New York Times bestselling Author Brenda Novak has penned over 40 novels. A two-time Rita nominee, she’s won The National Reader’s Choice, The Bookseller’s Best, The Bookbuyer’s Best and many other awards.
Brenda tops today’s Buffet with the first book in her “Whiskey Creek” contemporary romance series, When Lightning Strikes. It’s a great story and well told. The novel first appeared as a Harlequin MIRA paperback in 2012.
Brenda began writing as a way to earn money while she was a stay-at-home mom. “When I first got the idea to become a novelist, it took me five years to teach myself the craft and finish my first book,” she says. But she sold that book, and the rest is history.
Brenda runs an annual on-line auction for diabetes research every May at www.brendanovak.com.
As usual, each book listed here has gone FREE within the past 24 hours (except for the “Bargains” at the bottom of this page). Warning: Kindle book promotions can end without notice, so before downloading click the link “See Kindle price at Amazon” to verify that the book is still free. (Prices and availability may differ outside USA.)
When Lightning Strikes (Whiskey Creek)
Romance > Contemporary
Author: Brenda Novak
Gail DeMarco left Whiskey Creek, California, to make a name for herself in Los Angeles. Her PR firm has a roster of A-list clients, including the sexy and unpredictable Simon O’Neal. But Simon, who’s just been through a turbulent divorce, won’t cooperate, so she drops him from her list—and he retaliates by taking the rest of her clients with him.
Desperate to save her company, Gail makes a deal with Simon. What he wants is custody of his son, but that’s going to require a whole new image. He needs to marry some squeaky-clean girl like Gail, who’ll drag him off to some small, obscure place like Whiskey Creek…. Gail reluctantly agrees to become his wife. She isn’t reluctant because he’s too hard to like. It’s because he’s too hard not tolove!
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The Woman Who Lost Her Face: How Charla Nash Survived the World’s Most Infamous Chimpanzee Attack
Biographies & Memoirs
Author: Audio/Video, NBC News, Meredith Vieira
This enhanced eBook edition includes a video introduction from Meredith Vieira and more than 45 minutes of video interviews from NBC News.
Viciously attacked by a chimpanzee in 2009, Charla Nash was left so severely disfigured that she no longer had eyes to see the world, hands to feel it or even a face to show it. By her own doctors’ accounts, she never should have survived her injuries.
Charla’s story is one of incredible strength, fierce determination and cutting-edge medicine. NBC News and Meredith Vieira have been covering the story since the life-altering attack, documenting Charla’s unfaltering spirit and the remarkable surgeries that not only kept her alive, but gave her a new face and, ultimately, restored her very humanity.
Featuring candid and exclusive interviews with Charla, her family, her doctors and the chimpanzee’s owner, The Woman Who Lost Her Face is an intimate look at Charla’s life before and after the attack. This in-depth account takes you inside the operating rooms and hospitals where medical history was made and includes new details about the chimpanzee who mauled Charla to the brink of death and the woman who raised the animal as her son. The Woman Who Lost Her Face also features never-before-seen images of Charla and insight from the NBC News producers and reporters who covered the story.
Silo 49: Going Dark
Science Fiction > Dystopian
Author: Ann Christy
Set in Hugh Howey’s world of WOOL and written primarily for readers already familiar with the WOOL universe. Part One of the Silo 49 Series.
Silo 49 has never had it easy and things have just gotten a whole lot worse. Graham, the head of IT, has done many unsavory things in his life but everyone has a line they won’t cross. He just found his. With only his best friend, Wallis and a dying electrician, Grace, to stand by him, he is left with one clear and final choice. Does he do what is right or what the rules say he should? It is a race against time for the trio against the impersonal might of Silo One. Their only choice? Going Dark.
Stuck in the Middle (Sister-to-Sister, Book 1)
Christian Fiction > Romance
Author: Virginia Smith
Joan Sanderson’s life is stuck. Her older sister, Allie, is starting a family and her younger sister, Tori, has a budding career. Meanwhile, Joan is living at home with Mom and looking after her aging grandmother. Not exactly a recipe for excitement. That is, until a hunky young doctor moves in next door. Suddenly Joan has a goal–to get a date.
But it won’t be easy. Pretty Tori flirts relentlessly with him and Joan is sure that she can’t compete. But with a little help from God, Allie, and an enormous mutt with bad manners, maybe Joan can find her way out of this rut.
Only In Dreams
Romance > Contemporary
Author: Wendy Owens
Paige Parker thinks she has everything figured out. Even though her heart is broken, she manages to find love again, and she’s sure this time it’s for keeps.
Between planning her wedding and working on garments for her upcoming debut fashion show, Paige is overwhelmed. When her fiancé, Henry, suggests a couple months away from the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple to focus, she is thrilled to use the opportunity to reconnect with her best friend, Emmie.
Paige heads to Texas, ready to spend some quality time with Emmie and her baby girl, Olivia. When she arrives, she is shocked to find herself face-to-face with Christian Bennett, the man who broke her heart.
TODAY’S BARGAINS……………What’s this?
Life of Pi
Action & Adventure
Author: Yann Martel
Regularly $15.99, Today $1.99
The beloved and bestselling novel and winner of the Booker Prize, Life of Pi, now with cover art from the major motion picture directed by Ang Lee
After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan—and a 450-pound royal bengal tiger. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary and beloved works of fiction in recent years.
Universally acclaimed upon publication, Life of Pi is a modern classic.
Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search
History > World > 20th Century
Author: Martin Sixsmith, Judi Dench
Regularly $9.99, Today $2.99
Now a major motion picture starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan and nominated for four Academy Awards: the heartbreaking true story of an Irishwoman and the secret she kept for 50 years.
When she became pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to a convent to be looked after as a “fallen woman.” Then the nuns took her baby from her and sold him, like thousands of others, to America for adoption. Fifty years later, Philomena decided to find him.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Philomena’s son was trying to find her. Renamed Michael Hess, he had become a leading lawyer in the first Bush administration, and he struggled to hide secrets that would jeopardize his career in the Republican Party and endanger his quest to find his mother.
A gripping exposé told with novelistic intrigue, Philomena pulls back the curtain on the role of the Catholic Church in forced adoptions and on the love between a mother and son who endured a lifelong separation.
The Silence of the Lambs (Hannibal Lecter)
Thrillers > Psychological
Author: Thomas Harris
Regularly $7.99, Today $1.99
A serial murderer known only by a grotesquely apt nickname–Buffalo Bill–is stalking women. He has a purpose, but no one can fathom it, for the bodies are discovered in different states. Clarice Starling, a young trainee at the FBI Academy, is surprised to be summoned by Jack Crawford, chief of the Bureau’s Behavioral Science section. Her assignment: to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter–Hannibal the Cannibal–who is kept under close watch in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Dr. Lecter is a former psychiatrist with a grisly history, unusual tastes, and an intense curiosity about the darker corners of the mind. His intimate understanding of the killer and of Clarice herself form the core of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs–and ingenious, masterfully written book and an unforgettable classic of suspense fiction.
Mystic River
Psychological Thrillers
Author: Dennis Lehane
Regularly $9.99, Today $1.99
When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled tip to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened — something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever.
Twenty-five years later, Sean Devine is a homicide detective. Jimmy Marcus is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave Boyle is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay — demons that urge him to do terrible things.
When Jimmy Marcus’s daughter is found murdered, Sean Devine is assigned to the case. His personal life unraveling, he must go back into a world he thought he’d left behind to confront not only the violence, of the present but the nightmares of his past. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy Marcus, who finds that his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave Boyle, who came home the night Jimmy’s daughter died covered with someone else’s blood.
The Cider House Rules
Literary Fiction > Classics
Author: John Irving
Regularly $7.99, Today $1.99
First published in 1985 by William Morrow, The Cider House Rules is John Irving’s sixth novel. Set in rural Maine in the first half of the twentieth century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch—saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud’s, ether addict and abortionist. It is also the story of Dr. Larch’s favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted.
… See the rest of today’s Editor’s Picks here on page 2