Two Free Books - The River and The Warlord Wants Forever

I was going to save these until tomorrow, but was afraid that the deal might disappear with the end of the month. Sorry for the overload today (and no guarantee that I might not post again, as I know some indie authors are having halloween sales that end soon).

The River ($7.99 Kindle), by Cheryl Kaye Tardif, is available free from Shortcovers, in a DRM'd EPUB format. You don't have to set up an account or enter any information, but you do need Adobe Digital Editions installed before you click to download.

Book Description
STEM CELL RESEARCH, CLONING, AND WORLD DOMINATION--WITH A TWIST... The South Nahanni River area of Canada's Northwest Territories has a history of mysterious deaths, disappearances and headless corpses, but it may also hold the key to humanity's survival―or its destruction. Del thought her father was long dead. But someone from her past says otherwise. Now she and a group of near strangers embark on a perilous mission... Seven years ago, Del Hawthorne's father and three of his friends disappeared near the Nahanni River and were presumed dead. When one of the missing men stumbles onto the University grounds, alive but barely recognizable and aging before her eyes, Del is shocked. Especially when the man tells her something inconceivable. Her father is still alive! Gathering a group of volunteers, Del travels to the Nahanni River to rescue her father. There, she finds a secret river that plunges her into a technologically advanced world of nanobots and painful serums. Del uncovers a conspiracy of unimaginable horror, a plot that threatens to destroy us all. Will humanity be sacrificed for the taste of eternal life? At what point have we become...God?

Simon and Schuster is giving away Kresley Cole's novella, The Warlord Wants Forever (included in the anthology Playing Easy to Get ($9.99 Kindle), if you sign up for their newsletter. It's part of a promotion for Deep Kiss of Winter ($9.99 Kindle), the latest in her Immortals After Dark series. However, you don't have to put any real info into the fields, other than an email address that you can check (use a throw-away account, if you don't want the newsletter), as none of it is validated before you subscribe. Click HERE to sign up and get the free download (it's a PDF).

Book Description
Nikolai Wroth, once a ruthless human warlord in the 1700s and now a general in the rebel vampire army, needs to find his Bride, the one woman who can render him truly alive. As a turned human, he doesn’t enjoy a heartbeat or breaths and is consequently weaker than fully blooded vampires. He wants his Bride for the power she will bring him and can hardly believe it when his heart beats for Myst the Coveted, a mad, fey, mythological creature.

Myst is known throughout the world as the most beautiful Valkyrie, part chillingly fierce warrior, part beguiling seductress who can “make you want her even as she’s killing you.” She has devoted her life to protecting an ancient, powerful jewel and to fighting the vampires, and she now sees a way to torment one—for with Wroth’s heartbeat comes consuming sexual desire that can only be slaked by her.

She eludes him for five years, but he has finally chased her to ground and stolen the jewel which commands her, giving him absolute power over her. While he possesses it, he can make her do anything, and he plans to in order for her to experience first hand the agonizing, unending lust she’d purposely subjected him to for half a decade. Yet when Wroth realizes he wants more from her and frees her, will she come back to him?

Last Chance for Suvudu Free Books

Suvudu's Free Library should update tomorrow with their new listings, but they will also be taking down a number of their free reads. Today is the last chance to get these for free, in case you missed them earlier (although Amazon is sometimes slow to drop prices, they've also sometimes ended sales early, so check the links before one-clicking).

Darkfever by Karen Marie Moning
Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter
Queen of the Orcs: King’s Property by Morgan Howell
The Brass Bed by Jennifer Stevenson
The Briar King by Greg Keyes
Changelings by McCaffrey & Scarborough
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
Full Moon Rising by Keri Arthur

You can also get the PDF versions HERE, as well as find links to non-Kindle versions.

Happy Halloween from Gryphonwood Press and Blade Red Press

For Halloween only, Gryphonwood Press and Blade Red Press are giving away every book in their catalog. I've listed all the books, with links and the coupon code to use once you've put that book into your cart. I already have The Silver Serpent and Dourado, but I've been considering the books from Alan Baxter and just saw an announcement on Flank Hawk and was heading over to get a sample when I noticed the publisher -- so, as I'm writing this on Friday evening, I am waiting for midnight to just go buy it, instead of getting the sample.

Gryphonwood Press
Cibola by David Wood - SJ79G
Dead Eye: Pennies for the Ferryman by Jim Bernheimer - MK29P
Death Dealt the Hand by John E. Bailor - CT72U
Dourado by David Wood - QX73J
Flank Hawk by Terry W. Ervin II - DM58A
Seabird - An Invitation by Sherry Thompson - QW23Y
The Silver Serpent by David Debord - MG27T
Street: Empathy by Ryan A. Span - KK37T
You Don't Know What You've Got... anthology - RD33A

Blade Red Press
Ghost Of The Black by Alan Baxter – already free
MageSign by Alan Baxter – HH65A
RealmShift by Alan Baxter – DK99C

Maggots Of Heresy by Michael Fridman – already free

Free Book - Heritage

Heritage, by Judy Nunn, is being given away (in DRM'd EPUB format only, which works on the Sony and B&N readers) by Random House Australia as part of a promotion of her new book Maralinga. Neither book appears to be in print in the US, at least, not currently, so this is probably an author most of us have not read before. I just found this one, but there are only two days left to get the book.

Book Description
It was a time when refugees seized with both hands the chance for freedom; a time when people of more than seventy nations gathered beneath the Southern Cross to forge a new national identity. From war-torn Europe, they came to the mountains of Australia to realise one man's dream, and in so doing realised their own. The mighty Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, regarded by many as the greatest engineering feat of the 20th Century, was built with pride from the sweat and blood of displaced people. They were called New Australians.

One was 'Lucky', a German Jew seeking refuge in Australia after losing his family in the horror that was known as Endlosung, 'The Final Solution' of Hitler's Third Reich. Another was Pietro, a young Italian immigrant in search of a new life in a strange country far from the mountains of his childhood which harboured a deadly secret. And then there was the woman from Israel, the woman with a past so steeped in horror that no matter how far she ran, she would never escape the nightmare of Auschwitz or the massacre of Deir Yassin.

People of all races and creeds tunnelled through a mountain range and turned the course of a mighty river as they sought to put to rest the ghosts from the inferno of their past.
From the blood of Berlin to the birth of Israel, from the Italian Alps to the Snowy Mountains, HERITAGE tells the story of the birth of new Australia in the high plains of the Monaro and the rugged peaks of The Snowy Mountains. Judy Nunn is at the height of her powers in this passionate and fast-paced tale of rebirth, struggle, sacrifice and redemption.

To get the free book, click HERE. You'll then need to sign up for their newsletter (use a throw-away email address, but one you can check, if you don't want the newsletter), then click on a link in a confirmation email that they will send you. If you don't already have Adobe Digital Editions installed, you'll need to do that first.

Three Additional $9 Pre-Orders on Kindle

Two Three additional titles have joined the $9 pre-order price war in the Kindle store, adding to the earlier list. I've also added the delivery dates, so you know how long you have to think about pre-ordering (although the price war could, of course, end at any time, if one of the big three blinks).

Pirate Latitudes, by Michael Crichton (November 24, 2009), is one I'd be tempted to order in print, just for the cover, but won't. I may pre-order the Kindle version, though, as I usually enjoy Crichton's novels.

Book Description
An irresistible adventure of swashbuckling pirates in the New World, a classic story of treasure and betrayal. The Caribbean, 1665. A remote colony of the English Crown, the island of Jamaica holds out against the vast supremacy of the Spanish empire. Port Royal, its capital, is a cutthroat town of taverns, grog shops, and bawdy houses. In this steamy climate there's a living to be made, a living that can end swiftly by disease - or by dagger. For Captain Charles Hunter, gold in Spanish hands is gold for the taking, and the law of the land rests with those ruthless enough to make it. Word in port is that the galleon El Trinidad, fresh from New Spain, is awaiting repairs in a nearby harbor. Heavily fortified, the impregnable harbor is guarded by the bloodthirsty Cazalla, a favorite commander of the Spanish king himself. With backing from a powerful ally, Hunter assembles a crew of ruffians to infiltrate the enemy outpost and commandeer El Trinidad, along with its fortune in Spanish gold. The raid is as perilous as the bloodiest tales of island legend, and Hunter will lose more than one man before he even sets foot on foreign shores, where dense jungle and the firepower of Spanish infantry stand between him and the treasure.

The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver (November 3, 2009)

Book Description
An epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities. Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico - from a coastal island jungle to 1930s Mexico City - Harrison Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers who put him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. He discovers a passion for Aztec history and meets the exotic, imperious artist Frida Kahlo, who will become his lifelong friend. When he goes to work for Lev Trotsky, an exiled political leader fighting for his life, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, newspaper headlines and howling gossip, and a risk of terrible violence. Meanwhile, to the north, the United States will soon be caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. There in the land of his birth, Shepherd believes he might remake himself in America's hopeful image and claim a voice of his own. He finds support from an unlikely kindred soul, his stenographer, Mrs. Brown, who will be far more valuable to her employer than he could ever know. Through darkening years, political winds continue to toss him between north and south in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach - the lacuna - between truth and public presumption. With deeply compelling characters, a vivid sense of place, and a clear grasp of how history and public opinion can shape a life.

Under the Dome, by Stephen King (December 24, 2009)

Book Description
On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener's hand is severed as "the dome" comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when - or if - it will go away.

Dale Barbara, Iraq vet and now a short-order cook, finds himself teamed with a few intrepid citizens - town newspaper owner Julia Shumway, a physician's assistant at the hospital, a select-woman, and three brave kids. Against them stands Big Jim Rennie, a politician who will stop at nothing - even murder - to hold the reins of power, and his son, who is keeping a horrible secret in a dark pantry. But their main adversary is the Dome itself. Because time isn't just short. It's running out.