A Trio of Free Mini-Books from Macmillan (K)

These three titles are mini-books, excerpted from larger works that are soon to be released by Macmillan. All are currently free to pre-order, which means you do need a credit card on file (at least when you place the order), although it won't be charged. I expect them to end up free in other stores, after the release dates.

Locavore U.S.A.: How a local-food economy is changing one community, by Katherine Gustafson, is a chapter from Change Comes to Dinner: How Vertical Farmers, Urban Growers, and Other Innovators Are Revolutionizing How America Eats.

Book Description
In 1950, at least 70 percent of Montana's food was grown in Montana. Many states used to have robust local-food economies, but that has changed drastically around the country in recent decades. National-scale food businesses beat out community-oriented small and medium-sized operations, laying waste to the infrastructure that once supported thriving local-food economies.

There is rising interest in again making food a local affair. But jump-starting a locavore economy is a tricky business. To cut down the massive distances that the vast majority of food eaten in the United States travels before it reaches dinner plates, communities must work to nurture "a cascading effect" by which each piece of a local-food economy enables and then reinforces the others to create a robust, cost-effective network.

Locavore U.S.A. introduces readers to some brave, hard-working souls in western Montana who are building their own such network piece by piece. In the process they are uncovering a key way to transform our industrially dominated food system.

QuickieChick Guide: Fit to Flirt: Get the Body You Want and the Guy You Deserve, by Laurel House, is a excerpt from QuickieChick’s Cheat Sheet to Life, Love, Food, Fitness, Fashion, and Finance on a Less Than Fabulous Budget.

Book Description
Check out Laurel’s:

• Dos and Don’ts for Online Dating to become a pro at sifting through online dating profiles to find the guy who’s right for you.
• Date Night Etiquette Overview to connect with your guy and keep him wanting more
• Top 8 Skinny Chicks’ Diet Cheats for easy ways to cut your calories
• Workouts While Watching TV or Getting Ready to Go Out for some no-sweat ways to get in shape without having to join a gym.

How Mindfulness Can Change Your Life in 10 Minutes a Day: A Guided Meditation, by Andy Puddicombe, is a excerpt from Get Some Headspace: How Mindfulness Can Change Your Life in Ten Minutes a Day.

Book Description
From one of the world’s top mindfulness experts comes the ultimate tool for clearing out mental clutter and improving every aspect of your physical and mental health.

With this ten-minute guided meditation, learn a simple yet powerful technique that’s been tested by time and now adapted to fit into even the most hectic modern lifestyle. And reap incredible benefits! Doing this exercise on a daily basis can help you relieve stress, have stronger relationships, reduce anxiety, sleep more, find a healthy weight, control your emotions, be more productive… the list goes on and on.

Free Book - Ring of Flowers (K/N/E)

Update: 4/7/12 Now free from Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Sony.

Ring of Flowers, by Brian Andrews, is free in the Kindle store, courtesy of Arcade Publishing (an imprint of SkyHorse Publishing).

Book Description
The year is 1665, England.

In the Derbyshire village of Eyam, a tailor, George Vicars orders a bolt of fabric from London to make a wedding dress for his betrothed daughter, Kathryn. To escape her fate of marrying the town’s wealthiest and most odious bachelor, she elopes with her true love, farmhand Paul Foster. Kathryn’s departure is fortuitous, because when the fabric is delivered, the parcel is infested with fleas carrying bubonic plague. First bitten and first to die, George Vicars’ misfortune becomes the community’s death sentence when the town Rector boldly imposes a quarantine on all Eyam residents. Months later, expecting a child, the newlyweds return home to find their world turned upside down. Once inside the township, they are forbidden to leave and Kathryn is forced to give birth in quarantine. Under the shadow plague, and against all odds, Will Foster’s paternal ancestor is born . . . with a genetic mutation that will change the world 345 years later.

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

Today's Deals

Repeat freebies from Christian publishers:

• The Prayers of Agnes Sparrow (K/N/E)
• Sweet Baklava (K/N/E)
• Charlotte Figg Takes Over Paradise (K/N/E)
• They Almost Always Come Home (K/N/E)
• Highland Blessings (K/N/E)

A Genius for Deception: How Cunning Helped the British Win Two World Wars ($1.99), by Nicholas Rankin, is today's Kindle Deal of the Day. This is one of those well-researched non-fiction titles from Oxford University Press, which I'd recommend to history/war/military buffs, homeschoolers and those looking for strategies for the coming zombie apocalypse (after all, zombies should be even easier to fool!).

Book Description
In February 1942, intelligence officer Victor Jones erected 150 tents behind British lines in North Africa. "Hiding tanks in Bedouin tents was an old British trick," writes Nicholas Rankin; German general Erwin Rommel not only knew of the ploy, but had copied it himself. Jones knew that Rommel knew. In fact, he counted on it--for these tents were empty. With the deception that he was carrying out a deception, Jones made a weak point look like a trap.

In A Genius for Deception, Rankin offers a lively and comprehensive history of how Britain bluffed, tricked, and spied its way to victory in two world wars. As he shows, a coherent program of strategic deception emerged in World War I, resting on the pillars of camouflage, propaganda, secret intelligence, and special forces. All forms of deception found an avid sponsor in Winston Churchill, who carried his enthusiasm for deceiving the enemy into World War II. Rankin vividly recounts such little-known episodes as the invention of camouflage by two French artist-soldiers, the creation of dummy airfields for the Germans to bomb during the Blitz, and the fabrication of an army that would supposedly invade Greece. Strategic deception would be key to a number of WWII battles, culminating in the massive misdirection that proved critical to the success of the D-Day invasion in 1944.

Deeply researched and written with an eye for telling detail, A Genius for Deception shows how British used craft and cunning to help win the most devastating wars in human history.

Murder at Mansfield Park ($1.55 / £0.99 UK), by Lynn Shepherd, is the Kindle Deal of the day for those in the UK (the US edition is $9.99).

Book Description
Ever wondered what it would have been like if Jane Austen had turned her hand to murder?

Murder at Mansfield Park takes Austen's masterpiece and turns it into a riveting murder story worthy of PD James or Agatha Christie.

Just as in many classic English detective mysteries, this new novel opens with a group of characters in a country house setting, with passions running high, and simmering tensions beneath the elegant Regency surface. The arrival of the handsome and debonair Henry Crawford and his sister forces these tensions into the open, and sparks a chain of events that leads inexorably to violence and death.

Beautifully written, with an absolute faithfulness to the language in use at the time, Murder at Mansfield Park is both a good old-fashioned murder mystery that keeps the reader guessing until the very last page, and a sparklingly clever inversion of the original, which goes to the heart of many of the questions raised by Jane Austen's text. Austen's Mansfield Park is radically different from any of her other works, and much of the pleasure of Lynn Shepherd's novel lies in the way it takes the characters and episodes in the original, and turns them into a lighter, sharper, and more playful book, with a new heroine at its centre - a heroine who owes far more to the lively and spirited Elizabeth Bennet, than the dreary and insipid Fanny Price.

1,001 Facts that Will Scare the S#*t Out of You: The Ultimate Bathroom Reader ($3.99 Kindle, B&N), by Cary McNeal, is the Nook Daily Find, price matched on Kindle.

Book Description
Fact: Chocolate contains the alkaloid theobromine, which in high doses can be toxic to humans, and in even small amounts can kill dogs, parrots, horses, and cats.

This means that despite its name, the Kit-Kat candy bar is not a recommended snack for your kitty-cat. I wonder how many cats have died because of this confusion.

Fact: The most germ-laden place on your toilet isn't the seat or even the bowl:
It's the handle.

The solution: Don't flush. Let the next guy worry about it.

There are "just the facts"--and then there are just the facts that will frighten the bejeezus out of you. And thanks to this little gem of a bathroom book, you'll never look at the world the same way again, without, er, dry heaving a little bit.

From the sneaky fish that can swim up our genitals to the e coli bacteria lurking in the very water we drink, disturbing phenomena are everywhere we turn. Educational, entertaining, and undeniably horrifying, this book isn't guaranteed to help you, um, go to the bathroom, but it's certain to make your time there more . . . informed.

Miss Daisy Is Crazy! (My Weird School Series #1) ($3.99 Kindle, $1.99 B&N), by Dan Gutman and Jim Paillot (Illustrator), is the Nook Daily Find for Families; this one is an Agency book and should be price matched on Kindle, but so far it hasn't dropped (I always report these, so Amazon can get the publisher to fix the pricing).

Book Description
Never before has school been this mixed up—or this much fun!

Miss Daisy, who teaches second grade, doesn't know how to add or subtract. Not only that, she doesn't know how to read or write, either. She is the dumbest teacher in the history of the world!

Free Book - The Winds of Khalakovo (K)

The Winds of Khalakovo, the first title in the Lays of Anuskaya series by Bradley P. Beaulieu (book 2 releases in April), is free in the Kindle store. This was a Free Friday book at B&N last year, but (from what I can tell), this is the first time free at Amazon. Be careful if you are searching from your Kindle - there are two editions and only one is free.

Book Description
Among inhospitable and unforgiving seas stands Khalakovo, a mountainous archipelago of seven islands, its prominent eyrie stretching a thousand feet into the sky. Serviced by windships bearing goods and dignitaries, Khalakovo's eyrie stands at the crossroads of world trade. But all is not well in Khalakovo. Conflict has erupted between the ruling Landed, the indigenous Aramahn, and the fanatical Maharraht, and a wasting disease has grown rampant over the past decade. Now, Khalakovo is to play host to the Nine Dukes, a meeting which will weigh heavily upon Khalakovo's future.

When an elemental spirit attacks an incoming windship, murdering the Grand Duke and his retinue, Prince Nikandr, heir to the scepter of Khalakovo, is tasked with finding the child prodigy believed to be behind the summoning. However, Nikandr discovers that the boy is an autistic savant who may hold the key to lifting the blight that has been sweeping the islands. Can the Dukes, thirsty for revenge, be held at bay? Can Khalakovo be saved? The elusive answer drifts upon the Winds of Khalakovo...

Free Book - Margarita Nights OR Always Leave 'Em Dying (E)

You can pick one of the following two books from Kobo for free, using coupon code MAR12CRI, as part of their Kobo Touch Book Club. There may be some geographic restrictions and from what I can tell, the coupon code expires today (presumably at midnight, in one time zone or another).

Margarita Nights ($1.99 Kindle, Kobo), the first in the Sherri Travis Mystery series by Phyllis Smallman

Book Description
Margarita Nights is a cozy with grit -- serving Jack Daniels instead of tea.

In a small Florida beach town, Sherri Travis is a bartender with attitude and a woman with an inconveniently murdered husband who turns out to be as much trouble to her dead as he was alive.

Sifting through the debris of Jimmy's life, Sherri finds more than a few people who wanted her lying, scheming, scam artist husband gone -- but which one actually did the deed?

Always Leave 'Em Dying ($4.39 Kindle, Kobo), by Richard S. Prather, is a classic from the early 50's and the ninth title in his Shell Scott series.

Book Description
Shell Scott. He’s a guy with a pistol in his pocket and sex and violence on his mind. The crime world’s public enemy number one this Casanova is a sucker for a damsel in distress. When a pair of lovely legs saunters into his office he can’t help but take the job even when the case is a killer. In ALWAYS LEAVE ’EM DYING Shell thinks he has seen it all until he sees the cult. It sacrifices the best for the worst and when he discovers who is leading it, it almost kills him. Uniformed in black right down to the gun aimed at Shell the leader resembles an embalmed undertaker. But it isn’t just those gorgeous young girls he seeks to sacrifice. He wants Shell. Not dead or alive, just dead.

To get the book for free, you'll need an account. Click the Kobo link above, then on the blue Buy Now button; on the new page displayed, scroll down about halfway and click on the Have a gift card or promo code? Use it here link; enter the coupon code (I use cut and paste, as case often matters), click Apply and verify that the Promo credit is applied and your total is zero before clicking on the green Buy Now button.