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Monday, July 25, 2011

Bargain Book Roundup

If you've exhausted all the options in the The Big Deal sale (really? I still haven't browsed all the pages), or even if you haven't, you will want to pick up a few of the titles below, before the prices change.

First, I recommend you run, don't walk, over and grab Karen Chance's Cassie Palmer Series bundle while it is $7.51 (pre-order). It's ok, we'll wait right here until you get back .... ok, got it? Good! This is a four book bundle and contains the entire series except for the very latest title, Hunt the Moon, which was released last month. If you like paranormal/time-traveling romance/female lead books at all, then you need to read this series. The only ones exempt from the recommendation to buy the bundle are those, like me, who already have the entire series in your ebook library, already. It isn't like Penguin to price their bundles this low, so grab it before they come to their senses.

Book Description
Clairvoyant Cassandra Palmer's magical powers are a mixed blessing-she may be able to contact spirits but sometimes this can be a whole lot more trouble than it's worth. Battling with vampires, feys and mages who all seek supremacy, Cassie must use her powers wisely in order to save herself - and the world. The Cassie Palmer Series includes Touch the Dark, Claimed by Shadow, Embrace the Night and Curse the Dawn.

Next, you will want to check out the newly released titles from Elizabeth Peters that list Robinson as publisher. These are all currently priced at $4.44, which is nearly half off what Hachette has been charging. All total, there are 12 titles to choose from.

Book List
  1. Crocodile on the Sandbank (Amelia Peabody 01)
  2. Lion in the Valley (Amelia Peabody 04)
  3. The Deeds of the Disturber (Amelia Peabody 05)
  4. Hippopotamus Pool (Amelia Peabody 08)
  5. The Ape Who Guards the Balance (Amelia Peabody 10)
  6. The Falcon at the Portal (Amelia Peabody 11)
  7. The Golden One (Amelia Peabody 14)
  8. Guardian of the Horizon (Amelia Peabody 16)
  9. Borrower of the Night (Vicky Bliss Mysteries 1)
  10. Street of the Five Moons (Vicky Bliss Mysteries 2)
  11. Silhouette in Scarlet (Vicky Bliss Mysteries 3)
  12. Night Train to Memphis (Vicky Bliss Mysteries 5)

Benny and Shrimp, by Katarina Mazetti, is on sale for Australian readers only - you guys get it for 48 cents! The edition in the US is still at $11.99.

Book Description
Why is it so impossible to get a relationship to work between two mature single people, driven by an enormous longing and loudly ticking biological clocks? Especially when they are struck by a totally unexpected passion when they first meet… In alternate chapters, Benny and “Shrimp” tell the story of a love that started by mistake in a village cemetery, a love that should not really be as complicated as it seems. She is a childless young widow with a sharp intellect and a home so tidy that even her jam jars are in alphabetical order. He is a gentle, overworked milk farmer, a reluctant loner, who fears becoming the village’s Old Bachelor. The attraction between them is powerful. But how will she learn to accept that he falls asleep at the opera and has a house full of his mother’s embroidered wall hangings, and how could he ever feel at home in her minimalist apartment, bare as a dentist’s waiting room? In Benny and Shrimp, Katarina Mazetti brilliantly captures the intensity of an unexpected love affair, and the heartbreaking inevitability with which life tends to get in the way.

The Parasol Protectorate: Soulless, Blameless, and Changeless ($9.99), by Gail Carriger, is this month's bargain book from Orbit. The first three books in the Alexia Tarabotti series, the fourth (Heartless) has been released and the fifth (Timeless) is available for pre-order, but won't be released until next year. I think I managed to get thru a half-dozen pages before one-clicking this one into my library.

Book Description
Book 1: SOULLESS
Alexia Tarabotti is laboring under a great many social tribulations. First, she has no soul. Second, she's a spinster whose father is both Italian and dead. Third, she was rudely attacked by a vampire, breaking all standards of social etiquette.

Where to go from there? From bad to worse apparently, for Alexia accidentally kills the vampire -- and then the appalling Lord Maccon (loud, messy, gorgeous, and werewolf) is sent by Queen Victoria to investigate.

With unexpected vampires appearing and expected vampires disappearing, everyone seems to believe Alexia responsible. Can she figure out what is actually happening to London's high society? Will her soulless ability to negate supernatural powers prove useful or just plain embarrassing? Finally, who is the real enemy, and do they have treacle tart?

SOULLESS is a comedy of manners set in Victorian London: full of werewolves, vampires, dirigibles, and tea-drinking.

Book 2: CHANGELESS

Alexia Tarabotti, the Lady Woolsey, awakens in the wee hours of the mid-afternoon to find her husband, who should be decently asleep like any normal werewolf, yelling at the top of his lungs. Then he disappears - leaving her to deal with a regiment of supernatural soldiers encamped on her doorstep, a plethora of exorcised ghosts, and an angry Queen Victoria.

But Alexia is armed with her trusty parasol, the latest fashions, and an arsenal of biting civility. Even when her investigations take her to Scotland, the backwater of ugly waistcoats, she is prepared: upending werewolf pack dynamics as only the soulless can.

She might even find time to track down her wayward husband, if she feels like it.

Book 3: BLAMELESS
Quitting her husband's house and moving back in with her horrible family, Lady Maccon becomes the scandal of the London season.

Queen Victoria dismisses her from the Shadow Council, and the only person who can explain anything, Lord Akeldama, unexpectedly leaves town. To top it all off, Alexia is attacked by homicidal mechanical ladybugs, indicating, as only ladybugs can, the fact that all of London's vampires are now very much interested in seeing Alexia quite thoroughly dead.

While Lord Maccon elects to get progressively more inebriated and Professor Lyall desperately tries to hold the Woolsey werewolf pack together, Alexia flees England for Italy in search of the mysterious Templars. Only they know enough about the preternatural to explain her increasingly inconvenient condition, but they may be worse than the vampires -- and they're armed with pesto.


Tess Gerritsen's Rizzoli & Isles 8-Book Bundle: The Surgeon, The Apprentice, The Sinner, Body Double, Vanish, The Mephisto Club, The Keepsake, Ice Cold ($49.99) isn't quite as enticing a bundle as the ones above, but has eight books in the single volume. It isn't really under the $5/each bargain cutoff, but is a savings over paying $7.99 each. Since I already have the first four and #7, I'll keep it on my wish list, but will probably pick up the missing titles as singles, instead. I'll also be holding off a bit on the latest title in the series, The Silent Girl, which released this month at the $12.99 mark. The first in the series, The Surgeon, was one if the first free books I picked up in the Kindle store (Sep '08) and is a great read, leading me to snap up the other titles that I have.

Book Description
New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen has thrilled countless readers with her acclaimed novels of suspense featuring Boston detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles—and TNT struck ratings gold with the Rizzoli & Isles series based on Gerritsen’s novels. Now here’s a convenient e-book bundle of the first eight installments of this compelling series: The Surgeon, The Apprentice, The Sinner, Body Double, Vanish, The Mephisto Club, The Keepsake, and Ice Cold.

Includes an exclusive script excerpt from the TNT series and a special preview of Tess Gerritsen’s new Rizzoli & Isles novel, The Silent Girl, on sale July 5, 2011.


Both titles in the Hazel Micallef Mystery series by Inger Ash Wolfe are currently marked down to $2.99.

The Calling
Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef has lived all her days in the small town of Port Dundas, Ontario 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 mother (the former mayor) and her own sharp tongue to buoy her. But when a terminally ill 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, Hazel finds herself tracking a truly terrifying serial killer while everything around her spins 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. Will she hear them before it's too late?


The Taken
Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef is having a bad year. After major back surgery, she moves into her ex-husband’s home to be cared for by his new wife. As if that weren’t enough to cope with, her octogenarian mother is insisting that Hazel end her dependence on painkillers—an insistence that takes the form of secretly flushing Hazel’s stash down the toilet.

It’s almost a relief when Hazel gets a call about a body found in one of the lakes near Port Dundas. But what raises the hair on the back of her neck is that the local paper has just published the first installment of a serialized story featuring such a scenario. Even before they head out to the lake, she and Detective Constable James Wingate know they are being played. But who is pulling their strings and why are not clear, nor is what they find at the lake at all what they expected. This is no simple drowning accident or even a straightforward murder. It’s Micallef herself who is snared, caught up in a cryptic game being played by a maven of the art of deception.


Alice Duncan has released several backlist titles in her Daisy Gumm Majesty series, starting with Strong Spirits, currently marked down to 99 cents, followed by Fine Spirits and High Spirits, at the same price, and Hungry Spirits at $2.99. The next title in the series is only up as a hardcover pre-order, so far, but it will be interesting to see if she managed to retain digital rights to it, as well.

Book Description
Welcome to sunny Pasadena, California, just a stone's throw from Hollywood. The twenties are in full roar, Prohibition isn't stopping anybody . . . and Daisy Gumm Majesty is getting by the best way she knows how--catering to the rich and famous as a medium who put the "con" in conjurer.

But a girl's gotta make a living! If there's one thing I've learned in this life it's that most rich people have more money than sense. My career as a "spiritualist" started the day I pretended Aunt Vi's Ouija board was talking to me and everyone believed it, especially Vi's employer, wealthy old Mrs. Kincaid. Some folks may disapprove, but the way I see it, I'm just dishing out hope to people who need it. Is that so wrong?

According to Detective Sam Rotondo, it is--and now he's blackmailed me into spying on the Kincaids for him. I don't know what he hopes to find out. Any fool could see what's going on in that house: who's in love, who's in trouble, and who's in need of a swift kick in the pants. And if Sam weren't the most irritating, hard-headed man this side of the Pacific, why, I'd give him a private reading--and tell him the spirits have a whole lot more in store for him.


Afterthoughts ($0.99 pre-order) is just one of the many Lawrence Block titles that are currently marked down in the Kindle store, only one of which is officially a part of the Big Deal sale and most of which are now published by Open Road and usually sell in the $10-$15 range.

Book Description
A collection of afterwords from Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Lawrence Block’s most acclaimed works

In a career spanning more than fifty years, Lawrence Block has produced over one hundred books, ranging in genre from hard-boiled detective stories to pseudonymous erotica. Collected here for the first time are more than forty-five afterwords from the works that made him a master of modern fiction.

Each afterword is an insightful reflection on the experiences that have brought Block’s fiction to life, from the lessons he learned as a reader at a literary agency to the unlikely—and semi-autobiographical—origins of the acclaimed Matthew Scudder series. Witty and inspiring, Afterthoughts is a must-read for Block fans and mystery lovers alike.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Lawrence Block, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.


The Last Kashmiri Rose and Tug of War , the first and sixth in the Joe Sandilands Murder Mystery series by Barbara Cleverly, are both currently $4.44 in the Kindle store. Both of these are recent editions from publisher Robinson and have significantly prices than the older editions.

Book Description
In a land of saffron sunsets and blazing summer heat, an Englishwoman has been found dead, her wrists slit, her body floating in a bathtub of blood and water. But is it suicide or murder? The case falls to Scotland Yard inspector Joe Sandilands, who survived the horror of the Western Front and has endured six sultry months in English-ruled Calcutta. Sandilands is ordered to investigate, and soon discovers that there have been other mysterious deaths, hearkening sinister ties to the present case.

Now, as the sovereignty of Britain is in decline and an insurgent India is on the rise, Sandilands must navigate the treacherous corridors of political decorum to bring a cunning killer to justice -- knowing the next victim is already marked to die.


Life After Forty, by Dora Heldt and Jamie Lee Searle (Translator), is on the Big Deal sale, but is further marked down for those in the UK to only $1.60.

Book Description
When Christine’s husband of ten years dumps her over the phone while she watches a Hugh Grant film she is sent spinning on a cathartic, self-medicated journey to the land of self-acceptance and self-reliance. Surrounded by her sister and a strong support group of friends, Christine learns how to deal with the horrors of dating, finding new appliances, and the exhilarating feeling of shopping without consequence.

An uproarious look at the suddenly single life of a divorcee, Dora Heldt’s first book to appear in English captures the zeitgeist of the new millennium with searing insight while never deigning to take itself too seriously. Sparkling dialogue and unforgettable characters create a vibrant world of sardonic, take-no-prisoners women who hold their own in a world geared toward acceptance of their younger selves. Not since Bridget Jones’ Diary or Sex in the City has anything like Life After Forty so accurately and thoroughly expressed the modern female point of view with such startling clarity.


Perfect on Paper: The (Mis)Adventures of Waverly Bryson, by Maria Murnane, is also on the Big Deal sale and also marked down for those in the UK to $1.60. Guess these two make up, a bit, for the many titles on the sale that are actually full price for those outside the US.

Book Description
Anything can look perfect on paper. When her fiance calls off their wedding at the last minute, Waverly Bryson wonders if her life will ever turn out the way she thought it would...or should. Her high-powered job in sports PR? Not so perfect. Her relationship with her dad? Far from it. Her perfect marriage? Enough said. To keep sane, Waverly makes a habit of jotting down "Honey Notes," her own brand of self-deprecating wisdom and a pipe-dream for a line of greeting cards.

As Waverly stumbles back into the dating scene (no stalkers or jean shorts, please), her personal and professional lives threaten to collide. Perfect on Paper reminds us that everyone has a bad date (or twelve), and that everyone eventually needs a best friend to tell them,"Honey, you are not alone."