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Sunday, October 23, 2011

Bargain Book Roundup

The Way of Shadows ($2.99), the first title in The Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks, is on sale again, is you missed it when it was the Kindle Deal of the Day.
Book Description
For Durzo Blint, assassination is an art-and he is the city's most accomplished artist.

For Azoth, survival is precarious. Something you never take for granted. As a guild rat, he's grown up in the slums, and learned to judge people quickly - and to take risks. Risks like apprenticing himself to Durzo Blint.

But to be accepted, Azoth must turn his back on his old life and embrace a new identity and name. As Kylar Stern, he must learn to navigate the assassins' world of dangerous politics and strange magics - and cultivate a flair for death.

If you liked the free Prevention Healthy Favorites: Chicken Recipes: 48 Easy and Delicious Meals!, by The Editors of Prevention Magazine, then you may want to check out their Slow Cooker Recipes, Dessert Recipes and Snack & Appetizer Recipes mini-cookbooks. Each contains 48 recipes and have recently been lowered from $3.99 to 99 cents each. I can see using any one (or all) of them during the upcoming holiday season.
Book Description
Like good cooks everywhere, the editors of Prevention magazine love nothing more than sharing their favorite healthy and delicious dishes. That's the whole idea behind the Prevention Healthy Favorites series of essential cookbooks, each one gathering 48 of the best Prevention-tested recipes that make it easy to enjoy wonderful homemade food fast.

Slow cooking is one of the Prevention editors' favorite ways to prepare true comfort food - which for us means food that is as easy to make as it is to eat. It's all about effortless: Just put together simple ingredients in the morning, and come home to a wholesome meal and delicious-smelling house at night! What could be better?

With this Prevention-tested collection, you can't go wrong: We chose our recipes carefully, each is designed to nourish both body and spirit. Within these pages you'll find a great variety of flavors and ingredients, from Mexico's gentle heat (Pork Chile Verde) to the delightful Moroccan Chicken with Olives. You'll even find some lovely surprises, including Shrimp Arrabiata, which tastes so good you won't believe it's so healthy; and even rich and satisfying brownies that couldn't be any easier to make, yet fit into a healthy, enjoyable diet.

The Day the Falls Stood Still ($4.61), by Cathy Marie Buchanan
Book Description
Steeped in the intriguing history of Niagara Falls, this epic love story is as rich, spellbinding, and majestic as the falls themselves.

1915. The dawn of the hydroelectric power era in Niagara Falls. Seventeen-year-old Bess Heath has led a sheltered existence as the youngest daughter of the director of the Niagara Power Company. After graduation day at her boarding school, she is impatient to return to her picturesque family home near Niagara Falls. But when she arrives, nothing is as she had left it. Her father has lost his job at the power company, her mother is reduced to taking in sewing from the society ladies she once entertained, and Isabel, her vivacious older sister, is a shadow of her former self. She has shut herself in her bedroom, barely eating--and harboring a secret.

The night of her return, Bess meets Tom Cole by chance on a trolley platform. She finds herself inexplicably drawn to him--against her family's strong objections. He is not from their world. Rough-hewn and fearless, he lives off what the river provides and has an uncanny ability to predict the whims of the falls. His daring river rescues render him a local hero and cast him as a threat to the power companies that seek to harness the power of the falls for themselves. As their lives become more fully entwined, Bess is forced to make a painful choice between what she wants and what is best for her family and her future.

Set against the tumultuous backdrop of Niagara Falls, at a time when daredevils shot the river rapids in barrels and great industrial fortunes were made and lost as quickly as lives disappeared, The Day the Falls Stood Still is an intoxicating debut novel.

Who Goes There? ($0.99), by John W. Campbell
Book Description
A remote scientific research expedition at the North Pole is invaded by a monstrous alien, reawakened after lying frozen for centuries after a crash-landing. The alien is intelligent, cunning and a shape-changer who can assume the form and personality of anything it destroys and soon it is among the men of the expedition, killing and replacing them, using its shape-changing ability to lull the scientists one by one into inattention and destruction. The transformed alien can seemingly pass every effort at detection and the expedition seems doomed...

WHO GOES THERE?, according to the science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz (1920-1997), had an autobiographical impetus: Campbell's mother and aunt were identical twins and enjoyed the "game" of substituting for one another in his care as an infant and young child, confusing him again and again with false identity. It was this uncertainty, this susceptibility to masquerade and his terror at the game which, Moskowitz said, Campbell funneled into this last and greatest of his magazine pieces. (A short novel, THE MOON IS HELL, was published only in book form in the early 1950's.) Carefully and rigorously extrapolated in its portrait of the menaced expedition, the novelette is regarded as perhaps the greatest horror story to emerge form the field of science fiction. It was the basis for one of the great early science fiction films and its excellent remake decades later.

Campbell had become the editor of ASTOUNDING five months before the early 1938 publication of the story. As editor of that magazine, he insisted upon rigorous scientific background, humanized characters and values and a standard of writing comparable to that in the leading consumer magazines of the time. In pursuit, Campbell found a generation of new writers - Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, A.E. Van Vogt, Henry Kuttner, Lester del Rey among them - who collectively (and individually!) produced an extraordinary body of work.

WHO GOES THERE? provided the basis of the 1951 cult horror film THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD and was remade into John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), also regarded as a classic science fiction film, who's prequel THE THING launched in 2011. The copyright of the novelette was, typically of the time, owned by Street & Smith Publications to whose magazine Campbell had sold all of the rights. Hawks paid Street & Smith $900 for all film rights, $500 of that was paid over "voluntarily" by Street & Smith to Campbell. "Don't you feel cheated?" Isaac Asimov said he asked Campbell at the time of the film's successful release. "No," Campbell said. "If it's a good film and it will get more people to read science fiction and take it seriously, then it's all a very good thing."

Demon: A Memoir ($2.99), by Tosca Lee, is marked down from the near $10 price of last year (as is Havah).
Book Description
“One day . . . I realized that being angelic and fallen was very similar to being human and fallen—except for one major difference: the provision of a messiah. I immediately wondered what it must feel like to be unquestionably damned—and worse, to watch humans luxuriate in and take for granted the grace made available to them from a doting God. And I thought: Why wouldn’t a fallen angelic creation resent a human recipient of God’s grace? And why wouldn’t a demon want to prove that creature unworthy again and again as a result? Now I knew what it must feel like to be an angelic outsider looking in with jealous eyes and . . . through this new lens Demon: A Memoir was born.” —Tosca Lee

The Midwich Cuckoos ($0.99), by John Wyndham, is another film tie-in from RosettaBooks.
Book Description
Aliens land in an isolated British village and impregnate all of the women. Nine months later strange children with glowing eyes and intense intelligence "Midwich Cuckoos," emerge to undertake the conquest of the world. Filmed in the 1950's and again in the 1990's as VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED.

Shadow Walker ($3.99), by L.A. Banks
Book Description
Sarah Rivera has a lot going on in her life right now. It’s bad enough that she’s being shipped off to Temt Tchaas Academy—also known as Neteru Academy, a high school for future Guardians of the Light who have special powers—but she has to go there with her cocky twin brother and the rest of her compound brothers and sisters. To make matters worse, everyone has ridiculous expectations of her all because her parents are like supernatural rock stars for saving the planet sixteen years ago. But what nobody, not even her best girlfriend Tami seems to be getting is the fact that, she’s not special, doesn’t want to be a demon-hunting hero, and is even afraid of the dark!

So what that her mother was a warrior angel and her Dad used to be a Council level Vampire? Opposites attract. Go figure. As far as Sarah is concerned, all she got from the combination was a pair of fangs that lengthen at inappropriate times to embarrass her in front of her secret crush; whereas her brother, Alejandro, got the good looks and cool wings. However, what her parents’ status has created is drama in her life, by ensuring that the mean girls at school will make her life a living nightmare. Sarah knows her family’s renowned slayer reputation will also ensure that everyone at school will assume she had it easy and should be able to do everything her famous rebel parents can do, when she can’t. Not by a long shot.

Once at the hidden boarding school, things go from bad to worse as Sarah tries to fit in. Her nightmares increase and it isn’t just anxiety—her second sight is suddenly developing at a record pace. Layers of secrets are held by the building, held by her parents, and nothing is as it seems. There is something really bad going on at the school, worse than bad—deadly. Only, faculty and administrators don’t know where to begin to look for the cause as students start to disappear. Sarah must then make a choice to stand on the sidelines or to help use her gifts to save someone dear. But to do that means facing all of her greatest fears, along with a demon or two.

The Gifted Bundle ($8.39), by Nancy Holder, contains four books in a single volume.
Book Description
The ancient race of powerful magic users called The Gifted have lived side-by-side with normal "Ungifted" humans for centuries. Led by a Guardian, each Gifted "House" governs a territory. But when the House of Blood crosses over to the dark side, evil supernatural beings who had been held in check are loosed upon the world. As the war between the forces of good and evil escalates, the other Houses must contend with internal dissention and treachery before they can vanquish a monstrous demon who can bring destruction upon all mankind. Journey through the astonishing world of The Gifted in this gripping series by award-winning author Nancy Holder. Bundle includes Daughter of the Flames, Daughter of the Blood, Son of the Shadows and Swept Away.

At the Edge of the Sun ($3.99), by Anne Stuart
Book Description
A perfect blend of provocative beauty and fighting skills kept her safe in the most dangerous situations. But Maggie Bennett had no protection against her feelings for the handsome, mysterious Randall Carter. Torn by memories of past hurts, hopes for new love tossed her back into his arms and onto the bloody trail of a notorious terrorist. Maggie and Randall would be swept on a wild roller coaster ride of violence and betrayal…targets for an assassin’s bullet and a passion striking without warning from the dark depths of the heart.