Amazon has brought back a new group of discounted books under the
Kindle Big Deal banner, with hundreds of books priced at
$0.99,
$1.99,
$2.99, and
$3.99 thru December 23 (before all those holiday
Kindles get opened -- so I predict we'll see a brand new list of discounted titles on Christmas Eve!). The bargains below are not necessarily off the Big Deals list, but are ones I've stumbled upon in the last few days. Many of these are Agency titles, so are the same price at
Barnes & Noble and
Kobo, but I'm omitting links in the interest of time, so I'll have time to get this post completed.
All I Want for Christmas Is a Vampire (
$1.99), the fifth title in the
Love at Stake series by Kerrelyn Sparks, is also the only one in the series that I was missing.
Book Description
Toni Davis's Christmas wish list
- Springing my best friend from the psych ward.
- Living somewhere that doesn't have coffins in the basement. Occupied coffins.
- Finding Mr. Right. Please make him tall, dark, handsome, and alive.
This Christmas isn't so merry for Toni. Her best friend's been locked up in a mental hospital ever since she told the police she was attacked by vampires, and the only way for Toni to get her out is to prove that bloodsuckers really do exist. So she's taken a job as a bodyguard for the Undead, but she gets more than she bargained for, especially when she meets Ian MacPhie, a Scottish rascal looking for Ms. Right.
Although Ian's nearly five centuries old, he looks and acts like a twenty-seven-year-old hunk.
How can a dead man be so damn sexy? Could Mr. Wrong be Mr. Right? One forbidden kiss could lead to an eternity of passion—and all it takes is one moment under the mistletoe....
Silent Night, Haunted Night (
$1.99) is the fourth title in Terri Garey's
Nicki Styx series. Again, the only one of the series I was missing (and now I have all the titles in each one!).
Book Description
All I haunt for christmas is you....
Joe Bascombe is no stranger to desire, but when a sexy spirit begins haunting his dreams, he finds himself ensnared by dark passions. What he doesn't realize is that the devious demon and her two sisters, otherwise known as the Three Fates, are out to teach the woman he loves a lesson....
Unwilling psychic Nicki Styx survived a near-death experience to find herself able to see and hear the dead, but she only has eyes for Joe. Together they've conquered evil spirits, saved lost souls, and beaten back the Devil himself, but they're about to learn that there are more things in Heaven and Hell than they ever imagined. As far as Nicki is concerned, Joe is the man of her dreams, but now they're at the mercy of the creature who's invaded his.
It'll be a Christmas to remember ... and it could be Joe and Nicki's last.
Home for the Holidays (
$1.99), by Johanna Lindsey
Book Description
Left to handle the rumors other family's bankruptcy and impending eviction, Larissa Ascots wishes for a merry Christmas seem to be in peril for the first time in her sheltered life. A charming would-be "benefactor,"Vincent Everett, the Baron of Windsmoor, has offered to shelter Larissa and her young brother. But more than Yuletide spirit seems to have inspired the baron's generostity.From the moment he first set eyes on Larissa, the highborn rogue was bewitched. And now that she has taken up residence in his home, he aches with wanting her-a most unfortunate state of affairs, since the proud beauty obviously despises him ... and since Vincent has sworn to seek a righteous vengeance on the Ascot family.
The Breach (
$0.99), the first title in the
Travis Chase series by Patrick Lee, was previously discounted under a different ASIN (at twice this price and now missing from the Kindle store), so check your Kindle Library to see if you already have this one.
Book Description
Thirty years ago, in a facility buried beneath a vast Wyoming emptiness, an experiment gone awry accidentally opened a door.
It is the world's best-kept secret—and its most terrifying.
Trying to regain his life in the Alaskan wilds, ex-con/ex-cop Travis Chase stumbles upon an impossible scene: a crashed 747 passenger jet filled with the murdered dead, including the wife of the President of the United States. Though a nightmare of monumental proportions, it pales before the terror to come, as Chase is dragged into a battle for the future that revolves around an amazing artifact.
Allied with a beautiful covert operative whose life he saved, Chase must now play the role he's been destined for—a pawn of incomprehensible forces or humankind's final hope—as the race toward Apocalypse begins in earnest.
Because something is loose in the world.
And doomsday is not only possible ... it is inevitable.
The Fallen (
$0.99), a stand-alone title by T. Jefferson Parker, is already in my library.
Book Description
A good cop, Robbie Brownlaw was thrown from a sixth-floor window of a downtown hotel and miraculously survived. The traumatic incident left Robbie with a fast-track career in the San Diego P.D.'s Homicide division ... and a rare neurological condition that enables him to see people's emotional words as colored shapes—green trapezoids of envy, red squares of deception....
Another good man lies dead in a blood-splattered Ford Explorer—an ex-cop-turned-ethics investigator whose private life was torn open by unthinkable tragedy. Whether Garrett Asplundh's death was suicide or murder isn't immediately apparent—but it's soon clear to Robbie and his smart, tough partner, McKenzie Cortez, that Garrett had hard evidence of sex, scandal, and corruption spreading deep into local government. But pursuing the truth could prove more emotionally devastating than Robbie ever imagined.
California Girl (
$1.99), a stand-alone title by T. Jefferson Parker, is one I don't have. I had to sample, though, to see how well his Orange County stands up to my memories of living there.
Book Description
The Orange County, California, that the Becker brothers knew as boys is no more—unrecognizably altered since the afternoon in 1954 when Nick, Clay, David, and Andy rumbled with the lowlife Vonns, while five-year-old Janelle Vonn watched from the sidelines. The new decade has ushered in the era of Johnson, hippies, John Birchers, and LSD. Clay becomes a casualty of a far-off jungle war. Nick becomes a cop, Andy a reporter, David a minister. And a terrible crime touches them all in ways they could never have anticipated when the mutilated corpse of teenage beauty queen Janelle Vonn is discovered in an abandoned warehouse.
Inseparable (
$2.99), by Dora Heldt and Jamie Lee Searle (Translator), is another of the AmazonEncore titles that Amazon has had translated to English. You may have picked up the first of her titles,
Life After Forty, when it was $1.60 back in July.
Book Description
Still reeling from her recent divorce, Christine, the beloved protagonist of Dora Heldt’s uproarious Life After Forty, is sure that yet another birthday is the last thing she needs. But here it comes nonetheless, the big 4-4, in all its lonely mid-life glory. Making matters worse is Christine’s fear that, throughout her life, she has relied too heavily on the support of her girlfriends. As the big day nears, she begins to think that none of those women can understand just what she is going through. Alarmed by Christine’s growing despair, her best friend and sister hatch a plan to prove her wrong: they will gather together all of Christine’s old friends from the various stages of her life and throw a surprise party the likes of which she has never seen. Of course finding all of those women turns out to be easier said than done! Nonetheless, the final result proves to be a priceless gift, a moving and laugh-out-loud funny portrait of one woman’s life as told through the stories of her friendships.
Burning Bright: Return of the Light\Star Light, Star Bright\One for Each Night (
$1.49), an anthology by Anne Stuart, Maggie Shayne and Judith Arnold, is priced right for the season.
Book Description
There's a reason three women are drawn to Burning Bright, a small candle shop tucked away in snowy Crescent Cove, Vermont…
Return of the Light by Maggie Shayne
Dori Stewart's six-figure Manhattan job has vanished, and her lover and friends have vanished with it. She's scraping by as a waitress and awaiting the day she can return to New York in triumph. Maybe a ritual on the winter solstice can renew her wavering faith. What she needs is just the right candle…and Jason Farrar, an old boyfriend, by her side.
Star Light, Star Bright by Anne Stuart
Angela McKenna is back in Crescent Cove after a painful divorce. As if that isn't enough, she discovers that her secret teenage crush is also back in town, hiding from the world. Her Christmas could use brightening up. Maybe if she bought a special candle…maybe if Brody Jackson was with her…
One for Each Night by Judith Arnold
Alana Ross needs a candle, too, one to fit her late grandmother's antique menorah. Not just any candle will do. For Alana's first Hanukkah open house in Crescent Cove, everything has to be perfect. Maybe that'll make her feel more at home in her new town. It can't hurt. So far she's managed to alienate Jeffrey Barrett, the only man to show any interest in her, by accusing his uncle—in print—of a crime.
Judgement (
$0.99), by Fergus Bannon, Gary Gibson (Editor) and Hal Duncan (Foreword), is from an English author; I originally picked this up in PDF form during one of the Read an eBook Week promotions.
Book Description
Science fiction. It started with a few isolated incidents: a mob shootout in Las Vegas, a firefight in the Central American jungles - one apparently unconnected event after the other, hinting at a worldwide conspiracy of unprecedented proportions. But before long CIA computer expert Bob Leith realises it's something much more than mere globalised terrorism, something literally not of this world ...
Fergus Bannon, when not performing neurosurgical interventions with the aid of a hacksaw, dowsing rod and amphetamine-soaked surgical mask, has been known to write for publications such as Interzone, Territories, West Coast Magazine and Shipbuilding.
Fire in the Hole with Bonus Material (
$1.99), by Elmore Leonard, appears to be a single short story from the upcoming (and so far, in paperback only)
Fire in the Hole: Stories. If you are a fan of the
Justified TV series though, you'll probably want to grab the story that inspired it.
Book Description
For a limited time, and at a special price, read Fire in the Hole, the basis for the pilot episode of the hit FX series Justified, in which U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens meets up with an old friend in Harlan County—though they’re now on different sides of the law.
Also included is a special sneak peek at Elmore Leonard’s new novel, Raylan, available wherever books are sold January 17th.
Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter (
$2.99 Kindle,
B&N), the first
Dixie Hemingway Mystery by Blaize Clement, is once again discounted (last time, I grabbed it to replace my missing paperback copy). I'm still behind on this series (I never could find more titles in paper and have been resisting the ebooks, until they come down a bit), but for those who are not,
The Cat Sitter's Pajamas will be released in January.
Book Description
Until three years ago, Dixie Hemingway was a deputy with the Sarasota County Sherriff's Department in southwest Florida. Then came a tragic accident. Now Dixie's a pet-sitter on Siesta Key, a lush, exotic barrier island where the people tend to be rich, suntanned, and tolerant of one another's quirks.
As Dixie tried to get her life back in order, pet-sitting is the perfect job. She goes into people's homes while they're gone and takes care of their pets; she likes the animals, they like her, and she doesn't have to deal with people very much. She especially does not have to be afraid that she'll run into a situation that will cause her to lose her hard-won composure.
But when Dixie finds a man bizarrely drowned in a cat's water bowl, she is drawn into a tangled web of danger and secrets. Unbeknownst to Lieutenant Guidry, the homicide detective handling the murder, Dixie begins her own investigation into the whereabouts of the cat's owner, who has now vanished. Fans of The Cat Who... book series by Lilian Jackson Braun will adore this riveting new pet-oriented sleuth and will eagerly await Dixie's next case: Will duplicity dog the dachshund?
Havana Before Castro: When Cuba was a Tropical Playground (
$2.99), by Peter Moruzzi, looks like it will be interesting (especially on larger screen). For those watching their space, this one is 22MB in size (about 250 pages).
Book Description
Featuring hundreds of vintage photographs, postcards, brochures, and other materials evocative of time and place, Havana Before Castro: When Cuba Was a Tropical Playground documents how the city of Havana evolved from Prohibition haven and rich man's playground to a heady blend of glittering nightclubs, outrageous cabarets, all-night bars, and backstreet brothels. Here, captured in one amazing book, is the drama, passion, intrigue, and opulence of a legendary city during its heyday-before the Castro dictatorship re-imagined the country and Americans were banned from travel to this tropical paradise.
An architectural historian by profession, Peter Moruzzi is an acknowledged expert on mid-century Modern architecture and design. He is the founder of the Palm Springs Modern Committee, an internationally recognized historic preservation organization, and the writer/director of Desert Holiday, a documentary film chronicling the history of Palm Springs as seen through vintage postcards. He resides in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles and in Palm Springs.
Pillow Talk (
$1.99), by Freya North
Book Description
By day, Petra Flint is a talented jeweler working in a lively London studio. By night, she's a sleepwalker troubled by a past she can't put to bed and a present that leaves her clinging to an unsuitable boyfriend. Arlo Savidge was once a budding heartthrob musician. Then tragedy struck and he chose to forsake stardom and all future affairs of the heart for a quiet life in the countryside as a music teacher.
Petra and Arlo haven't seen each other since they were teenagers-when their feelings ran deep but the timing wasn't right. Now, seventeen years later, they run into each other once more. Might first love get a second chance-or will what keeps them up at night keep them apart forever?
Blue Christmas (
$1.99), is the third title in the
Southern series by Mary Kay Andrews
Book Description
It's the week before Christmas, and antiques dealer Weezie Foley is in a frenzy to garnish her shop for the Savannah historical district decorating contest, which she intends to win. Weezie is ready to shoot herself with her glue gun by the time she's done, but the results are stunning. She's certainly one-upped the owners of the trendy boutique around the corner, but suddenly things start to go missing from her display, and there seems to be a mysterious midnight visitor to her shop.
Still, Weezie has high hopes for the holiday—maybe in the form of an engagement ring from her chef boyfriend. But Daniel, always moody at the holidays, seems more distant than usual. Throw in Weezie's decidedly odd family, a 1950s Christmas tree pin, and even a little help from the King himself (Elvis, that is), and maybe there will be a pocketful of miracles for Weezie this Christmas Eve.
Back by popular demand, this new edition of the holiday classic includes an essay by the author, tips for "keeping the happy in holidays," additional recipes, and more.
Catriona (
$0.99), by Jeanette Baker
Book Description
Known for her Scottish time travel and Irish historical romances, Jeanette Baker was featured in RT's "Where Are They Now" best-loved authors column. Kate Sutherland is visited by the mystical, ghostly Catriona, her deceased ancestor, who transports Kate into the passion and bloodshed of 15th-century Scotland. With ties in both the past and the present, Kate must now risk everything to right the wrongs of long ago, or lock the door on history to pursue her future love.
