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Saturday, June 15, 2013

Kindle Daily Deals 6/15

This weekend, save up to 60% on select books at Kobo using promo code 48Hours (valid in the US, UK/EU, Canada and AU). They are also having a sale of $20 on the Glo (Code: EJB29) & up to $70 off the Arc (Code: RFN47), for those in Canada and the US.

If you are an Audible member and had four credits on June 11, check your email for a message about the $10 for Using 4 Credits in 4 Days promotion.

Today's Kindle Daily Deal is White Cargo ($1.99), by Stuart Woods [Simon and Schuster], which is rumored to be under development as a feature film.
Book Description
From the glittering beaches of the Caribbean to a final harrowing showdown in the Amazonian rain forest comes a breakneck tale of danger, intrigue, and depravity.

Cat Catledge is a happy man. A self made multi millionaire at fifty, he has a loving wife and a beautiful teenaged daughter. And after years of hard work, he is taking his family on the ultimate dream sabbatical: a two year cruise to the South Pacific via the Panama Canal, aboard his custom built forty-three-foot yacht. He gets as far as Colombia.

Off that country's cocaine dusted shores, Cat's bliss—and his dearly loved family—are permanently shattered by an event so unexpected, so savage, and so tragically final that it leaves Cat completely devastated. Consumed by terrible guilt, he returns home alone, a broken man. Investigations by both the Colombian authorities and the U.S. State Department prove fruitless.

Then, late one night, Cat is awakened by the telephone and, from far away, over a static filled line, an achingly familiar voice utters a single, electrifying word.

Driven by a mixture of hope and anguish, Cat slips back into South America on a desperate search for the daughter he cannot bring himself to believe is dead. Aided by an Australian ex-convict, a beautiful television journalist, and a man known to him only as "Jim", Cat follows a trail of blood and graft, white powder and white slavery, and discovers in himself an unsuspected capacity for ruthlessness and cunning, and—even more surprising—a rekindled capacity for love.

Today's Kindle Romance Daily Deal is Small Town Sinners ($2.99), by Melissa Walker [Bloomsbury USA Childrens]. This is also the Nook Daily Find today and it's a dollar cheaper at B&N than it is for Kindle.
Book Description
Lacey Anne Byer is a perennial good girl and lifelong member of the House of Enlightenment, the Evangelical church in her small town. With her driver's license in hand and the chance to try out for a lead role in Hell House, her church's annual haunted house of sin, Lacey's junior year is looking promising. But when a cute new stranger comes to town, something begins to stir inside her. Ty Davis doesn't know the sweet, shy Lacey Anne Byer everyone else does. With Ty, Lacey could reinvent herself. As her feelings for Ty make Lacey test her boundaries, events surrounding Hell House make her question her religion.

Today's Kindle SciFi/Fantasy Daily Deal is Breakfast of Champions ($1.99), by Kurt Vonnegut [RosettaBooks]. If you missed the sale two years ago, you'll want to get it now.
Book Description
Breakfast of Champions (1973) provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonnegut's obsessions. His recurring cast of characters and American landscape was perhaps the most controversial of his canon; it was felt by many at the time to be a disappointing successor to Slaughterhouse-Five, which had made Vonnegut's literary reputation.

The core of the novel is Kilgore Trout, a familiar character very deliberately modeled on the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985), a fact which Vonnegut conceded frequently in interviews and which was based upon his own occasional relationship with Sturgeon. Here Kilgore Trout is an itinerant wandering from one science fiction convention to another; he intersects with the protagonist, Dwayne Hoover (one of Vonnegut's typically boosterish, lost and stupid mid-American characters) and their intersection is the excuse for the evocation of many others, familiar and unfamiliar, dredged from Vonnegut's gallery.

The central issue is concerned with intersecting and apposite views of reality, and much of the narrative is filtered through Trout who is neither certifiably insane nor a visionary writer but can pass for either depending upon Dwayne Hoover's (and Vonnegut's) view of the situation. America, when this novel was published, was in the throes of Nixon, Watergate and the unraveling of our intervention in Vietnam; the nation was beginning to fragment ideologically and geographically, and Vonnegut sought to cram all of this dysfunction (and a goofy, desperate kind of hope, the irrational comfort given through the genre of science fiction) into a sprawling narrative whose sense, if any, is situational, not conceptual.

Reviews were polarized; the novel was celebrated for its bizarre aspects, became the basis of a Bruce Willis movie adaptation whose reviews were not nearly so polarized. (Most critics hated it.) This novel in its freewheeling and deliberately fragmented sequentiality may be the quintessential Vonnegut novel, not necessarily his best, but the work which most truly embodies the range of his talent, cartooned alienation and despair.

Today's Kindle Kids Daily Deal is My Pup ($1.99), by Tammie Lyon [Two Lions]. note: This book requires Kindle Fire/HD or select Kindle Reading Apps (Kindle Cloud Reader, Kindle for iPad or Kindle for Android).
Book Description
It’s puppy love! Follow a new pup and his owner as they frolic throughout the neighborhood, playing ball, taking walks, doing tricks, and snuggling. Tammie Lyon’s illustrations rendered in gouache and colored pencil add lively appeal to this endearing story of a little girl and her new dog.

Age Level: 3 and up

Nook Daily Find 6/15

Small Town Sinners ($7.99 Kindle, $1.99 B&N), by Melissa Walker [Bloomsbury USA Childrens], is the Nook Daily Find.
Book Description
Lacey Anne Byer is a perennial good girl and lifelong member of the House of Enlightenment, the Evangelical church in her small town. With her driver's license in hand and the chance to try out for a lead role in Hell House, her church's annual haunted house of sin, Lacey's junior year is looking promising. But when a cute new stranger comes to town, something begins to stir inside her. Ty Davis doesn't know the sweet, shy Lacey Anne Byer everyone else does. With Ty, Lacey could reinvent herself. As her feelings for Ty make Lacey test her boundaries, events surrounding Hell House make her question her religion.

Melissa Walker has crafted the perfect balance of engrossing, thought-provoking topics and relatable, likable characters. Set against the backdrop of extreme religion, Small Town Sinners is foremost a universal story of first love and finding yourself, and it will stay with readers long after the last page.

UK Kindle Daily Deal 6/15

Multiple Wounds (£0.99 UK), by Alan Russell [Thomas & Mercer], is the Kindle Deal of the Day for those in the UK (the US edition is $4.99).
Book Description
Holly Troy's mind is a complex maze of myth and reality, multiple personalities vying for time in the spotlight. As an artist, she is creative and compelling. As a witness, she is painfully unreliable, unsure of even which person she was the night of the murder. Even Holly can’t be sure of her own innocence. Homicide detective Orson Cheever never thought he would find himself playing psychologist to a Greek goddess in a modern-day murder investigation, but many of Holly's personalities come straight from classical mythology, from Cronos and Pandora to the Fates. As Cheever attempts to unravel truth from myth, he learns that there is even more to Holly than meets the eye. One personality in particular—that of a five-year-old girl—hits a little too close to home, and Cheever is forced to finally pull back the dark curtains of his own past in order to uncover the truth in this psychological thriller.

The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (£0.99 UK), edited by Ian Watson and Ian Whates [Robinson], is the Kindle Deal of the Day for for Science Fiction & Fantasy Fans in the UK (the US edition is $8.39).
Book Description
War is becoming increasingly 'SF-ized' with remotely controlled attack drones and robot warriors already in development and being tested. Over the past 100 years the technology of war has advanced enormously in destructive power, yet also in sophistication so that we no longer seem to live under the constant threat of all-out global thermonuclear cataclysm. So what will future wars be like? And what will start them: religion, politics, resources, refugees, or advanced weaponry itself? Watson and Whates present a gripping anthology of SF stories which explores the gamut of possible future conflicts, including such themes as nuclear war, psychological and cyberwars, enhanced soldiery, mercenaries, terrorism, intelligent robotic war machines, and war with aliens.All the stories in this collection of remarkable quality and diversity reveals humankind pressed to the limits in every conceivable way.It includes 24 stories with highlights such as:The Pyre of the New Day' - Catherine Asaro.The Rhine's World Incident' - Neal Asher. Caught in the Crossfire' - David Drake. Politics' - Elizabeth Moon.The Traitor' - David Weber.And others from:Dan Abnett, Tony Ballantyne, Fredric Brown, Algis Budrys, Simon R. Green, Joe Haldeman, John Kessel, John Lambshead, Paul McAuley, Andy Remic, Laura Resnick, Mike Resnick & Brad R. Torgersen, Fred Saberhagen, Cordwainer Smith, Allen Steele, William Tenn, Walter Jon Williams, Michael Z. Williamson, Gene Wolfe.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Daily Deal - Murder in Steeple Martin

Murder in Steeple Martin ($4.99 $2.99 Kindle), the first novel in the Libby Sarjeant murder mystery series by Lesley Cookman [Accent Press], is today's Deal of the Day at at Diesel E-Books, where it's discounted to $1.40 (8 copies left). At Amazon, the entire series is on sale for $2.99 per title, although long time readers may find they already have this one in their libraries, as it was free last August.
Book Description
Artist and ex-actress Libby Sarjeant is busy directing a play for the opening of a new theatre in her village when one of her cast is found murdered. The play, written by her friend Peter, is based on real events in his family, disturbing and mysterious, which took place in the village during the last war. As the investigation into the murder begins to uncover a tangled web of relationships in the village, it seems that the events dramatised in the play still cast a long shadow, dark enough to inspire murder.

Libby's natural nosiness soon leads her into the thick of the investigation, but is she too close to Peter's family, and in particular his cousin Ben, to be able to recognise the murderer?
Get the book from Diesel; be sure to check the sales price, as the Deal of the Day often sells out. Deals change at 11AM Eastern Time, USA.

Free Nook App - Missile Defender

Missile Defender ($0.99 Amazon), by Epic Pixel LLC, is this week's Free Friday App from Barnes & Noble.
App Description
Defend your city against an enemy bombardment in this touchscreen twist on the classic arcade game. Intercept missiles, upgrade your defenses, and play through limitless levels. See how long you're able to hold out before your physical and psychological defenses crumble.

Hit or Missile
Incoming missiles rain down at night--tap on the screen and use the multi-touch feature to launch interceptors. Repairs and upgrades are available during the day, as you steel yourself for yet another fear-stricken night.

Upgrade your defenses in this Sisyphean struggle against the Fates
Anticipate the path of enemy missiles and pick your targets accurately. Keep an eye on your own missile count and use them strategically. Be constantly vigilant as difficulty increases each nightfall. And keep holding on to the idea that someday it will all end. Someday...

Retro 80s Zeitgeist
Missile Defender is in the style of a classic 80s arcade game. It features clean HD art work, multi-touch controls, upgradable missiles, and endless levels of gameplay--without the oppressive fear of a real-world nuclear brinkmanship. If you've enjoyed those old quarter-guzzlers, Missile Defender is sure to bring back great memories.

Prepare to get nostalgic as you defend civilization from anachronistic existential threats in Missile Defender!
Get the free App from Barnes & Noble.