Thursday’s Mystery eBooks
Claws for Alarm
by Cate Conte
Rating: 4.3 #ad
Maddie James has finally given in to her friend Katrina’s pleas to open up her cat cafe to more than ten felines: they’re now up to fifteen purring friends. In fact, JJ’s House of Purrs is making such a splash that she’s getting national attention. The Shoreline Animal Rescue League is quite interested in the cafe, and so Maddie accepts a request to meet with Jillian Allen, the executive director. Jillian shows up at the cafe and asks Maddie if they can partner on a fundraiser to support the local rescue efforts—and she offers up her celebrity endorser and her celebrity cat to sweeten the deal. Maddie, caught up in the prospect, offers up her sister Val to help plan the event.
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(Cat Cafe Mysteries)
Cash and Nettie
by Frank Wheeler
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Cash Summers spent most of his life working his father’s ranch. When Hitch Gunner sends the Gomez brothers to raid the place, only a handful of people survive the attack. Cash’s mother and sister aren’t two of them. Struggling to find justice in an unjust world, Cash and his brothers set out to tear down the men who unraveled their family. Along for the ride is their Uncle Jem, who promises to keep them safe.
Hitch Gunner has made it no secret that he wants Cash dead, and he’s willing to pay a high price to the man who does the job. Born without morals, Hitch’s own family is scared of him.
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(Cat Cafe Mysteries)
The Bone Code
by Kathy Reichs
Rating: 4.5 #ad
On the way to hurricane-ravaged Isle of Palms, a barrier island off the South Carolina coast, Tempe receives a call from the Charleston coroner. The storm has tossed ashore a medical waste container. Inside are two decomposed bodies wrapped in plastic and bound with electrical wire. Tempe recognizes many of the details as identical to those of an unsolved case she handled in Quebec fifteen years earlier. With a growing sense of foreboding, she travels to Montreal to gather evidence.
Meanwhile, health authorities in South Carolina become increasingly alarmed as a human flesh-eating contagion spreads. So focused is Tempe on identifying the container victims that, initially, she doesn’t register how their murders and the pestilence may be related. But she does recognize one unsettling fact.
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(Temperance Brennan Mysteries)
The Cutting Edge
by Jeffery Deaver
Rating: 4.5 #ad
In the early hours of a quiet, weekend morning in Manhattan’s Diamond District, a brutal triple murder shocks the city. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs quickly take the case. Curiously, the killer has left behind a half-million dollars’ worth of gems at the murder scene, a jewelry store on 47th street. As more crimes follow, it becomes clear that the killer’s target is not gems, but engaged couples themselves.
The Promisor vows to take the lives of men and women during their most precious moments–midway through the purchase of an engagement ring, after a meeting with a wedding planner, trying on the perfect gown for a day that will never come. The Promisor arrives silently, armed with knife or gun, and a time of bliss is transformed, in an instant, to one of horror.
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(Lincoln Rhyme Mysteries)
Megan’s Way
by Melissa Foster
Rating: 3.9 #ad
What would you give up for the people you love?
When Megan Taylor, a single mother and artist living on Cape Cod, receives the shocking news that her cancer has returned, she’s faced with the most difficult decision she’s ever had to make. The love she has for her daughter, Olivia, and her closest friends will be stretched and frayed.
Megan’s illness reawakens her best friend, Holly Townsend’s, torment of a long-held secret and years of betrayal. How does one choose between a daughter and a life-long best friend? Can the secret she has been keeping be revealed after years of lying without destroying everyone in its wake?
Love and Death Among the Cheetahs
by Rhys Bowen
Rating: 4.5 #ad
I was so excited when Darcy announced out of the blue that we were flying to Kenya for our extended honeymoon. Now that we are here, I suspect he has actually been sent to fulfill another secret mission. I am trying very hard not to pick a fight about it, because after all, we are in paradise! Darcy finally confides that there have been robberies in London and Paris. It seems the thief was a member of the aristocracy and may have fled to Kenya. Since we are staying in the Happy Valley—the center of upper-class English life—we are well positioned to hunt for clues and ferret out possible suspects.
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(A Royal Spyness Mysteries)
Cold as Hell
by Lilja Sigurdardottir
Rating: 4.1 #ad
Icelandic sisters ÁrÓra and Ísafold live in different countries and aren’t on speaking terms, but when their mother loses contact with Ísafold, ÁrÓra reluctantly returns to Iceland to find her sister. But she soon realizes that her sister isn’t avoiding her … she has disappeared, without trace.
As she confronts Ísafold’s abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend BjÖrn, and begins to probe her sister’s reclusive neighbours – who have their own reasons for staying out of sight – ÁrÓra is led into an ever-darker web of intrigue and manipulation.
The Other Side of Midnight
by Sidney Sheldon
Rating: 4.6 #ad
The Other Side of Midnight is Sidney Sheldon at his best.
This page-turner is full of tortured romantic entanglements, reverses of fortune, thrilling suspense, and ultimate justice. In Paris, Washington, and a fabulous villa in Greece, an innocent American becomes a bewildered, horror-stricken pawn in a game of vengeance and betrayal. She is Catherine Douglas, a woman caught in a web of four lives intertwined by passion as her handsome husband pursues an incredibly beautiful film star . . . and as Constantin Demeris, a legendary Greek tycoon, tightens the strands that control them all.
Wednesday’s Mystery eBooks
The Hangman’s Sonnet
by Reed Farrel Coleman
Rating: 4.4 #ad
Jesse Stone, still reeling from the murder of his fiancée by crazed assassin Mr. Peepers, must keep his emotions in check long enough to get through the wedding day of his loyal protégé, Suitcase Simpson. The morning of the wedding, Jesse learns that a gala 75th birthday party is to be held for folk singer Terry Jester. Jester, once the equal of Bob Dylan, has spent the last forty years in seclusion after the mysterious disappearance of the master recording tape of his magnum opus, The Hangman’s Sonnet.
That same morning, an elderly Paradise woman dies while her house is being ransacked. What are the thieves looking for? And what’s the connection to Terry Jester and the mysterious missing tape?
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(A Jesse Stone Mysteries)
Her Perfect Life
by Hank Phillippi Ryan
Rating: 4.0 #ad
“A powerhouse of a novel.” Mystery Scene Magazine
Everyone knows Lily Atwood―and that may be her biggest problem. The beloved television reporter has it all―fame, fortune, Emmys, an adorable seven-year-old daughter, and the hashtag her loving fans created: #PerfectLily. To keep it, all she has to do is protect one life-changing secret. Her own.
Lily has an anonymous source who feeds her story tips―but suddenly, the source begins telling Lily inside information about her own life. How does he―or she―know the truth?
The Night Hawks
by Elly Griffiths
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Ruth is back as head of archaeology at the University of North Norfolk when a group of local metal detectorists – the so-called Night Hawks – uncovers Bronze Age artifacts on the beach, alongside a recently deceased body, just washed ashore. Not long after, the same detectorists uncover a murder-suicide—a scientist and his wife found at their farmhouse, long thought to be haunted by the Black Shuck, a humongous black dog, a harbinger of death. The further DCI Nelson probes into both cases, the more intertwined they become, and the closer they circle to David Brown, the new lecturer Ruth has recently hired, who seems always to turn up wherever Ruth goes.
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(Ruth Galloway Mysteries)
ONCE UPON A MURDEROUS DELUSION
by A.G. Russo
Rating: 4.3 #ad
The year is 1980 in a small, sleepy New England town. Out of nowhere, a series of devastating murders threaten the safety and well-being of the community. A serial killer has begun a deadly game of catch-me-if-you-can with local police, who have dubbed the carnage, “The Mommy Murders.”
Frightened residents are certain the violent rape/murders are in some way connected to the psychiatric unit of Parkhirst General Hospital. Nella, a nurse angst-ridden by her service during the Vietnam War, is new to the area and the hospital. She joins the tight-knit group of nurses on the evening shift. Val, the leader of the group, with her own history of trauma, believes it stems from the prejudice their patients suffer from a community unsympathetic to mental illness. Or is evil closer to home than they think?
Fugitive Gideon Safford
by Bill Yenne
Rating: 5.0 #ad
The first adventure in a brand new Western series from acclaimed author Bill Yenne!
Gideon Safford is a fugitive, but his trail has long since grown cold. Heading into the Rockies from his native Kentucky, hoping to get across the Continental Divide before winter, he stops for refreshment and a night’s rest at the Dollar Saloon in Ithaca, Montana, a little town of farmers and small-time prospectors in the Elk Fork country. A chance intervention in a gunfight forces Gideon to kill a man in order to save another. Unfortunately, the dead man works for Clay Schugrue, a powerful rancher who controls the Elk Fork through intimidation and thievery by his hired guns. The shooting touches off an eight-day war between Schugrue’s men and riled-up townsfolk, with a mysterious rogue sniper attacking both sides. Unable to leave the people of Ithaca to their fate, Gideon reluctantly takes a stand for justice…and can only pray he’ll be able to see it through.
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(A Fugitive Gideon Safford Western Adventure)
Rampike
by European P. Douglas
Rating: 5.0 #ad
Trapped in an isolated mountain town… Something doesn’t want them to leave
When the local hermit, Maul Thorndean, disappears, Sheriff Joe Moorefield finds his cabin in a disconcerting state: all the surrounding trees are ghost-white, brittle, and leaning towards the cabin. There is blood on the floor, but no sign of Maul. Usually, if there is trouble in Mercy, Maul is the cause. Now, he might be the victim. The strange trees and their wraith-like limbs spread across the town. But when people begin disappearing, it’s clear that the trees are the least of the sheriff’s worries. In a desperate race to escape, only the luckiest will survive.
Little Secrets
by Jennifer Hillier
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Marin had the perfect life. Married to her college sweetheart, she owns a chain of upscale hair salons, and Derek runs his own company. They’re admired in their community and are a loving family—until their world falls apart the day their son Sebastian is taken.
A year later, Marin is a shadow of herself. The FBI search has gone cold. The publicity has faded. She and her husband rarely speak. She hires a P.I. to pick up where the police left off, but instead of finding Sebastian, she learns that Derek is having an affair with a younger woman.
Faithful Place
by Tana French
Rating: 4.4 #ad
Back in 1985, Frank Mackey was a nineteen-year-old kid with a dream of escaping hisi family’s cramped flat on Faithful Place and running away to London with his girl, Rosie Daly. But on the night they were supposed to leave, Rosie didn’t show. Frank took it for granted that she’d dumped him-probably because of his alcoholic father, nutcase mother, and generally dysfunctional family. He never went home again. Neither did Rosie. Then, twenty-two years later, Rosie’s suitcase shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place, and Frank, now a detective in the Dublin Undercover squad, is going home whether he likes it or not.
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(Dublin Murder Squad Mysteries)
A Witch in Time
by Constance Sayers
Rating: 4.5 #ad
Helen Lambert has lived several lives-a young piano virtuoso in 1890s Paris, an actress in 1930’s Hollywood, a rock star in 1970s Los Angeles — only she doesn’t know it. Until she meets a strange man who claims he’s watched over her for centuries, bound to her from the beginning.
At first, Helen doesn’t believe him. Her life is as normal as any other modern career woman’s. Then she begins having vivid dreams about ill-fated love and lives cut short.