Monday’s Mystery eBooks
Dogs and More Dogs, Another Murder
by Christa Nardi
Rating: 4.3 #ad
An abandoned house, an abundance of dogs. And a dead body or two.
Sheridan Hendley’s volunteer position at Pets and Paws takes a new turn when more than twenty malnourished dogs are found at a rundown house on the outskirts of town. When the body of an elderly woman is found amidst mountains of clutter in the house, a search of the property leads to startling revelations. And another body. While Herman Stoneham’s death is deemed natural causes, his wife’s is not. Where did all the dogs come from and who’s responsible for Justine’s untimely death? Are the two connected?
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(A Sheridan Hendley Mysteries)
Verdict at River’s Edge
by Colleen K. Snyder
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Jeff Farrell is the camp “go-to”man: janitor, tour guide, paramedic… Collin finds his easy banter, gentle humor and quick wit intriguing. As their paths cross over and over—and over and over—Collin finds herself drawn to him. When Rob picks whitewater rafting as his challenge and asks Collin to come along, Collin must muster all her rigid self-control and her faith to face her fear. But when a killer makes her his next target, which will she rely on to see her through? Her strength? Or her faith? Can she “walk the talk” when the events of the week spiral out of her control?
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(Collin Walker Mysteries)
Amid the Sinking Dark
by Abe Moss
Rating: 4.5 #ad
“You can’t save everyone. Not even close…”
Robbed of her only chance at a normal life, Nell Parrish now finds herself in a strange new home where darkness and mysteries abound. Plagued with dreams of the night which brought her here, she’s desperate for any distraction, anything to forget those unimaginable horrors…
… even if it means braving another altogether.
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(The Dread Void Mysteries)
Faithless
by Kjell Ola Dahl
Rating: 4.1 #ad
When the body of a woman turns up in a dumpster, scalded and wrapped in plastic, Inspector Frank FrØlich is shocked to discover that he knows her … and their recent meetings may hold the clue to her murder.
As he begins to learn more about the tragic events surrounding her death, FrØlich’s colleague Gunnarstranda deals with a disturbingly similar cold case involving the murder of a young girl in northern Norway. An unsettling number of coincidences emerge, and FrØlich is forced to look into his own past to find the answers … and to catch the killer before he strikes again.
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(Oslo Detective Mysteries)
Safe
by Stephanie Hurt
Rating: 4.1 #ad
Hadley never thought she’d be living out one of the stories she wrote. Not until one trip to the park changed her whole life. She finds herself in the middle of a horror story. One that will change the way she looks at everything and everyone around her. If she lived through this, it would be a miracle. She had one chance at safety, but he was making her break out of her comfort zone.
Drew left everything to find solace on his Wyoming ranch. His world had been filled with espionage, murder, and keeping the country safe as a member of an elite Navy Seal team. But now, all he wanted was peace. That would change in an instant with one meeting with Hadley. Drew couldn’t go back to that life, but now he has no choice if he was to keep her safe…
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(Broken)
SQUALOR, NEW MEXICO
by Lisette Brodey
Rating: 4.4 #ad
Darla McKendrick is nine when she first hears her mother and her aunt Didi secretly discussing their younger sister, Rebecca, speculating about her life in squalor. From the moment Darla asks to know more about her mysterious aunt, she is offered nothing but half-truths, distortions, and evasions.
As Darla grows into her teen years, her life is oddly yet profoundly affected by this woman she has never known. She can’t help but notice that Rebecca seems to exist only in dark corners of conversations and that no one ever wants to talk about her—with Darla. Neither Darla nor her three cousins have a clue about their aunt, yet their respective parents appear to recoil in fear at the sound of her name.
Classified
by Fern Michaels
Rating: 4.4 #ad
The riches that mean most to Teresa “Toots” Loudenberry are the loving friends and family she’s accumulated over the course of a life well lived. And now that her daughter, Abby, has married her beau Chris and settled down near Toots in Charleston, life is even more satisfying than the delicious pralines sold at Toots’s bakery, The Sweetest Thing.
Abby isn’t the only one enjoying a little romance. Toots’s friendship with Dr. Phil Becker has grown unexpectedly close . . . and that brings both joy and complications…
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(Godmothers Mysteries)
Magi’s Path
by Daniel Schinhofen
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Nearly everything in Gregory’s life had changed by the end of his first year at the academy. Alone at the start of his novice year, he’d gotten engaged to Yukiko Warlin and found a friend in Jenn Bean by the time the annual tournament was over.
The three of them went on to join Aether’s Guard, bringing the name of the nearly dead clan back to life. Elder Lightshield, the leader of Aether’s Guard, gave them his support and backing and Magus Dia guided them. Their training with Armsmaster Gin continued, offering a safe haven and helping to shield them from the worst tribulations that academy life could bring…
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(Aether’s Revival Mysteries)
Sunday’s Mystery eBooks
Handbook for Homicide
by Lorna Barrett
Rating: 4.6 #ad
Haven’t Got A Clue bookshop owner Tricia Miles’s relationship is on the rocks. After a not-so-fun vacation with her on-again-off-again lover, Marshall Cambridge, Tricia’s hoping for smooth sailing back in Stoneham. Unfortunately Booktown greets her not with blue skies but with another body.
When Tricia’s assistant manager, Pixie, finds homeless vet Susan Morris’s body behind Haven’t Got A Clue, Pixie’s checkered past makes her the prime suspect. Tricia sets out to clear Pixie’s name armed with only an anchor insignia earring found at the scene of the crime.
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(A Booktown Mysteries)
The Second Deadly Sin
by Åsa Larsson
Rating: 4.4 #ad
At the end of a deadly bear hunt across the wilderness of Northern Sweden, the successful hunters are shaken by a grisly discovery.
Across in Kurravaara, a woman is murdered with frenzied brutality: crude abuse scrawled above her bloodied bed, her young grandson nowhere to be found. Only Rebecka Martinsson sees a connection.
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(The Arctic Murders Mysteries)
Solomon’s Compass
by Carol Kilgore
Rating: 4.7 #ad
When Coast Guard Commander Taylor Campbell returns to Rock Harbor, Texas, to tend to her uncle’s estate, she meets a veteran Navy SEAL, Jake Solomon, and learns her uncle didn’t drown accidentally. His murder was one in a string of murders of a group of Vietnam veterans who called themselves the Compass Points.
Before her uncle died, he sent Taylor a message with the location of his buried treasure. Unearthing it will place her squarely in the killer’s crosshairs, but she’s determined to fulfill her uncle’s last wish.
The Devil All the Time
by Donald Ray Pollock
Rating: 4.6 #ad
In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic overtones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting.
Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.”
Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl
by Jeffrey Paul Melnick
Rating: 3.9 #ad
“Creepy crawling” was the Manson Family’s practice of secretly entering someone’s home, and without harming anyone, leaving only a trace of evidence that they had been there, some reminder that the sanctity of the private home had been breached. Now, author Jeffrey Melnick reveals just how much the Family creepy crawled their way through Los Angeles in the sixties and then on through American social, political, and cultural life for fifty years, firmly lodging themselves in our minds. Even now, it is almost impossible to discuss the sixties, teenage runaways, sexuality, drugs, music, California, or even the concept of family without referencing Manson and his “girls.”
The Absent One
by Jussi Adler-Olsen
Rating: 3.9 #ad
Copenhagen’s Detective Carl Mørck is back and ready for action in the second Department Q novel from the “new ‘it’ boy of Nordic Noir” (The Times, London).
Carl Mørck has settled into Department Q and is ready to take on another cold case. This time, it’s the brutal double-murder of a brother and sister two decades earlier. One of the suspects confessed and is serving time, but it’s clear to Mørck that all is not what it seems. Kimmie, a homeless woman with secrets involving certain powerful individuals, could hold the key—if Mørck can track her down before they do…
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(Department Q Mysteries)
Praetorian
by Simon Scarrow
Rating: 4.7 #ad
AD 51. Legionaries Cato and Macro have forged a bond that has survived war, rebellion and torture. Yet nothing has prepared them for a daunting mission on the deadliest battlefield of all: the bloody streets of Rome.
Traitors are threatening to plunge the Empire into bloody chaos and no one can be trusted. The Emperor has ordered Cato and Macro to go on a deadly mission, working undercover to root out the traitors before Rome tears itself apart.
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(Eagles of the Empire Mysteries)