The Last Chinese Chef ($2.99 Kindle, B&N), by Nicole Mones [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt]. The companion audiobook, which I already have, is only $3.99 via Audible. Be careful if you are searching for this one and not using the links, as there are two editions and only this one is on sale (too bad it is the Topaz format one).Book Description
This alluring novel of friendship, love, and cuisine brings the best-selling author of Lost in Translation and A Cup of Light to one of the great Chinese subjects: food. As in her previous novels, Mones’s captivating story also brings into focus a changing China -- this time the hidden world of high culinary culture.
When Maggie McElroy, a widowed American food writer, learns of a Chinese paternity claim against her late husband’s estate, she has to go immediately to Beijing. She asks her magazine for time off, but her editor counters with an assignment: to profile the rising culinary star Sam Liang.
In China Maggie unties the knots of her husband’s past, finding out more than she expected about him and about herself. With Sam as her guide, she is also drawn deep into a world of food rooted in centuries of history and philosophy. To her surprise she begins to be transformed by the cuisine, by Sam’s family -- a querulous but loving pack of cooks and diners -- and most of all by Sam himself. The Last Chinese Chef is the exhilarating story of a woman regaining her soul in the most unexpected of places.
The House at Sea's End ($2.99 Kindle, B&N) and A Room Full of Bones ($2.99 Kindle, B&N), the third and fourth novels in the Ruth Galloway Mystery series by Elly Griffiths [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt]The House at Sea's End
Just back from maternity leave, forensic archeologist Ruth is finding it hard to juggle motherhood and work when she is called in to investigate human bones that have surfaced on a remote Norfolk beach. The presence of DCI Harry Nelson, the married father of her daughter, does not help. The bones, six men with their arms bound, turn out date back to World War II, a desperate time on this stretch of coastland.A Room Full of Bones (companion audiobook $4.99)
Home Guard veteran Archie Whitcliffe reveals the existence of a secret the old soldiers have vowed to protect with their lives. But then Archie is killed and a German journalist arrives, asking questions about Operation Lucifer, a plan to stop a German invasion, and a possible British war crime. What was Operation Lucifer? And who is prepared to kill to keep its secret?
Forensic archeologist Ruth Galloway investigates her most complicated case to date: two people affiliated with a museum housing aboriginal skulls succumb to a mysterious fever that later threatens the life of DCI Harry Nelson.
When Ruth Galloway arrives to supervise the opening of a coffin containing the bones of a medieval bishop, she finds the museum's curator lying dead on the floor. Soon the museum's wealthy owner lies dead in his stables, too.
These two deaths could be from natural causes, but when he is called in to investigate, Nelson isn't convinced, and it is only a matter of time before he and Ruth cross paths once more. When threatening letters come to light, events take an even more sinister turn. But as Ruth's friends become involved, where will her loyalties lie? As her convictions are tested, Ruth and Nelson must discover how Aboriginal skulls, drug smuggling, and the mystery of “The Dreaming” hold the answer to these deaths, as well as the keys to their own survival.
Beast Master's Planet ($9.99 Kindle, B&N, Kobo), an omnibus volume containing Andre Norton's Omnibus of Beast Master and Lord of Thunder, both in the Beastmaster series. Unlike the titles I highlighted on sale yesterday, this one is published by Macmillan and $5/title is a pretty good price for the set (individual titles are running around $8 apiece).Book Description
In 1959 Andre Norton published The Beast Master, a fast-paced science fiction adventure that introduced to readers a new kind of hero, Hosteen Storm. Storm, a Navajo from the American southwest, served in the Planetary Confederacy forces as a Beast Master teamed with an African eagle, a meercat, and a dune cat.
Telepathically linked to his team animals, Storm served valiantly in the war that eventually defeated the alien Xiks, though victory could not prevent the aliens from destroying Earth. With his homeworld gone, Storm emigrated to the colonized frontier planet Arzor, where he would have to help fight a holdout Xik force that has brought the war to his adopted home.
In Lord of Thunder, Storm's beast master skills and animal partners are needed to unravel the mystery behind a huge gathering of the indigenous Norbies. Only Storm and his half-brother Logan Quade can penetrate the Norbies' clan secrets and discover what is behind the threat of an uprising that could destroy the tenuous peace between the colonists and the aliens who share their planet.
These two novels are science fiction adventure at its best. Here is exciting space opera full of colorful, absorbing SF action on an alien world, as only Andre Norton can write it.
At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.
Beauty Dies ($1.99 Kindle, B&N), a Claire Conrad/Maggie Hill novel by Melodie Johnson Howe [MysteriousPress.com (Open Road)]Book Description
A former supermodel takes a fatal tumble, and only the unlikely duo Claire and Maggie can say who pushed her....
Women like Cybella are not destined to survive their fifties. Her looks long gone, the ex-supermodel takes a leap down a stairwell—an apparent suicide that lands her on the front page one last time. Maggie Hill and her employer, the eccentrically brilliant detective Claire Conrad, are about to leave New York when a streetwalker named Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Murphy barges into their hotel room, clutching a tape that she claims proves the model was murdered—a tawdry bit of pornography starring Jackie and Cybella’s daughter. Conrad is unimpressed, but Jackie gets her attention on her way out of the hotel, when an unseen killer stabs her to death in the street.
Discovering the truth behind the two murders will take Maggie and Claire on a trip to the ugliest corners of New York City, and show them that there is no back alley as dangerous as a high-fashion catwalk.
Shoveling Smoke: A Clay Parker Crime Novel ($1.99 Kindle, B&N), by Austin David [Chronicle Books]Book Description
Reveling in outrageous shenanigans and hilariously off-kilter characters, Shoveling Smoke does for East Texas what Carl Hiaasen's novels do for South Florida. Burned-out corporate lawyer Clay Parker chucks it all and moves from Houston to a tiny firm in a dusty small town, searching for his lost integrity and a simpler life. Instead, he lands in the middle of a bungled fraud case defending the disreputable and downright nasty Bevo Rasmussen, accused of torching the stables housing his overinsured thoroughbreds. Immediately confronted with corrupt officials, crazed survivalists, an incompetent hit man, an emu, and a naked county clerk, along with an assortment of vengeful wives and great barbecue, Clay discovers that nothing is what it seems to be. By the end, our hero gets way more than he bargained for, justice (Texas-style) gets served, and the reader gets a laugh-out-loud first novel.
Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction ($2.99 Kindle, B&N), by David Sheff [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt], one of Amazons Best of the Month, February 2008 picks, with the companion audiobook $3.99.Book Description
What had happened to my beautiful boy? To our family? What did I do wrong? Those are the wrenching questions that haunted every moment of David Sheff’s journey through his son Nic’s addiction to drugs and tentative steps toward recovery. Before Nic Sheff became addicted to crystal meth, he was a charming boy, joyous and funny, a varsity athlete and honor student adored by his two younger siblings. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who lied, stole, and lived on the streets. David Sheff traces the first subtle warning signs: the denial, the 3 A.M. phone calls (is it Nic? the police? the hospital?), the rehabs. His preoccupation with Nic became an addiction in itself, and the obsessive worry and stress took a tremendous toll. But as a journalist, he instinctively researched every avenue of treatment that might save his son and refused to give up on Nic.
Beautiful Boy is a fiercely candid memoir that brings immediacy to the emotional rollercoaster of loving a child who seems beyond help.
The Patron Saint of Liars ($2.99 Kindle, B&N), by Ann Patchett [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt]Book Description
Since her first publication in 1992, celebrated novelist Ann Patchett has crafted a number of elegant novels, garnering accolades and awards along the way. Now comes a beautiful reissue of the best-selling debut novel that launched her remarkable career.
St. Elizabeth's, a home for unwed mothers in Habit, Kentucky, usually harbors its residents for only a little while. Not so Rose Clinton, a beautiful, mysterious woman who comes to the home pregnant but not unwed, and stays. She plans to give up her child, thinking she cannot be the mother it needs. But when Cecilia is born, Rose makes a place for herself and her daughter amid St. Elizabeth's extended family of nuns and an ever-changing collection of pregnant teenage girls. Rose's past won't be kept away, though, even by St. Elizabeth's; she cannot remain untouched by what she has left behind, even as she cannot change who she has become in the leaving.
The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels ($13.20 Kindle, B&N, $14.89 Kobo - coupon eligible) combines the first novel listed above with five others, dropping the price to essentially $2.10 each. Authors included are Nicole Mones, Ann Patchett, Maggie O'Farrell, Jenna Blum, Elizabeth Benedict and Molly Gloss [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt]. You don't get access to the reduced price companion audiobooks with this volume, but some of the included titles are selling for ~$10 each, so it's a great deal for those that skip those, anyway.Book Description
Best Contemporary Women’s Fiction: Six Novels includes works by some of the finest novelists of today.
Almost by Elizabeth Benedict chronicles the attempt of writer Sophy Chase to come to terms with the death of her almost ex-husband -- who may have committed suicide on the New England resort island where she left him just months before.
Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum follows Trudy, a professor of German history, as she investigates her mother's past and the truth surrounding her life in Germany during WWII. Combining a passionate, doomed love story, a vivid evocation of life during the war, and a poignant mother/daughter drama, Those Who Save Us is a profound exploration of what we endure to survive and the legacy of shame.
The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss is a heartwarming, greatly satisfying story of a young woman with the rare talent of “gentling” wild horses and the unexpected and profound connections between people and animals.
The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones takes readers inside the hidden world of elite cuisine in modern China through the story of an American food writer in Beijing. When recently widowed Maggie McElroy is called to China to settle a claim against her late husband’s estate, she is blindsided by the discovery that he may have led a double life.
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell is a gothic, intricate tale of family secrets, lost lives, and the freedom brought by truth that will haunt you long past its final page.
The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett tells the story of a secretive magician's death that sets in motion his partner's journey of self-discovery.
