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Sunday, April 7, 2013

Kindle Daily Deals 4/7

Amazon's MP3 Deal of the Day is Brantley Gilbert's Halfway To Heaven album for $2.99 (Deluxe Edition) [+Video] [+Digital Booklet].

Today's Kindle Daily Deal is eight exciting adventure novels from James Patterson's "Maximum Ride" series for just $2.99 each. That's an even bigger discount than the price match to B&N's Top 1,000 sale was giving us, so I think I'll be filling in the last two from this series, which I had not picked up yet.
Fourteen-year-old Maximum Ride, better known as Max, knows what it's like to soar above the world. She and all the members of the "flock"--Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gasman and Angel--are just like ordinary kids--only they have wings and can fly. It may seem like a dream come true to some, but their lives can morph into a living nightmare at any time...like when Angel, the youngest member of the flock, is kidnapped and taken back to the "School" where she and the others were experimented on by a crew of wack jobs. Her friends brave a journey to blazing hot Death Valley, CA, to save Angel, but soon enough, they find themselves in yet another nightmare--this one involving fighting off the half-human, half-wolf "Erasers" in New York City. Whether in the treetops of Central Park or in the bowels of the Manhattan subway system, Max and her adopted family take the ride of their lives. Along the way Max discovers from her old friend and father-figure Jeb--now her betrayed and greatest enemy--that her purpose is save the world--but can she?
  1. The Angel Experiment
  2. School's Out - Forever
  3. Saving the World
  4. The Final Warning
  5. Max
  6. Fang
  7. Angel
  8. Nevermore

Today's Kindle Romance Daily Deal is The Duchess War ($1.99), by Courtney Milan [indie].
Book Description
Miss Minerva Lane is a quiet, bespectacled wallflower, and she wants to keep it that way. After all, the last time she was the center of attention, it ended badly--so badly that she changed her name to escape her scandalous past. Wallflowers may not be the prettiest of blooms, but at least they don't get trampled. So when a handsome duke comes to town, the last thing she wants is his attention.

But that is precisely what she gets.

Because Robert Blaisdell, the Duke of Clermont, is not fooled. When Minnie figures out what he's up to, he realizes there is more to her than her spectacles and her quiet ways. And he's determined to lay her every secret bare before she can discover his. But this time, one shy miss may prove to be more than his match...

The Duchess War is the first full-length book (97,000 words) in the Brothers Sinister series. It is preceded by The Governess Affair, a prequel novella, and followed by A Kiss for Midwinter. Each book stands alone, but those who prefer to read in order might want to read that book first.

Today's Kindle Kids Daily Deal is get four top-rated "Twisted Lit" novels by Kim Askew, Amy Helmes, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Laurie Plissner, and more, for only $1.99 apiece [Merit Press].

Tempestuous (Twisted Lit), by Kim Askew, Amy Helmes and Jacquelyn Mitchard
After a mistake with big financial consequences topples her throne, former "it girl" Miranda Prospero is bitter: she finds herself stranded in a crazed new world, holding court among geeks and misfits at a mall Hot Dog Kabob stand. Then, she gets her chance for revenge. When the storm of the decade snows in the mall workers and last-minute shopaholics for a long winter's night, Miranda sets out to get back at the catty clique who was behind her exile. But there's a complication. She somehow gets handcuffed to sullen loner Caleb. With him (literally) bound to her side, Miranda learns more in one night about her own heart, and human nature, than she ever did as prep royalty. With this twisted take on Shakespeare's The Tempest, authors Kim Askew and Amy Helmes prove again that, from Juliet's grief to Cordelia's rage, no one knew about teen angst better than the Bard. His wisdom holds up nearly half a millennium later.
Exposure (Twisted Lit), by Kim Askew, Amy Helmes and Jacquelyn Mitchard
Double, double, toil, and trouble! The quest for high-school royalty can turn deadly when teen ambition outstrips reason. Skye Kingston is a shy shutterbug who prefers observing life from behind her camera lens. She doesn't know she's stunning, and comes off the sidelines only when she's forced to by the terrifying events of one treacherous school year in Alaska. A boy named Duncan is dead, and his death may or may not be an accident. Skye's three new best friends are eerily able to foretell the future, and cheerleader Beth might be more than a social climber--she quite probably is a sociopath. Then there's Skye's growing attraction to the school hottie, Craig, The Boy Who Would Be Prom King. But their time is crossed by fate. There's already been one death, and who can say if it's only the first? As Skye falls for Craig, she also slowly realizes that he is caught in the crosshairs of a deadly plot. Can she save Craig and herself from a murderous fate? Exposure is not only a modern take on the classic Macbeth, it's proof that nothing has changed since Shakespeare riffed on the subject nearly half a millennium ago: the quest for power can lead to bloodstained hands.
The Girl in the Wall (Twisted Lit), by Daphne Benedis-Grab and Jacquelyn Mitchard
Ariel's birthday weekend looks to be the event of the season, with a private concert by rock star Hudson Winters on the grounds of her family's east coast estate, and all of Ariel's elite prep school friends in attendance. The only person who's dreading the party is Sera, Ariel's former best friend, whose father is forcing her to go. Sera has been the school pariah since she betrayed Ariel, and she now avoids Ariel and their former friends. Thrown together, Ariel and Sera can agree on one thing: this could be one very long night.

They have no idea just how right they are.

Only moments after the concert begins and the lights go down, thugs open fire on parents and schoolmates alike, in a plot against Ariel's father that quickly spins out of control. As the entire party is taken hostage, the girls are forced apart. Ariel escapes into the hidden tunnels in the family mansion, where she and Sera played as children. Only Sera, who forges an unlikely alliance with Hudson Winters, knows where her friend could be. As the industrial terrorist plot unravels and the death toll climbs, Ariel and Sera must recall the sisterhood that once sustained them as they try to save themselves and each other on the longest night of their lives.
Louder Than Words (Twisted Lit), by Laurie Plissner and Jacquelyn Mitchard
A girl with no voice, only one friend, and a synthetic speech machine that makes her sound like a robot--definitely not prom queen material. So traumatized on the night of the car wreck that killed her entire family that she lost her ability to speak and most of her memories, seventeen-year-old Sasha faces a lonely, quiet future...until she meets a beautiful boy who can literally read her mind.

Today's Kindle SciFi/Fantasy Daily Deal is Cat's Cradle ($1.99), by Kurt Vonnegut [RosettaBooks], with the companion audiobook $3.95.
Book Description
Cat’s Cradle (1963) is Vonnegut's most ambitious novel, which put into the language terms like "wampeter", "kerass" and "granfalloon" as well as a structured religion, Boskonism and was submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for a Master's Degree in anthropology, and in its sprawling compass and almost uncontrolled (and uncontrollable) invention, may be Vonnegut's best novel.

Written contemporaneously with the Cuban missile crisis and countenancing a version of a world in the grasp of magnified human stupidity, the novel is centered on Felix Hoenikker, a chemical scientist reminiscent of Robert Oppenheimer… except that Oppenheimer was destroyed by his conscience and Hoenikker, delighting in the disastrous chemicals he has invented, has no conscience at all. Hoenikker's "Ice 9" has the potential to convert all liquid to inert ice and thus destroy human existence; he is exiled to a remote island where Boskonism has enlisted all of its inhabitants and where religion and technology collaborate, with the help of a large cast of characters, to destroy civilization.

Vonnegut's compassion and despair are expressed here through his grotesque elaboration of character and situation and also through his created religion which like Flannery O'Connor's "Church Without Christ" (in Wise Blood) acts to serve its adherents by removing them from individual responsibility. Vonnegut had always been taken seriously by science fiction readers and critics (a reception which indeed made him uncomfortable) but it was with Cat’s Cradle that he began to be found and appreciated by a more general audience. His own ambivalence toward science, science fiction, religion and religious comfort comes through in every scene of this novel.