for their souls and lives.
Thursday’s Mystery eBooks
Too Chili To Die
by Stephanie Parker McKean
Rating: 4.7 #ad
The future doesn’t bode well for Mackendra Evans when she discovers a murder victim on her first assignment at a new job. It gets worse. An investigation links her to the victim and makes her the chief suspect when police discover she’s the victim’s daughter – and is in line to receive a large inheritance after his death.
Mackendra’s dream is to become a staff writer at a local newspaper and, although it seems to have come true when she is hired by editor Carilee Vinson – her success comes at a steep price. Her editor can be as prickly and barbed as a cattle fence. She discovers siblings she never knew existed – but most of them hate her.
Cold, Cold Bones
by Kathy Reichs
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Winter has come to North Carolina and, with it, a drop in crime. Freed from a heavy work schedule, Tempe Brennan is content to dote on her daughter Katy, finally returned to civilian life from the army. But when mother and daughter meet at Tempe’s place one night, they find a box on the back porch. Inside: a very fresh human eyeball.
GPS coordinates etched into the eyeball lead to a Benedictine monastery where an equally macabre discovery awaits. Soon after, Tempe examines a mummified corpse in a state park, and her anxiety deepens.
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(A Temperance Brennan Mysteries)
Rose and the Cowboy
by Jesse Storm
Rating: 5.0 #ad
“Don’t touch him there! He’s bleeding.” “I know that he’s bleeding! Both of my hands are covered in blood.” “Well, be careful.” “I am being careful, Rose. I don’t want to make it any worse!” “I think he’s waking up.”
Ted was convinced that he was dreaming. And when he opened his eyes, he was sure that there were two angels looking down at him.
“Hello, mister,” Rose said. “How are you feeling?” “Don’t ask him that, Rose,” the other woman replied. “You can clearly see that he’s been shot.” “I just wanted to make sure, okay, Lilly?”
Ted was still in a great deal of pain, but it was obvious that his shoulder had been tended to. He could feel a tightness around his wound. The women were putting pressure on it and preparing to cauterize his gunshot wound.
The Seven Dials Mystery
by Agatha Christie
Rating: 4.5 #ad
A practical joke goes chillingly, murderously wrong in Queen of Mystery Agatha Christie’s classic detective story, The Seven Dials Mystery.
Gerry Wade had proved himself to be a champion sleeper, so the other houseguests decided to play a practical joke on him. Eight alarm clocks were set to go off, one after the other, starting at 6:30 a.m. But when morning arrived, one clock was missing and the prank then backfired, with tragic consequences.
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(Superintendent Battle Mysteries)
Pirates Come Down
by Christopher McMaster
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Fishing in the future takes more than a net!
Rickets is a PAC-Man, his patrol and attack craft the first line of defence against encroaching vessels. Moss is a Fisheries Observer, tasked with seeing that companies abide by the quotas set on target species. Together they play a part in ensuring the waters are not fished to extinction.
But as fisheries elsewhere play out, New Zealand waters start to look more attractive until every ship protects itself with PAC boats, missiles that skim the surface, and kamikaze drones equipped with explosives.
The Missing
by Sarah Langan
Rating: 3.9 #ad
A remote and affluent Maine community, Corpus Christi was untouched by the environmental catastrophe that destroyed the neighboring blue-collar town of Bedford. But all that will change in a heartbeat . . .
The nightmare is awakened when third-grade schoolteacher Lois Larkin takes the children on a field trip to Bedford. There in the abandoned woods, a small, cruel boy unearths an ancient horror—a contagious plague that transforms its victims into something violent, hungry . . . and inhuman.
The Spires
by Kate Moretti
Rating: 4.3 #ad
Strung between two teenagers, an unemployed husband, and a tenuous career, Penelope Cox barely has her life together when the past comes knocking at her door. Willa Blaine, her old roommate, needs her help: refuge from an abusive husband. “Two weeks tops,” she says—but it’s not the imposition that bothers Penelope; it’s the memories Willa brings with her.
Twenty years earlier, Penelope, Willa, and three friends lived together in a converted church. Insular and closed off from the rest of the world, the five roommates formed their own dysfunctional family, celebrating the pinnacle of their lives; they called themselves “the Spires.”
The Snake and the Spider
by Karen Kingsbury
Rating: 4.3 #ad
Best friends Daryl Barber and James Boucher were responsible, and their parents trusted them to spend Spring Break at Daytona Beach unchaperoned. When the boys missed their agreed-upon daily check-ins, their parents were disappointed. When they failed to come home on their planned return date, their parents were terrified. They could not have known that their innocent sons would encounter two violent men on the Florida coast. They could not have imagined the torture their children would endure before their bodies turned up four months later in a Florida swamp. What starts as a dream vacation, ended as every parent’s worst nightmare . . .