Bargain Romance

It's in His Kiss, by Julia Quinn has been marked down from $7.99 to $1.99.

Book Description
Meet Our Hero ...
Gareth St. Clair is in a bind. His father, who detests him, is determined to beggar the St. Clair estates and ruin his inheritance. Gareth's sole bequest is an old family diary, which may or may not contain the secrets of his past .. and the key to his future. The problem is -- it's written in Italian, of which Gareth speaks not a word.

Meet Our Heroine ...
All the ton agreed: there was no one quite like Hyacinth Bridgerton. She's fiendishly smart, devilishly outspoken, and according to Gareth, probably best in small doses. But there's something about her -- something charming and vexing -- that grabs him and won't quite let go...

Meet Poor Mr. Mozart ...
Or don't. But rest assured, he's spinning in his grave when Gareth and Hyacinth cross paths at the annual -- and annually discordant -- Smythe-Smith musicale. To Hyacinth, Gareth's every word seems a dare, and she offers to translate his diary, even though her Italian is slightly less than perfect. But as they delve into the mysterious text, they discover that the answers they seek lie not in the diary, but in each other ... and that there is nothing as simple -- or as complicated -- as a single, perfect kiss.

If you get this one, you'll also want to check out It's In His Kiss: The Epilogue II, which is $1.59. I'm not sure how long it really is (and the reviews are actually for the main book), but it looks to be relatively short, at 47K. It looks as though it tries to wrap up all the loose ends in the book (but that there wasn't enough there for another full novel).

Book Description

What happened to the diamonds????If you've read It's in His Kiss, you want to know. Don't miss this charming and passionate short story, in which Gareth proves that some things get better with age, Hyacinth gains new respect for her mother (with a daughter like Isabella she'd have to, wouldn't she?), and everyone learns that while diamonds are lovely, sometimes tenacity is a girl's best friend.

Ruth Ann Nordin has added two new novels to her free download page. The first one is His Redeeming Bride.

Book Description
Seven years after Eye of the Beholder ends, Neil Craftsman's story begins. (I recommend reading Eye of the Beholder first. Otherwise, this book spoils the "surprise" in Eye of the Beholder.)

When Sarah Donner learns she's pregnant, she hopes this blessing will be the thing to make her husband finally love her. But to her horror, he announces that she will go live with her overbearing mother-in-law. Weeks before she is due to give birth, they are traveling to her mother-in-law's when some thieves kill him.

Ready to give birth, she has to rely on the aid of the one man others had warned her about: Neil Craftsman. She knows of his tarnished past, and no respectable woman will go near him. But when she learns her husband left her with no home and no money, she has nowhere else to go but to the one man she's shunned.

As she gets to know Neil, she learns that there is more to him than meets the eye. But when his past comes back to haunt him, will her newfound love be enough to redeem him - or will he always be a shunned man?

The second new book on her site is Falling In Love With Her Husband

Book Description
When Ann Statesman marries Todd Brothers, it's not because she loves him. She marries him because she knows that he will make a good husband. She hopes that given time, her feelings for him will blossom into romantic love. But when her old beau comes back for her, will she still want to stay with Todd...or will she want to go back her past love?

She has also added a new download from Melanie Nilles, Starfire Angels, which looks like a fantasy novel for the young adults (yes, it says Science Fiction, but if you wake up with wings, that puts you outside the realm of science and into fantasy). The book description is very brief, but there is a video trailer that promises to elaborate on the premis.

Book Description
A senior in high school wakes up one morning and discovers that she has wings. Nothing in her life will ever be the same again.

To download either of these three books or any of the others on her site, click HERE. They are all in PDF, but should convert well with MobiCreator Professional or Calibre, as well as be readable on the Kindle DX without conversion.

Game of the Day - Westward (98 cents)

Amazon's Video Game of the Day deal today is once again a game download for 98 cents; this time it's Westward. I read through the reviews and I'm definitely going to get the free trial - I may buy it just so that I can get to the level where you blow up outhouses.

Game Description

• Buy, Sell & Trade To Build Your Fortune.
• Engaging Storyline.
• More Than 10 Playable Main Characters.
• Ever-Changing Scenarios.

Enter the rough and tumble world of Westward, where gold is there for the taking and bandits lurk around every turn. Control the fortunes of three vastly different towns as they rise from the dust of the frontier and grow into thriving boomtowns. Brave the dangers of the West and explore uncharted plains, dense forests and rocky canyons as you guide your settlers to safety and success. Stake your claim with a cast of hundreds, stunningly original graphics, hilarious dialogue and endless possibilities!

This game should also qualify as a purchase for the Buy One, Get One Free offer that Amazon is currently running, as yesterday's download did.

Game of the Day - 98 Cents (plus one free)

Amazon's Video Game of the Day deal today is a game download, Tradewinds 2, for 98 cents. It's a cute game, so far, where you travel between ports, buying and selling trade goods (with prices changing at ports depending on the season) and fighting off pirates. I quickly played thru the 30 minute trial period and promptly went back to Amazon and purchased the full version.

This game also qualifies as a purchase for the Buy One, Get One Free offer that Amazon is currently running and I've already received the email from Amazon telling me to choose one of the games from that offer to download for free (but I'll try each of them first, to make sure they work on my computer; I've run into some that won't and others that were just unplayable for me, so the 30 minute trial period is something I always take advantage of).

Game Description

• Trade Goods And Fight Pirates.
• Over 100 Swashbuckling Adventures
• Customize Your Ship And Characters
• Over 60 Hours Of Gameplay

Amass a fortune by buying and selling goods in this fantastic seafaring game of chance, skill and adventure! Earn enough gold to upgrade your ship and engage in land and sea battles. Trade magic weaponry and mysterious artifacts as you encounter a fascinating new world and discover uncharted ports. Two game modes and over sixty hours of gameplay await you in your quest to dominate the high seas!

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon, is currently marked down to $2.39, the lowest I've seen it since last December, when it went down to $1.75 (I think it was even lower a day or two before I got a copy then). I know that
by year end it was back up to $6.39, although several others in the series were still marked down then.

Book Description
Claire Randall is leading a double life. She has a husband in one century, and a lover in another...

In 1945, Claire Randall, a former combat nurse, is back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon—when she innocently touches a boulder in one of the ancient stone circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is a Sassenach—an "outlander"—in a Scotland torn by war and raiding border clans in the year of our Lord...1743.

Hurled back in time by forces she cannot understand, Claire's destiny in soon inextricably intertwined with Clan MacKenzie and the forbidden Castle Leoch. She is catapulted without warning into the intrigues of lairds and spies that may threaten her life ...and shatter her heart. For here, James Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior, shows her a passion so fierce and a love so absolute that Claire becomes a woman torn between fidelity and desire...and between two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives.

The entire Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon is available for the Kindle. In order, they are:Outlander ($2.39), Dragonfly in Amber ($7.19), Voyager ($6.39), Drums of Autumn ($6.39), The Fiery Cross ($6.39) and A Breath of Snow and Ashes ($6.39) and, of course, the newest in the series, An Echo in the Bone ($13.20 - it appears the publisher intentionally set the list price at $30 in order to prevent it from being sold at $9.99 in the Kindle store, as that is above the cutoff for the automatic pricing system's discount; maybe it will go down as sales for the book increase, otherwise I'm waiting on the paperback).

Free Reads - H.G. Wells

To celebrate the birthday of H.G. Wells (21 Sept 1866) BooksOnBoard is offering The Time Machine for free - in ePub, ADE and Mobi formats. You'll need to set up an account, but should not need a credit card for these formats. There doesn't appear to be any DRM on the files, so the Mobi version should work on the Kindle.

Book Description
The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, is a novella, written in 1895, that sparked the idea of a usable vehicle that allows its operator to travel through time. Wells’ protagonist, the Time Traveler, sees time as the fourth dimension, meaning it could be as travelable as any of the other dimensions. He ends up in the year 802,701 A.D. and discovers a human-esque race called Eloi. Wells’ The Time Machine explores the utopian existence that the Time Traveler discovers the Eloi living in.

If you don't want to use BooksOnBoard, need another format or just want to check out what a hand-converted public domain book can look like (almost always much better than those poorly formatted gutenberg copies in the Kindle store often are), you might want to check out the free version of both The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds over at mobileread.com. These three are currently at the top of the list of recent uploads, which you can find by clicking HERE.

With either of these two sources, you'll need to make your own backups, since when you delete them from your reader, they will be truly removed. On the other hand, that also means that these books won't be cluttering up your archive forever, either, something that becomes more and more of an issue, as my archive grows and there is no method of organizing two years after the first Kindle shipped.