🕵️ Author: Jordan Harper
💰 Regularly $11.99, Today $2.99
Private Investigator Mysteries

Welcome to Mae Pruett’s Los Angeles, where “Nobody talks. But everybody whispers.” As a “black-bag” publicist tasked not with letting the good news out but keeping the bad news in, Mae works for one of LA’s most powerful and sought-after crisis PR firms, at the center of a sprawling web of lawyers, PR flaks, and private security firms she calls “The Beast.” 🦁 They protect the rich and powerful and depraved by any means necessary.

After her boss is gunned down in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel in a random attack, Mae takes it upon herself to investigate and runs headfirst into The Beast’s lawless machinations and the twisted systems it exists to perpetuate. 🏨 It takes her on a roving neon joyride through a Los Angeles full of influencers pumped full of pills and fillers; sprawling mansions footsteps away from sprawling homeless encampments; crooked cops and mysterious wrecking crews in the middle of the night.

Edgar Award-winner Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows is addicting and alarming, a “juggernaut of a novel” and “an absolute tour de force.” ⚡ It is what the crime novel can achieve in the modern age: portray the human lives at the center of vast American landscapes, and make us thrill at their attempts to face impossible odds.

“The book everybody’s been waiting for” —Michael Connelly
“An absolute tour de force”—S. A. Cosby
“The best mystery novel I’ve read in years” —James Patterson

Jordan Harper is an Edgar Award-winning author and Emmy-winning TV writer (Hightown, The Wire) who brings insider knowledge of Hollywood’s dark underbelly to his crime fiction. 🎬 His debut novel She Rides Shotgun won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, establishing him as a writer who combines literary ambition with genre thrills. Harper’s experience writing for prestige television gives his prose a visual, propulsive quality—every scene feels like it belongs on screen.

Why I’m including this: Harper has created something rare—a crime novel that’s both commercially thrilling and literarily ambitious, exploring how power really works in modern Los Angeles. 💼 Mae Pruett isn’t a detective or cop but a “black-bag” publicist, someone whose job is burying scandals and protecting the powerful “by any means necessary.” That insider perspective into crisis PR, private security, and the interlocking systems Harper calls “The Beast” provides access to how the rich and famous actually operate when caught doing terrible things. 🌟 The murder of Mae’s boss “in a random attack” immediately raises questions—was it really random, or did someone want him silenced? Mae’s investigation isn’t official; she’s freelancing, which means no backup, no authority, just her knowledge of The Beast’s operations and her determination to find answers. 🔍 Harper’s Los Angeles is simultaneously gorgeous and grotesque: “influencers pumped full of pills and fillers,” “sprawling mansions footsteps away from sprawling homeless encampments,” “mysterious wrecking crews in the middle of the night.” That juxtaposition of extreme wealth and poverty, beauty and corruption, is quintessentially LA. 🌴 The endorsements from Michael Connelly (LA crime fiction royalty), S.A. Cosby (crime fiction’s hottest contemporary voice), and James Patterson (bestselling thriller king) signal this crosses genre boundaries—literary enough for serious crime readers, propulsive enough for commercial thriller fans. Harper’s claim that this represents “what the crime novel can achieve in the modern age” isn’t hyperbole—he’s using noir conventions to examine contemporary power structures, showing how The Beast protects abusers, silences victims, and maintains systems of exploitation. 💥 If you’ve loved Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels (LA crime with moral complexity), Don Winslow’s The Power of the Dog (systemic corruption), or any crime fiction that exposes how the powerful escape consequences, Harper delivers similar rage and revelation. At $2.99 (down from $11.99), you’re getting an Edgar Award-winner’s masterwork about modern corruption for less than a fancy coffee—and this will keep you up far longer than caffeine.

🌍 Author: Christopher Ryan
💰 Regularly $14.99, Today $1.99
Cultural Anthropology

The New York Times bestselling coauthor of Sex at Dawn explores the ways in which “progress” has perverted the way we live—how we eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die—in this “engaging, extensively documented, well-organized, and thought-provoking” (Booklist) book.

Most of us have instinctive evidence the world is ending—balmy December days, face-to-face conversation replaced with heads-to-screens zomboidism, a world at constant war, a political system in disarray. 😰 We hear some myths and lies so frequently that they feel like truths: Civilization is humankind’s greatest accomplishment. Progress is undeniable. Count your blessings. You’re lucky to be alive here and now.

Well, maybe we are and maybe we aren’t. 🤔 Civilized to Death counters the idea that progress is inherently good, arguing that the “progress” defining our age is analogous to an advancing disease.

Prehistoric life, of course, was not without serious dangers and disadvantages. 💀 Many babies died in infancy. A broken bone, infected wound, snakebite, or difficult pregnancy could be life-threatening. But ultimately, Christopher Ryan questions, were these pre-civilized dangers more murderous than modern scourges, such as car accidents, cancers, cardiovascular disease, and a technologically prolonged dying process?

Civilized to Death “will make you see our so-called progress in a whole new light” (Book Riot) and adds to the timely conversation that “the way we have been living is no longer sustainable, at least as long as we want to the earth to outlive us” (Psychology Today). 🌱 Ryan makes the claim that we should start looking backwards to find our way into a better future.

Christopher Ryan is a New York Times bestselling author and psychologist whose 2010 book Sex at Dawn challenged conventional wisdom about human sexuality and became one of the most controversial anthropology books of the decade. 📚 Ryan combines academic rigor (he holds a PhD in psychology) with accessible writing that makes complex anthropological concepts understandable to general readers. His work consistently questions whether modern assumptions about “human nature” are actually culturally constructed narratives that serve power rather than truth.

What makes this special: Ryan’s thesis is provocatively simple—what if everything we’ve been told about progress is wrong? What if civilization didn’t save us but trapped us? 🏙️ Most books celebrate human advancement from “primitive” hunter-gatherers to modern technological society as obvious improvement. Ryan flips that narrative, arguing that “progress” has made us sicker, more stressed, more isolated, and less happy than our prehistoric ancestors. The evidence he marshals is uncomfortable: modern diseases (cancer, heart disease, diabetes) were rare or nonexistent in hunter-gatherer populations; mental illness, depression, and anxiety are epidemic in wealthy nations; we work more hours than medieval peasants; we’re lonelier despite being more “connected.” 😔 Ryan’s genius is asking the question nobody wants to face: were prehistoric dangers (infection, childbirth complications, predators) actually more deadly than modern dangers (car accidents, pollution, chronic diseases, suicide)? The answer might be no, which means we’ve traded acute but manageable risks for chronic diseases and psychological suffering. 💊 His argument isn’t that we should abandon technology and return to caves—that’s impossible and undesirable. Instead, Ryan suggests we need to recognize which aspects of modern life are genuinely improvements and which are making us miserable, then redesign society around human needs rather than economic growth. 🌿 The “balmy December days, face-to-face conversation replaced with heads-to-screens zomboidism” opening captures Ryan’s method: presenting evidence we can all see but have been trained to ignore or accept as inevitable. If you’ve loved Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (human history reassessed), Sebastian Junger’s Tribe (modern isolation vs. tribal connection), or any book questioning whether we’re actually better off than our ancestors, Ryan delivers similar paradigm-shifting analysis. At $1.99 (down from $14.99), you’re getting a New York Times bestseller that might fundamentally change how you view “progress” and modern life for less than a parking meter—though after reading it, you might question why we need parking meters at all.

✨ Author: Chris Colfer
💰 Regularly $7.99, Today $1.99
Children’s Fantasy & Magic Adventure

This #1 New York Times bestseller is the first book in a new series set in Chris Colfer’s Land of Stories universe, perfect for both new and longtime fans!

When Brystal Evergreen stumbles across a secret section of the library, she discovers a book that introduces her to a world beyond her imagination and learns the impossible: She is a fairy capable of magic! 🧚 But in the oppressive Southern Kingdom, women are forbidden from reading and magic is outlawed, so Brystal is swiftly convicted of her crimes and sent to the miserable Bootstrap Correctional Facility.

But with the help of the mysterious Madame Weatherberry, Brystal is whisked away and enrolled in an academy of magic! 🏰 Adventure comes with a price, however, and when Madame Weatherberry is called away to attend to an important problem she doesn’t return.

Do Brystal and her classmates have what it takes to stop a sinister plot that risks the fate of the world, and magic, forever? ⚡

Fall in love with an all-new series from Chris Colfer, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Land of Stories, filled with adventure, imagination, and wonderfully memorable characters both familiar and new. 📖

A #1 New York Times bestseller
An IndieBound bestseller
A USA Today bestseller
A Wall Street Journal bestseller

Chris Colfer is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, Golden Globe-winning actor (Glee), and Emmy-nominated writer who has sold millions of books worldwide through his Land of Stories series. 🎭 His ability to create magical worlds that tackle real-world issues (prejudice, censorship, authoritarianism) while remaining accessible to middle-grade readers has made him one of the most successful children’s fantasy authors of the 2010s. Colfer understands that great children’s literature doesn’t talk down to young readers but trusts them to handle complex themes wrapped in adventure.

Here’s what you’re getting: Colfer has created a Harry Potter-style world where discovering you have magic should be wonderful but is instead illegal and dangerous. 📚 Brystal lives in the “oppressive Southern Kingdom” where women are forbidden from reading and magic is outlawed—meaning her very existence as a literate female fairy is triple crime. That setup immediately establishes stakes: Brystal can’t just hide her powers, she must hide her literacy and her gender’s defiance of restrictions. Being sent to “Bootstrap Correctional Facility” (note the darkly comic name suggesting she should have pulled herself up by bootstraps rather than having magic) before being rescued by mysterious Madame Weatherberry creates classic chosen-one rescue dynamics. 🎓 The magic academy setting will appeal to readers who loved Harry Potter or The School for Good and Evil—kids learning magic together, forming friendships, discovering abilities. But Colfer adds urgency: Madame Weatherberry disappears, leaving students to face “a sinister plot that risks the fate of the world, and magic, forever” without adult guidance. 🌟 The oppressive kingdom backdrop (women can’t read, magic is banned) gives this social justice undertones—Brystal must fight not just magical villains but systemic oppression that seeks to control women and eliminate magic entirely. Colfer’s experience as an LGBTQ+ advocate informs his writing: his magical outcasts represent any marginalized group fighting for the right to exist. 🏳️‍🌈 The multiple bestseller lists (New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, IndieBound) prove Colfer has crossover appeal—kids love the adventure, adults appreciate the themes, booksellers can hand-sell it confidently. If your children loved J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Soman Chainani’s The School for Good and Evil, or any middle-grade fantasy about magical schools and fighting injustice, Colfer delivers similar magic with more explicit social commentary. At $1.99 (down from $7.99), this is exceptional value for a #1 New York Times bestseller that will keep young readers engaged while teaching them about standing up to oppression—and it’s the start of a complete series for kids who devour books.