Free Book - From the Ashes (K/N/E)

Update: 1/23/12 Now free from Sony.

From the Ashes (US/UK), by Jeremy Burns, is free in the Kindle store and from Barnes & Noble. The publisher, Fiction Studio, has another 13 titles on sale right now for $1.99 or less (Kindle, B&N), ten of which are apparently in my library, already!

This one doesn't have any reviews yet at Amazon, but I'd definitely ignore the reviews on B&N, as they seem to all be complaints by those who can't figure out how to find the Free Friday book blog using their Nook.

Book Description
A DEADLY CONSPIRACY

Graduate students Jonathan and Michael Rickner, sons of eminent archeologist Sir William Rickner, are no strangers to historical mysteries and archeological adventures. But when Michael is discovered dead in his Washington, D.C. apartment, Jon refuses to believe the official ruling of suicide. Digging deeper into his brother’s work, he discovers evidence that Michael was murdered to keep his dissertation research buried.

A DEVASTATING NATIONAL SECRET

Joined by Michael’s fiancée Mara Ellison, Jon travels to New York where he uncovers the threads of a deadly Depression-era conspiracy – one entangling the Hoover Administration, the Rockefellers, and the rise of Nazi Germany – and the elite cadre of assassins that still guard its unspeakable secret.

THE LABYRINTHINE PATH TO THE TRUTH

Finding themselves in the crosshairs of the same men who killed Michael, Jon and Mara must navigate a complex web of historical cover-ups and modern-day subterfuge, outwitting and outrunning their all-powerful pursuers as they race through the monuments and museums of Manhattan in a labyrinthine treasure hunt to discover the last secret of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., before their enemies can bury the truth – and them – forever.

Get the free ebook from Barnes & Noble.
Get the free ebook from Sony.

Free Game - Hamster Habitat (K)

Amazon has released Hamster Habitat, a new, free game for eInk Kindles.

Game Description
Hamster Habitat is an engaging path-building puzzle game.

Can you bring all your hamsters together?

In Hamster Habitat, your goal is to connect all of the pieces in the hamster cage using a limited supply of hamster tubes. You'll need to work around obstacles and plan carefully to solve puzzles of three different difficulty levels. For bonus points, find the path that not only unites the hamsters but rewards them with up to three treats!

Hamster Habitat gives you more than 50 puzzles to solve in any order, and includes a full tutorial, an infinite undo feature to make it easy to change your mind, and a Show Solution feature for those puzzles you just can't figure out. Hamster Habitat is fun for puzzle lovers of all ages.

Free Book - Your Dream Wedding on a Budget (K/N/E)

Update: 1/23/12 Now free from Sony.

It took a month, but Your Dream Wedding on a Budget ($2.39 Kindle), a Workman Short (45 pages) by Mindy Weiss, is now free in the Kindle store, joining Barnes & Noble and Kobo.

Book Description
No one knows how to plan a wedding like Mindy Weiss, the “mega-star wedding planner” (People magazine) whose wide-ranging clientele includes actors, artists, and musicians. In The Wedding Book, she created the ultimate all-in-one guide; from that, she’s now culled an invaluable digest on how to plan your very best wedding possible while adhering to a budget. Here’s a general wedding budget overview: an at-a-glance chart of what traditionally consumes most of the budget, and what should cost the least. Guidelines to figure out who’s paying for what. The ten best ways to cut costs, beginning with trimming the guest list, and the five best splurges—the kind of things that make a big difference for little cost. Dozens of tips throughout show how to save money on food, drinks, flowers, photography, music, the wedding dress, and more—guaranteeing that you’ll not only wind up with a dream wedding, but also with the satisfaction of knowing it was a smart wedding. About this title: Workman Shorts is a lively line of subject-specific e-books curated from our library of trusted books and authors.

Get the free ebook from Barnes & Noble.
Get the free ebook from Kobo.
Get the free ebook from Sony.

Today's Deals

New coupon codes from Kobo: jan20us20 for 20% off a non-Agency title. You should be able to use the usual country code substitutions to get five total with this discount.

If you are a big comics fan, you may be interested in the 1/2 sale for Bone or the 99 cent Uncanny X-Force sale over at Comixology. Looks like today is the final day and you can get issue #1 completely free as a sample. It does require an account and you'll need the Comixology Comics app to read them on your Kindle Fire or an Android/iThing device. You' want to check their Free Comics page, too, since they add a few new ones each week.

You can get a free MP3 download of Loga Ramin Torkian's Your Bewitching Eyes (Chashme Jadu), courtesy of Six Degree Records. You'll need to give them an email address to get the link sent (and will be subscribed to their newsletter).

EPUB formats now available for the first four free books, the fifth is now free on Kindle and the sixth is one that has returned to the Kindle store (free), after disappearing abruptly on the first day it was available.

• Always the Wedding Planner, Never the Bride (K/N/E)
• Valeria's Cross (K/N/E)
• A Time to Love (K/N/E)
• Long Time Coming (K/N/E)
• Bound In Sin (K/DF)
• Nocturne (K/N/E)

Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure ($1.99), by Richard E. Byrd, is today's Kindle Deal of the Day.

Book Description
When Admiral Richard E. Byrd set out on his second Antarctic expedition in 1934, he was already an international hero for having piloted the first flights over the North and South Poles. His plan for this latest adventure was to spend six months alone near the bottom of the world, gathering weather data and indulging his desire “to taste peace and quiet long enough to know how good they really are.” But early on things went terribly wrong. Isolated in the pervasive polar night with no hope of release until spring, Byrd began suffering inexplicable symptoms of mental and physical illness. By the time he discovered that carbon monoxide from a defective stovepipe was poisoning him, Byrd was already engaged in a monumental struggle to save his life and preserve his sanity.

When Alone was first published in 1938, it became an enormous bestseller. This edition keeps alive Byrd’s unforgettable narrative for new generations of readers.

The Second Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is (Still) Wrong ($1.52 / £0.99 UK), by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, is the Kindle Deal of the day for those in the UK (the US edition is $11.99).

Book Description
From the brains behind The Book of General Ignorance comes another wonderful collection of the most outrageous, fascinating, and mind-bending facts, taking on the hugely popular form of the first book in the internationally bestselling series. The original Book of General Ignorance was published in 2006. It has since been translated into twenty-six languages and sold over 1.2 million copies.

Now, just when you thought that it was safe to start showing off again, John Lloyd and John Mitchinson are back with another busload of mistakes and misunderstandings. Here is a new collection of simple, perfectly obvious questions you'll be quite certain you know the answers to. Whether it's history, science, sports, geography, literature, language, medicine, the classics, or common wisdom, you'll be astonished to discover that everything you thought you knew is still hopelessly wrong.

For example, do you know who made the first airplane flight? How many legs does an octopus have? How much water should you drink every day? What is the chance of tossing a coin and it landing on heads? What happens if you leave a tooth in a glass of Coke overnight? What is house dust mostly made from? What was the first dishwasher built to do? What color are oranges? Who in the world is most likely to kill you?

Whatever your answers to the questions above, you can be sure that everything you think you know is wrong. The Second Book of General Ignorance is the essential text for everyone who knows they don't know everything, and an ideal stick with which to beat people who think they do.

Buried Sins ($3.79 Kindle; $1.99 B&N), by Marta Perry, is the Nook Daily Find.

Book Description
WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE

Had her brand-new husband been involved in something shady? Before Caroline Hampton could confront him, he was killed in a car crash...or so it was claimed. Unsettling incidents--escalating in dange--warned her he could be very much alive. And so Caroline fled for the safety of her sisters' Amish country inn. But someone who suspected her--handsome police chief Zachary Burkhalter--was waiting for Caroline. Waiting for her to slip up. And watching her every move. Daring her to trust him with all of the truth.

Today's backlist/indie free books on Kindle (not likely to be free for long):

• Hollywood Secrets (Hollywood Headlines), by Gemma Halliday
• Night of Wolves (The Paladins #1), by David Dalglish
• Skate Crime: Multimedia, by Alina Adams
• Torment, by Brett McBean
• Zombie Zoology: An Unnatural History, by Tim Curran
• Vampires 3, by J.R. Rain, J. Sheridan LeFanu and Thomas Preskett Prest
• Waves of Regret, by Ken Floyd
• Hard Press'd (The Preston Andrews Mysteries), by Linda Rae Blair
• House Report (Kat Carpenter Mysteries), by Deborah Nicholson
• Husband Hunting, by Kate Silver
• Demonspell (Sunspinners 1), by Phoebe Matthews
• Whispers of a Legend, Part One-Shadows of the Past, by Carrie James Haynes
• New Year's Day (Redshift #1), by N.V. Binder
• Trefoil, by M C Moore
• Loki's Daughters, by Delle Jacobs
• SMART SCHOOL TIME RECIPES: The Breakfast, Snack, and Lunchbox Cookbook for Healthy Kids and Adults, by Alisa Marie Fleming
• My Little Pet Dragon (A fun picture book for children 3-6!), by Scott Gordon
• Barcode Booty: How I found and sold $2 million of 'junk' on eBay and Amazon, And you can, too, using your phone, by Steve Weber
• On Dark Shores: The Lady, by J.A. Clement
• THE DESTINY DICE (THE GAMING MAGI) , by David Bischoff
• DRAGON LADY, by Gary Alexander (Istoria Books)
• ToxiCity, by Libby Fischer Hellmann
• Is It Just Me? or Is Everyone a Little Nuts!, by Judi Coltman
• Rebellion Trilogy, by Gordon Ryan
• Shades of Gray #1 Noir, City Shrouded By Darkness, by Kristie Lynn Higgins
• Touch of Danger (Three Worlds), by Carol A. Strickland
• The Cartel, by A.K. Alexander
• Bomber Bombs (A Bomber Hanson Mystery), by David Champion
• Wind Slayers (Decoy Series #3) , by Robert W. Walker
• The World of Lady Lazarus, by Michele Lang
• From Hell, by Ian Fraser
• Maud's House, by Sherry Roberts
• Harry Truman vs The Aliens, by Emerson LaSalle
• Dragon Blues, by Edie Ramer
• You've Got Murder, by Karin Tabke and Edie Ramer
• To Seduce an Earl (The Seduction Series), by Lori Brighton (Three previously free are free once again)
• Never Buried (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series), by Edie Claire
• Dark Warriors: A Dark Lands Anthology, by Autumn Dawn
• Mystery Short Stories, by N.C. Hyzy
• The Way They Were, by Mary Campisi
• Generation Wall, by Mark Scheppert and Katharina Schmidt (translator)
• DX (Crimson City), by Carolyn Jewel
• The Blood Red Scarf, by Richard Parks
• Adjourned (The Jury Series) and Three Ways to Die, by Lee Goldberg
• It's a Dog's Life (a romantic comedy with a canine sidekick), by Dale Mayer
• A Fallen Woman (Brides of Bath Book 3), by Cheryl Bolen
• The One You Love (suspense mystery), by Paul Pilkington
• Where You Lived: Stories, by Where You Lived: Stories
• Infinity:Tales of Time and Space, by Carole Gill
• Zombie Writing!, by Richard Lee Byers, Eric S. Brown, Mark Clodi and Jason S. Hornsby
• Three books by James Roy Daley

Free Book - John F. Kennedy (K)

John F. Kennedy, A Life, by The Editors of New Word City, is free in the Kindle store.

Book Description
John F. Kennedy’s assassination has been the subject of public and cultural fascination (a film by Oliver Stone, a novel by Stephen King, endless conspiracy theories) for nearly 50 years. It’s time, this brief biography argues, to give equal consideration to Kennedy’s life.