Today's Kindle Daily Deal is The Prophet ($2.99), by Michael Koryta [Hachette].Book Description
Adam Austin hasn't spoken to his brother in years. When they were teenagers, their sister was abducted and murdered, and their devastated family never recovered. Now Adam keeps to himself, scraping by as a bail bondsman, working so close to the town's criminal fringes that he sometimes seems a part of them.
Kent Austin is the beloved coach of the local high school football team, a religious man and hero in the community. After years of near misses, Kent's team has a shot at the state championship, a welcome point of pride in a town that has had its share of hardships.
Just before playoffs begin, the town and the team are thrown into shock when horrifically, impossibly, another teenage girl is found murdered. As details emerge that connect the crime to the Austin brothers, the two must confront their buried rage and grief-and unite to stop a killer.
Michael Koryta, widely hailed as one of the most exciting young thriller authors at work today, has written his greatest novel ever-an emotionally harrowing, unstoppably suspenseful novel that Donald Ray Pollock has called "one of the sharpest and superbly plotted crime novels I've read in my life."
Today's Kindle Romance Daily Deal is Wait for You ($0.99), by J. Lynn.Book Description
Some things are worth waiting for...
Traveling thousands of miles from home to enter college is the only way nineteen-year-old Avery Morgansten can escape what happened at the Halloween party five years ago--an event that forever changed her life. All she needs to do is make it to her classes on time, make sure the bracelet on her left wrist stays in place, not draw any attention to herself, and maybe--please God--make a few friends, because surely that would be a nice change of pace. The one thing she didn't need and never planned on was capturing the attention of the one guy who could shatter the precarious future she's building for herself.
Some things are worth experiencing...
Cameron Hamilton is six feet and three inches of swoon-worthy hotness, complete with a pair of striking blue eyes and a remarkable ability to make her want things she believed were irrevocably stolen from her. She knows she needs to stay away from him, but Cam is freaking everywhere, with his charm, his witty banter, and that damn dimple that's just so... so lickable. Getting involved with him is dangerous, but when ignoring the simmering tension that sparks whenever they are around each other becomes impossible, he brings out a side of her she never knew existed.
Some things should never be kept quiet...
But when Avery starts receiving threatening emails and phone calls forcing her to face a past she wants silenced, she's has no other choice but to acknowledge that someone is refusing to allow her to let go of that night when everything changed. When the devastating truth comes out, will she resurface this time with one less scar? And can Cam be there to help her or will he be dragged down with her?
And some things are worth fighting for...
Today's Kindle SciFi/Fantasy Daily Deal is Timequake ($1.99), by Kurt Vonnegut [RosettaBooks].Book Description
Timequake (1997) exists in two conjoined versions ("Timequake One"/"Timequake Two") and in meta-fictional mode is a novel about a novel, composed in short, arbitrary chapters and using its large cast of characters and disoriented chronology to mimic the "timequake" which is its subject. Some cosmic upheaval has hurled the entire population a decade back where, in full consciousness (but helplessly entrapped) everyone’s pitiable and embarrassing mistakes are helplessly enacted again.
By this stage of his life--he was 72 the year the novel was published--Vonnegut was still wearing his luminescent bells and Harlequin's cape, but these had become dusty and the cape no longer fitted. Vonnegut’s exasperation and sense of futility could no longer be concealed or shaped, and this novel is a laboratory of technique (deliberately) gone wrong, a study of breakdown.
Vonnegut had never shown much hope in his work for human destiny or occupation; the naive optimism of Eliot Rosewater in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater had in the damaged veteran Billy Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse-Five become a naive fantasy of escape to a sexual heaven. In the nihilism of Timequake, the only escape is re-enactment, but re-enactment has lost hope and force.
This is no Groundhog Day in which Vonnegut traps his various refugees (many escaped from his earlier works) but a hell of lost possibility. The temporal timequake of the title is the actual spiritual fracture of the 20th century, and in his 73rd year Vonnegut envisions no hope, not even the hollow diversions of Slapstick. Vonnegut’s imaginative journey, closely tracked by his work, is one of the most intriguing for any American writer of the twentieth century.
The Kindle Deal of the day for those in the UK is two novels in the Hebrides series by Lillian Beckwith for £0.99 each (~80% off).A Breath of Autumn (Main/UK; no US edition)
Kirsty MacDonald is a crofter on the idyllic Westisle in the Hebrides, an island she now owns. Her son, Wee Ruari, has started school on the mainland, travelling by boat across the Sound to Clachan, and being separated from her son during the week is a wrench for Kirsty. Twice widowed, she misses the boy’s father, who was tragically drowned, and also her husband’s brother, who became her second husband – and secretly loved her. Kirsty is not left entirely alone though.The Sea for Breakfast (Main/UK; no US edition)
As autumn arrives she is kept busy preparing for the winter and finds herself fully involved in the lives of her fellow islanders: fisherman Jamie, who is like her own son, his friend Euan and new arrival Enac. However, it is the appearance of a Canadian and his daughter that causes the biggest waves in the small community. Kirsty is opposed to change but soon comes to learn that not all change is to be resisted.
Lillian Beckwith takes her experiences of moving to a croft of her own, and uses them as the basis of these comic adventures, once again set on the island of Bruach. Adapting to a totally different way of life provides many excuses for humour.
In one story, beachcombing yields a strange find; in another, a Christmas party results in a riotous night’s celebrations. The eccentric cast of characters guarantees there is never a dull moment on Bruach
20th Century Ghosts ($1.99 Kindle, B&N), an anthology by Joe Hill [HarperCollins], is the Nook Daily Find, price matched on Kindle. Be careful if searching on your Kindle that you don't get the 99 cent single story instead (it lacks the "s" at the end, but comes up much higher in a search).Book Description
Imogene is young, beautiful . . . and dead, waiting in the Rosebud Theater one afternoon in 1945. . . .
Francis was human once, but now he's an eight-foot-tall locust, and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing. . . .
John is locked in a basement stained with the blood of half a dozen murdered children, and an antique telephone, long since disconnected, rings at night with calls from the dead. . . .
Nolan knows but can never tell what really happened in the summer of '77, when his idiot savant younger brother built a vast cardboard fort with secret doors leading into other worlds. . . .
The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. . . .
Today's Kindle Teen Daily Deal is Crossing ($1.99), by Andrew Xia Fukuda [AmazonEncore].Book Description
A loner in his all-white high school, Chinese-born Xing (pronounced “Shing”) is a wallflower longing for acceptance. His isolation is intensified by his increasingly awkward and undeniable crush on his only friend, the beautiful and brilliant Naomi Lee.
Xing’s quiet adolescent existence is rattled when a series of disappearances rock his high school and fear ripples through the blue collar community in which he lives.
Amidst the chaos surrounding him, only Xing, alone on the sidelines of life, takes notice of some peculiar sightings around town. He begins to investigate with the hope that if he can help put an end to the disappearances, he will finally win the acceptance for which he has longed. However, as Xing draws closer to unveiling the identity of the abductor, he senses a noose of suspicion tightening around his own neck.
While Xing races to solve the mystery and clear his name, Crossing hurtles readers towards a chilling climax.
