Beautiful Lies ($0.79), by Lisa Unger. Looks like a markdown to get you aquainted with the author, whose Fragile ($9.99) releases Aug 3.Book Description
If Ridley Jones had slept ten minutes later or had taken the subway instead of waiting for a cab, she would still be living the beautiful lie she used to call her life. She would still be the privileged daughter of a doting father and a loving mother. Her life would still be perfect—with only the tiny cracks of an angry junkie for a brother and a charming drunk with shady underworld connections for an uncle to mar the otherwise flawless whole.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, those inconsequential decisions lead her to perform a good deed that puts her in the right place at the right time to unleash a chain of events that brings a mysterious package to her door—a package which informs her that her entire world is a lie.
Suddenly forced to question everything she knows about herself and her family, Ridley wanders into dark territory she never knew existed, where everyone in her life seems like a stranger. She has no idea who’s on her side and who has something to hide—even, and maybe especially, her new lover, Jake, who appears to have secrets of his own.
Sexy and fast-paced, Beautiful Lies is a true literary thriller with one of the freshest voices and heroines to arrive in years. Lisa Unger takes us on a breathtaking ride in which every choice Ridley makes creates a whirlwind of consequences that are impossible to imagine . .
Beyond Reach ($1.59), by Karin Slaughter, also has a new release this summer, Broken ($9.99).Book Description
With over 13 million copies of her books sold in twenty-two countries, #1 internationally bestselling author Karin Slaughter delivers “crime fiction at its finest.” Now she returns to Grant county, Georgia where the lightning-fast plot, vivid forensic detail, and heart-stopping suspense will thrust readers into the darkest corners of their own imaginations—and push Slaughter to the top of the national bestseller lists.
Sara Linton—resident medical examiner/pediatrician in Grant County, Georgia,—has plenty of hardship to deal with, including defending herself in a heartbreaking malpractice suit. So when her husband, Police chief Jeffery Tolliver, learns that his friend and coworker detective Lena Adams has been arrested for murder and needs Sara’s help, she is not sure she can handle the pressure of it all. But soon Sara an Jeffery are sitting through evidence, peeling back the layers of a mystery that grows darker by the day—until an intricate web of betrayal and vengeance begins to unravel. And suddenly the lives of Sara, Lena, and Jeffery are hanging by the slenderest of threads.
Barefoot ($1.99), by Elin Hilderbrand, looks to be another author intro pricing, as her The Island ($12.99) released this month.Book Description
It's summer on Nantucket, and as the season begins, three women arrive at the local airport, observed by Josh, a local boy, home from college. Burdened with small children, unwieldy straw hats, and some obvious emotional issues, the women--two sisters and one friend--make their way to the sisters' tiny cottage, inherited from an aunt. They're all trying to escape from something: Melanie, after seven failed in-vitro attempts, discovered her husband's infidelity and then her own pregnancy; Brenda embarked on a passionate affair with an older student that got her fired from her prestigious job as a professor in New York; and her sister Vickie, mother to two small boys, has been diagnosed with cancer. Soon Josh is part of the chaotic household, acting as babysitter, confidant, and, eventually, something more, while the women confront their pasts and map out their futures.
Where Angels Go ($1.21), by Debbie Macomber. I'm not entirely sure it's more than a novella, from the size, but the linked Hardcover ($1.21) doesn't mention being a story collection. Another of her books was marked down last week and is back to full price now, so if you collect her books, grab this one quick.Book Description
Christmas is a time for angels Shirley, Goodness and Mercy are back! These three irresistible angels love their assignments on earth. They especially love helping people who send prayer requests to Heaven (even though the Archangel Gabriel, their boss, knows they're going to break his rules)!
This Christmas, Mercy is assigned to bring peace of mind to an elderly man... who discovers an unexpected answer to his prayers.
Goodness is sent to oversee the love life of a young woman afraid to risk commitment for a second time.
And Shirley has the task of granting a little boy's fondest Christmas wish.
Shirley, Goodness and Mercy go wherever they're needed. These three charming angels often find themselves in trouble, but somehow things always work out for the best especially at Christmas.
These Wicked Games ($2.99), by Sherry Ledington, et al, isn't a short story collection, but is more of a fan-lit group written novel.Book Description
Could that ravishing beauty be his wife? Damien, the handsome and brooding Earl of Coulter, is captivated by the mysterious woman he sees across a ballroom. Yet there is something strangely familiar in her flashing eyes and fascinating smile. Can this tempting woman full of sensual promise possibly be the same cat--obsessed chit he married? Last he knew, she was rusticating in the country with her damned feline. Frustrated that her husband can't even be bothered to remember her name, Patience is ripe for revenge after three long years of countryside boredom. It's time to show her husband exactly what he's been missing. As Damien and Patience match wits, their passion threatens to beat them at their own game. With the help of a feather, a thunderstorm, a tiger, a pot of chocolate and a house full of meddling relatives, Patience and Damien are playing with fire. But who will triumph when true love it at stake? These Wicked Games is the first novella produced by Avon FanLit, an online event for the romance community.
Exit Ghost ($4.73), by Philip Roth, is one of two editions available (the newer one is $10.49)Book Description
Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age.
Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.
The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman's youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman's first literary hero, E. I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation.
The third connection is with Lonoff's would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff's "great secret." Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.
Haunted by Roth's earlier work The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer's insatiable commitment to fiction.
Vampire Kisses ($3.99), by Ellen Schreiber, is the first in her Vampire Kisses series (currently up to seven titles), aimed at the teen reader.Book Description
In her small town, dubbed "Dullsville," sixteen-year-old Raven -- a vampire-crazed goth-girl -- is an outcast. But not for long...
The intriguing and rumored-to-be haunted mansion on top of Benson Hill has stood vacant and boarded-up for years. That is, until its mysteriously strange new occupants move in. Who are these creepy people -- especially the handsome, dark, and elusive Alexander Sterling? Or rather, what are they? Could the town prattle actually ring true? Are they vampires? Raven, who secretly covets a vampire kiss, both at the risk of her own mortality and Alexander's loving trust, is dying to uncover the truth.
Ellen Schreiber's spooky and stirring romance tells the story of two outsiders who fall in love in a town where conformity reigns, and ends with a shocking surprise.
Malice: Includes Bonus Chapter from Betrayed ($1.99), by Robert K. Tanenbaum Book Description
New York District Attorney Butch Karp, recovering from an assassination attempt that came within a few millimeters of killing him, takes on a shadowy cartel that uses terrorists to further its criminal empire while sliding the United States toward a fascist state that the cartel controls. As Karp struggles to uncover those responsible for planning the terrorist murders of six school-children, he goes to the aid of the younger brother of his college roommate, who has been unfairly suspended from his position as baseball coach at a university in Idaho.
Meanwhile, Marlene Ciampi is in Idaho to help her husband with the investigation, and she befriends a Basque sheepherder who is demanding answers to the disappearance of his daughter -- a pretty college coed he suspects is having an affair with the school's president -- which may be related to Karp's case. And if that wasn't enough, the couple's daughter, Lucy, and her eclectic group of accomplices must uncover a traitor's plot and stop an assassination attempt surreptitiously planned to occur in the heart of Manhattan.
Malice is filled with twists and story lines torn from today's headlines, and once again delivers Tanenbaum's one-of-a-kind courtroom scenes that, by the exciting climax, have been woven into a single, brilliant tapestry of action and suspense.
Hunter Victorious ($4.99), by Rose Estes, is the conclusion of her Hunter trilogy, but the other two are not yet on Kindle (so I just clicked on both to request them; hey, I like to start a series from the beginning!).Book Description
The long-awaited final entry in Estes' Hunter Trilogy fantasy series. Braldt the Hunter has survived the tortures of a savage people on a distant world, but now he is trapped on Valhalla, a doomed world of shapeshifters and evil science. Braldt must somehow overthrow the vile leaders--or his homeworld will perish.
The Calling ($3.27), by Inger Ash Wolfe, is again one of two editions available (the other is $10 and appears to be in the mobi format, while this one is Topaz).Book Description
There were thirteen crime-scene pictures. Dead faces set in grimaces and shouts. Faces howling, whistling, moaning, crying, hissing. Hazel pinned them to the wall and stood back. It was a silent opera of ghosts.
Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef has lived all her days in the small town of Port Dundas and is now making her way toward retirement with something less than grace. Hobbled by a bad back and a dependence on painkillers, and feeling blindsided by divorce after nearly four decades of marriage, sixty-one-year-old Hazel has only the constructive criticism of her old goat of a mother and her own sharp tongue to buoy her. But when a terminally ill Port Dundas woman is gruesomely murdered in her own home, Hazel and her understaffed department must spring to life. And as one terminally ill victim after another is found—their bodies drained of blood, their mouths sculpted into strange shapes—Hazel finds herself tracking a truly terrifying serial killer across the country while everything she was barely holding together begins to spin out of control.
Through the cacophony of her bickering staff, her unsupportive superiors, a clamoring press, the town’s rumor mill, and her own nagging doubts, Hazel can sense the dead trying to call out. But what secret do they have to share? And will she hear it before it’s too late?
In The Calling, Inger Ash Wolfe brings a compelling new voice and an irresistible new heroine to the mystery world.
The Shimmer ($4.09), by David Morrell, is one I saw mentioned in the Amazon forums (by a reader that really enjoyed it).Book Description
When a high-speed chase goes terribly wrong, Santa Fe police officer Dan Page watches in horror as a car and gas tanker explode into flames. Torn with guilt that he may be responsible, Page returns home to discover that his wife, Tori, has disappeared. Frantic, Page follows her trail to Rostov, a remote town in Texas famous for a massive astronomical observatory, a long-abandoned military base, and unexplained nighttime phenomena that draw onlookers from every corner of the globe. Many of these gawkers-Tori among them-are compelled to visit this tiny community to witness the mysterious Rostov Lights. Without warning, a gunman begins firing on the lights, screaming "Go back to hell where you came from," then turns his rifle on the bystanders. A bloodbath ensues, and events quickly spiral out of control, setting the stage for even greater violence and death. Page must solve the mystery of the Rostov Lights to save his wife. In the process, he learns that the decaying military base may not be abandoned at all, and that the government may have known about the lights for decades. Could these phenomena be more dangerous than anyone could have possibly imagined?
Free-Range Knitter: The Yarn Harlot Writes Again ($1.84), by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, a popular yarn/knitting blogger.Book Description
... reminds us of the joy we felt upon first encountering her hilarious and poignant collection of essays surrounding her favorite topics: knitting, knitters, and what happens when you get those two things anywhere near ordinary people.
For the 60 million knitters in America, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (a.k.a. the Yarn Harlot) shares stories of knitting horrors and triumphs, knitting successes and defeats, but, mostly, stories about the human condition that ring true for everyone--especially if you happen to have a rather large amount of yarn in your house.
Funny, unique, and gleeful in her obsession, Pearl-McPhee speaks to knitters of all skill levels in this delightful celebration of craft and creativity.
Candy Apple Red ($4.48), by Nancy Bush, is the first of her Jane Kelly Mysteries. If you like this one, you can pick up the other two for bargain prices as well: Electric Blue ($4.76) and Ultra Violet ($4.47).Book Description
Jane Kelly is through with following men anywhere. Last time she did, she left Southern California for the dubious charms of Lake Chinook, Oregon, where she's traded in bartending for the much more glamorous trade of process serving. (Well, she can tell herself it's glamorous, anyway.) And the boyfriend, of course, is long gone. She's not making any lifetime commitments, but when Portland divorce attorney Marta Cornell calls with a P.I. job, the money involved sounds like the answer to her dwindling bank account - until she learns Tess Bradbury wants her to investigate the disappearance of Bobby Reynolds. Four years ago, without warning, Bobby murdered his young family and promptly vanished. No one disputed that he'd slaughtered his own flesh and blood except Tim Murphy, his best friend - and Jane's ex, the one guy she's never quite gotten over. The murders had driven a wedge between him and Jane, and finally drove him right out of town. Now he's on his way back, to attend a Lake Chinook Historical Society benefit that Cotton Reynolds, Bobby's father, is hosting. It looks like Jane's going to be following men around again - this time with a tape recorder and a camera.
Getting Rid of Matthew ($2.04), by Jane FallonBook Description
Virginia desperately wants to get away from her "preposterously protective parents," but when an unusual confluence of events sends her whole town sailing away leaving her behind, she finds herself beginning to shrink.
Happy Snak ($3.92), by Nicole Kimberling, might be worth buying on the strength of the content warning, alone.Book Description
A little uncivil disobedience is good for the soul-
Gaia Jones is on A-Ki space station for one reason, and it's not to ogle the hermaphroditic aliens. She's out to make a name for herself and her line of intoxicating human snacks. Not easy in A-Ki's tightly controlled society. Her task gets even more delicate when she rushes to the aid of a dying alien-and finds herself the unwilling guardian of a shunned alien ghost named Kenjan. And the new owner of his slave.
The danger mounts when Kenjan's grieving lover, the powerful leader of the Kishocha, offers her a dream and a nightmare rolled into one: a new store all her own with a strange double purpose-half snack bar, half shrine. The catch? She must spend the rest of her life there, tending Kenjan the Heretic's ghost. Or the entire station will be destroyed.
There's only one way to gain both her freedom and justice for Kenjan-teach both the powerful government elite and the Kishocha theocracy a lesson in uncivil disobedience-
Warning: This book contains excessive consumption of clams and clam-based snacks. Also, gratuitous abuse of orange dye, as well as summary decapitation, forbidden love, alien sex and one beloved hamster named Microbe.
The Dirty Parts of the Bible ($0.99), by Sam Torode, is the full length version of one of the titles being considered for Amazon's Breakthrough Awards (amongst 500 others that had free excerpts posted). I'm not sure why more of the other authors haven't posted their novels (and some who have seem to want to overprice them).Book Description
THE DIRTY PARTS OF THE BIBLE is the prose equivalent of a Johnny Cash album--a tale of love and liquor, preachers and prostitutes, trains and treasure.
It's 1936 and 19-year-old Tobias Henry is stuck in the frozen hinterlands of Michigan. Tobias is obsessed with two things: God and girls. Mostly girls. But being a Baptist preacher's son, he can't escape God. When his father is blinded in a bizarre accident, Tobias rides the rails to Texas in search of a lost fortune. Along the way, he is initiated into the hobo brotherhood by Craw, a ribald yet wise vagabond. Obstacles arise in the form of a saucy prostitute, a giant catfish, and a flaming boxcar. But when he meets Sarah, a tough farm girl under a dark curse, he finds out that the greatest challenge of all is love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY says: "This rich and soulful novel is actually a rather well-done bildungsroman steeped in wanderlust and whimsy that at times recalls The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and at others a tamer On the Road. The story begins in 1936 as 20-year-old Tobias is thumbing his way from Remus, Mich., to his uncle’s farm in Glen Rose, Tex., to find a hidden bag of money, after his father, a Baptist pastor, drunkenly slams his car into the church and is removed from the parsonage. The author does an excellent job in making well-charted territory (riding the rails; scavenged campfire meals under the stars) seem vibrant and new. Snippets of scripture, Southern spirituals, and folk ballads lend context and flavor to the text. Most impressive are the jangly dialogue and the characters’ distinctive voices, which are authentic and earthy but not remotely hoary. When Tobias finally arrives at his uncle’s, the surprises that await him are more than enough to keep his--and readers’--interests piqued."
Starting Out in the Evening ($2.27), by Brian Morton Book Description
Leonard Schiller is a writer in his seventies. All of his books are out of print; he's left no mark in literary history; a lifetime of dedicated labor has brought him few rewards. Heather Wolfe is a graduate student in her twenties. She read Schiller's novels when she was growing up, and they changed her life. She decides to write her master's thesis about Schiller's work, and she sets out to meet him.
Starting Out in the Evening is a novel about the unexpected consequences of that meeting--and the unexpected consequences of art. Heather blows into Schiller's life like a whirlwind and overturns everything in it. After years of obscurity, he finds himself dreaming of literary immortality; after a lifetime of restraint, he finds himself infatuated with a woman "so young she seemed like an emissary from the future."
For Heather, meeting Schiller has even more complicated results. Finding it hard to believe that this cautious, habit-bound man wrote the books that taught her so much about the beauty of taking risks, she begins to suspect that her idol has failed to understand the deepest lessons of his own art.
In the course of the novel, we also come to know Schiller's daughter, Ariel, a spirited and tender-hearted former dancer, and her lover, Casey, a restlessly self-questioning black intellectual. Though deeply committed to each other, they are pursuing irreconcilable dreams, and together they are facing the fear that their conflicts will prove greater than their love. When Schiller's fortunes change dramatically, Ariel and Casey are put to a test that neither of them could have prepared for.
With a startling sureness of touch, Morton illuminates the inner lives of a varied cast of characters--male and female, young and old, black and white--all of whom are striving to live out their ideals in a world that seems to have little room for idealism. And in Leonard Schiller, Morton has given us one of the most remarkable characters to appear in recent American fiction--an unforgettable portrait of an artist as an old man.
Written with breathtaking insight and loving humor, Starting Out in the Evening is an exhilaratingly intelligent and powerful novel--an extraordinary triumph of the novelist's art.
