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Sunday, February 20, 2011

Bargain Book Roundup - Under Three Bucks

All the books in this post are $2.99, with prices set by the publisher. Prices should be the same at Kobobooks.com or Barnes and Noble, but they do sometimes vary (A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness, for example, is $14.99 on Kindle, but $12.99 from Kobo).

Kill Zone, by Jack Coughlin and Donald A. Davis, is the first in their Sniper series, a fictional series based upon the type of real-life action Jack Coughlin retold in Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper ($8.99).

Book Description
An American general is captured in the Middle East by terrorists who threaten to behead him within days. One strange fact: moments before he is rendered unconscious during the attack, the general notices that his captors speak American English. What’s going on?

Gunnery Sgt. Kyle Swanson, a top Marine sniper, is vacationing on a yacht in the Mediterranean when he receives orders to mount a top secret mission to rescue the general. But as the Marines prepare to land in the Syrian desert, they fall victim to a terrible accident. Swanson, the only survivor, then discovers they were also flying into an ambush. How did the enemy have details of a mission known only to a few top American government officials?

Swanson takes off across the desert alone to find the captured general and realizes he is fighting a particularly ruthless and dangerous enemy: American mercenaries working for a very-high-level group of U.S. officials with ties to the White House itself, part of a clandestine conspiracy whose hidden goal is nothing less than total control of the American military. Their sworn enemy is the captured general whose fate now rests in Swanson’s hands.


The Devil in the Junior League, by Linda Francis Lee

Book Description
The Junior League of Willow Creek, Texas, is tres exclusive. Undesirables need not apply. Fredericka Mercedes Hildebrand Ware (Frede to her friends) is a member beyond reproach...until her life begins to unravel. When her husband betrays her, steals her money, and runs off to places unknown, it's something Frede would rather keep under wraps. The last thing she needs is to become fodder for the JLWC gossip mill. And to make matters worse, there's only one person in town who stands a chance at helping her get revenge: Howard Grout, a tasteless, gold-chain-wearing lawyer who has bought his way into Frede's tony neighborhood. But htere's a price: She has to get his tacky, four-inch-stiletto-and-pink-spandex-wearing wife Nikki into the Junior League.
Linda Francis Lee has written an hysterical novel about the creme de la creme of Texas society, the lengths to which one woman goes to bring her cheating husband to justice, and how taking on what seems like a "Mission Impossible" can change you in ways you could never have imagined.


Seducing the Heiress, by Olivia Drake

Book Description
Her wealth and beauty have made Miss Portia Crompton the catch of the season. Secretly determined to wed the maharajah’s son she left behind in India, Portia ignores the money-hungry bucks who ply her with bouquets and bonbons. But one suitor will not be deterred: Colin Byrd, Viscount Ratcliffe. He is persistent and presumptuous—and wickedly tempting.

Colin has no delusions about romance. He’s a rogue, a womanizer, and a murderer, and seduction comes as easily to him as breathing. Portia’s fortune is an irresistible lure until Colin’s mercenary scheme hits a snag. Winning her dowry is no longer enough—he wants her heart and her passion. The more adamant she is in her refusal, the more determined he is to seduce her…


Beginner's Greek: A Novel , by James Collins

Book Description
When Peter Russell finally meets the woman of his dreams he falls as madly in love as you can on a flight from New York to LA. Her name is Holly. She's achingly pretty with strawberry-blonde hair, and reads Thomas Mann for pleasure. She gives Peter her phone number on a page of The Magic Mountain, but in his room that night Peter finds the page is inexplicably, impossibly, enragingly...gone.

So begins the immensely entertaining story of Peter and his unrequited love for his best friend's girl; of Charlotte and her less-than-perfect marriage to a man in love with someone else; of Jonathan and his wicked and fateful debauchery; and of Holly, the impetus for it all. Along the way, there's the evil boss, the desirable temptress, miscommunications, misrepresentations, fiendish behavior, letters gone astray, and ultimately, an ending in which every character gets his due.

Both incisive and wonderfully funny, this is a brilliantly understated comedy of manners in which love lost is found again.


Girls in Trucks, by Katie Crouch

Book Description
Sarah Walters is a less-than-perfect debutante. She tries hard to follow the time-honored customs of the Charleston Camellia Society, as her mother and grandmother did, standing up straight in cotillion class and attending lectures about all the things that Camellias don't do. (Like ride with boys in pickup trucks.)

But Sarah can't quite ignore the barbarism just beneath all that propriety, and as soon as she can she decamps South Carolina for a life in New York City. There, she and her fellow displaced Southern friends try to make sense of city sophistication, to understand how much of their training applies to real life, and how much to the strange and rarefied world they've left behind.

When life's complications become overwhelming, Sarah returns home to confront with matured eyes the motto "Once a Camellia, always a Camellia"- and to see how much fuller life can be, for good and for ill, among those who know you best.


One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets, by Bliss Broyard

Book Description
Two months before he died of cancer, renowned literary critic Anatole Broyard called his grown son and daughter to his side, intending to reveal a secret he had kept all their lives and most of his own: he was black. But even as he lay dying, the truth was too difficult for him to share, and it was his wife who told Bliss that her WASPy, privileged Connecticut childhood had come at a price. Ever since his own parents, New Orleans Creoles, had moved to Brooklyn and began to "pass" in order to get work, Anatole had learned to conceal his racial identity. As he grew older and entered the ranks of the New York literary elite, he maintained the façade. Now his daughter Bliss tries to make sense of his choices and the impact of this revelation on her own life. She searches out the family she never knew in New York and New Orleans, and considers the profound consequences of racial identity. With unsparing candor and nuanced insight, Broyard chronicles her evolution from sheltered WASP to a woman of mixed race ancestry.

Stand the Storm, by Breena Clarke

Book Description
Even though Sewing Annie Coats and her son, Gabriel, have managed to buy their freedom, their lives are still marked by constant struggle and sacrifice. Washington's Georgetown neighborhood, where the Coatses operate a tailor's shop and laundry, is supposed to be a "promised land" for former slaves but is effectively a frontier town, gritty and dangerous, with no laws protecting black people.
The remarkable emotional energy with which the Coatses wage their daily battles-as they negotiate with their former owner, as they assist escaped slaves en route to freedom, as they prepare for the encroaching war, and as they strive to love each other enough-is what propels STAND THE STORM and makes the novel's tragic denouement so devastating.


The Inheritance, by Simon Tolkien, is the second novel (the first was Final Witness, $6.15) from the equally talented grandson of J. R. R. Tolkien, with a third soon to follow: The King of Diamonds ($11.99 pre-order).

Book Description
A complex mystery of deception and betrayal that follows the court case of a young man set to hang for the murder of his father

When a famed Oxford historian is found dead in his study one night, all evidence points to his son, Stephen. About to be disinherited from the family fortune, Stephen returns to home after a long estrangement—and it happens to be the night his father is shot to death. When his fingerprints are found on the murder weapon, Stephen’s guilt seems undeniable. But there were five other people in the manor house at the time, and as their stories slowly emerge—along with the revelation that the deceased man was involved in a deadly hunt for a priceless relic in Northern France at the end of World War II—the race is on to save Stephen from a death sentence.

Everyone has a motive, and no one is telling the truth.

Unwilling to sit by and watch the biased judge condemn Stephen to death, an ageing police inspector decides to travel from England to France to find out what really happened in that small French village in 1945—and what artifact could be so valuable it would be worth killing for.


Buy Ketchup in May and Fly at Noon, by Mark Di Vincenzo

Book Description
Have you ever wanted to know the best day of the week to buy groceries or go out to dinner?

Have you ever wondered about the best time of day to ask someone out on a date—or for a raise?

Buy Ketchup in May and Fly at Noon tells you the best time—of the day, of the week, of the month or of the year—to do almost anything. Do you know:
  • The best time of day to be operated on?
  • The best month to buy an iPod?
  • The best day of the week to avoid lines at the Louvre?
  • The best day of the month to make an offer on a house?
Get more for your money, maximize your time, take better care of your health and be savvier about your career—all by doing certain things at the right time.

Remember: Timing is everything!


Halcyon Drift, by Brian Stableford, is the re-release of the first title in his Hooded Swan series.

Book Description
In a galactic culture that extends from quasi-Utopian worlds like New Alexandria to vermin-infested slums like Old Earth, starship pilots have become the great romantic heroes of the day. When Star-Pilot Grainger is rescued from a shipwreck, he finds himself pressed into reluctant service to fly the Hooded Swan, the prototype of a new kind of interstellar ship. He's also picked up an alien parasite that's determined to share his brain. Under these dire circumstances, can Grainger possibly stay out of trouble? Not a chance!

The cover of Poseur #1, by Rachel Maude, looks like a teenage Sex in the City. Here, the setting is a private girl's school on West Coast, but fashion still plays a big role. From the same publisher that recently discounted every book in The Clique series to $1.99 over a period of several months.

Book Description
po·seur (noun): a person who pretends to be what he or she is not.

Charlotte Beverwil, Janie Farrish, Melissa Moon, and Petra Greene attend exclusive Winston Prep in the Hollywood Hills. And that's all they have in common. But hang out together? They'd rather be hanged. Borrow one another's clothes? They'd sooner borrow a zit. So when these four sophomores are forced into a class to create their own fashion label, they Clash with a capital C. Janie thinks Melissa and Charlotte are Beverly Hills brats. They dismiss Janie as a Valley rat in sheep's clothing. And Petra, well . . . Petra couldn't care less. Can a cool coquette, a shy punk, a hippie goddess, and a ghettoglam egomaniac make beautiful couture together? At Winston Prep, survival of the fittest comes down to who fits in-and what fits.

Introducing a juicy new series from the publisher of the national bestselling series Gossip Girl, The Clique, The It Girl, and The A-List.

Includes Do-It-Yourself instructions by NYC fashion label Compai and fashion sketches throughout by the author