New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Courtney Milan tops today’s Buffet with her Victorian romance The Duchess War, the first installment in her “Brothers Sinister” series. As one reviewer put it, this book is “an intelligent and beautiful story for grown women and a romance for the girl who still believes in fairy tales.”
Courtney lives in the Rocky Mountains with her husband, a medium-sized dog, and an attack cat. Before she started writing historical romance, she experimented with various occupations: computer programming, dog-training, scientificating…. But her favorite job is the one she’s now doing full time–writing romance.
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The Duchess War (The Brothers Sinister Book 1)
Miss Minerva Lane is a quiet, bespectacled wallflower, and she wants to keep it that way. After all, the last time she was the center of attention, it ended badly–so badly that she changed her name to escape her scandalous past. Wallflowers may not be the prettiest of blooms, but at least they don’t get trampled. So when a handsome duke comes to town, the last thing she wants is his attention.
But that is precisely what she gets.
Because Robert Blaisdell, the Duke of Clermont, is not fooled. When Minnie figures out what he’s up to, he realizes there is more to her than her spectacles and her quiet ways. And he’s determined to lay her every secret bare before she can discover his. But this time, one shy miss may prove to be more than his match…
Chosen for Power (Women of Power Book 1)
Somebody is out to destroy Elle Simpson and everything in her life. Elle has always depended on family to make her business run strong, but long work hours have left her without much of a private life. Just as Elle thinks she has met the potential man of her dreams, she also discovers an imposter determined to destroy her business and life. Can she trust this “Prince Charming” to help her defend everything she holds dear, or will she only leave herself vulnerable at the worst possible time?
Drake Charles’s work in the fast-growing mobile technology field made him a wealthy, powerful man. But he quickly sheds the fame and publicity for a more private life that earns him the label as a man of mystery. Drake adds to that mystery every year when he hosts a masquerade ball for charity. It’s also his best chance to find the one thing he really wants . . . true love.
Having met behind masks of anonymity, Elle and Drake enjoy a whirlwind night of romance that leaves them both wanting more. Elle’s heart tells her to trust Drake, but years of fighting off business foes has taught her that anyone could be a potential threat. Will this new romance give them both a fairy tale ending, or spiral into a nightmare for the whole Simpson family?
The People That Time Forgot (Illustrated)
In uncharted Caprona, a continent lost from the map of the Earth, where Time has stopped and all primeval creatures of long-gone ages still prowl, Bowen Tyler is lost. To find Tyler, Thomas Billings travels across the world to Caprona, where even stranger mysteries await him, and a barbaric civilization hides, torn between the impassable jungle on one side and an unknown menace on the other.
The People That Time Forgot is an Edgar Rice Burroughs fantasy novel, the second of his Caspak trilogy. The sequence was first published in Blue Book Magazine as a three-part serial in the issues for September, October and November 1918, with The People That Time Forgot forming the second installment. The complete trilogy was later combined for publication in book form under the title of The Land That Time Forgot (properly speaking the title of the first part) by A. C. McClurg in June 1924. Beginning with the Ace Books editions of the 1960s, the three segments have usually been issued as separate short novels.
Captive: Book 1 – Formerly Life of Recovery (A New Life)
To what lengths would you go to break away from a life filled with pain and suffering?
Tori Farrell has lived a dangerous life. When you grow up with a Motorcycle Gang of Mercenaries and Drug Lords like the Dragons, a normal life is more like a fairytale. For years, she accepted her dark reality, a world consisting of drugs, sex, violence and murder. In the end, she learned the most valuable lesson: survival.
After years of being ruled by the Dragons, Tori uses her skills of seduction and assassination to free herself from the grasp of the people who vowed they would never let her go. Taken in by the FBI, she fears not everything is what it seems, and soon finds herself lost in a web of lies and deceit. She thought getting away from the Dragons would put her on a path to a new and better life, but now she must face the cold hard truth” there is always a price to be paid.
The Promise of Paradise (Hometown Heroes)
Ashton Kirk, youngest daughter of a prestigious senator, fiancee of a hotshot attorney, and fresh Harvard graduate, is headed for a promising law career when scandal breaks apart her family. To escape, she rents an apartment in the sleepy town of Paradise, New Hampshire, where no one knows who she is.
Ashton hopes for solitude, but all bets are off when Eddie West, the town’s most eligible bachelor, moves in downstairs. Eddie likes his women and his cars shiny, sleek, and fast, and when he meets his new housemate, he wastes no time getting friendly. While he’s looking for a no-strings romance, though, he gets more than he bargained for in Ash, who sees through his bravado to the pain of a loss too fresh to mention.
Can two people from different worlds find common ground, a place to fall in love and build a future? Is it possible to find your soul mate in the place you least expect?
Simpson’s Will
Just out of Fordham Law School in 1968, Tim O’Leary receives a surprise job offer from Bradford, Lord and Turner, an old-line Manhattan law firm. Upon arrival, he is assigned to what is expected to be a routine probate proceeding in the estate of the well-known and recently divorced Reginald Simpson, who has died and whose Will disinherits his good-for-nothing brother Harold. Matters deteriorate, however, when the Will mysteriously vanishes and Harold hires the brash Brooklyn lawyer Mickey Finn to challenge it. Tim’s girlfriend, a street-smart private investigator, decides the Will has been stolen, but an unexpected turn of events frustrates Tim’s pursuit of her theory as the case hurtles toward what promises to be a costly and embarrassing conclusion.
Flight (The Crescent Chronicles Book 1)
Sometimes you just have to take flight.
A summer in New Orleans is exactly what Allie needs before starting college. Accepting her dad’s invitation to work at his hotel offers an escape from her ex-boyfriend and the chance to spend the summer with her best friend. Meeting a guy is the last thing on her mind—until she sees Levi.
Unable to resist the infuriating yet alluring Levi, Allie finds herself at the center of a supernatural society and forced to decide between following the path she has always trusted or saving a city that might just save her.
The Disappearance of Mavis Woodstock (The Val & Kit Mystery Series Book 1)
This first book in The Val & Kit Mystery Series introduces Realtor Valerie Pankowski and her best friend since childhood, Kit James. Val, who has just signed her divorce papers and a lease on a new apartment, receives a call from a prospective client, Mavis Woodstock (a vaguely familiar name). Mavis insists she has to sell her house as quickly as possible, but then doesn’t keep her scheduled appointment.
Kit, whose glamour belies her bold and often brash ways, remembers Mavis from their school days, an unattractive girl who was ignored when she was lucky, ridiculed when she was not. She also remembers Mavis being the only daughter in a large family that was as frugal as it was wealthy. When Val and Kit cannot locate Mavis, they begin an investigation, encountering along the way a little romance, a lot of deception, and more than one unsavory character.
The Assembler of Parts: A Novel
From the start of this extraordinary first novel, eight-year-old Jess finds herself in heaven reviewing her short life. She is guided in this by a being she calls the Assembler of Parts, and her task, as she understands it, is to glean her life’s meaning. From birth, it was obvious that she was unlike other children: she was born without thumbs. The Assembler left out other parts too, for she suffers from a syndrome of birth defects that leaves her flawed.
But soon it becomes apparent that by her very imperfections she has a unique ability to draw love from—and heal—those around her, from the team of doctors who rally to her care, to the parents who come together over her, to the grandmother whose guilt she assuages, to the family friend whom she helps reconcile with an angry past. With a voice full of wisdom and humor, she tells their stories too. Yet, only when she dies suddenly and her parents are suspected of neglect, unleashing a chain of events beyond her healing, does the meaning of her life come into full focus. And only then does the Assembler’s purpose become clear.
Doctor in Petticoats (Sophie’s Daughters Book 1)
What happens when an idealistic student nurse encounters an embittered army doctor in a stagecoach accident? How will she react when she learns her training didn’t prepare her for tragic reality? How will he, an army deserter, respond to needs when he vowed to never touch another patient? Can these two stubborn mules find common ground on which to work and bring healing to West Texas?
The Harrowing (A Ghost Story)
Baird College’s Mendenhall echoes with the footsteps of the last home-bound students heading off for Thanksgiving break, and Robin Stone swears she can feel the creepy, hundred-year-old residence hall breathe a sigh of relief for its long-awaited solitude. Or perhaps it’s only gathering itself for the coming weekend.
As a massive storm dumps rain on the isolated campus, four other lonely students reveal themselves: Patrick, a handsome jock; Lisa, a manipulative tease; Cain, a brooding musician; and finally Martin, a scholarly eccentric. Each has forsaken a long weekend at home for their own secret reasons.
The five unlikely companions establish a tentative rapport, but they soon become aware of a sixth presence disturbing the ominous silence that pervades the building. Are they the victims of a simple college prank taken way too far, or is the unusual energy evidence of something genuine—and intent on using the five students for its own terrifying ends? It’s only Thursday afternoon, and they have three long days and dark nights before the rest of the world returns to find out what’s become of them. But for now it’s just the darkness keeping company with five students nobody wants and no one will miss.
Where Are They Buried?: How Did They Die? Fitting Ends and Final Resting Places of the Famous, Infamous, and Noteworthy
The perennially best-selling guide to the lives, deaths, and final resting places of our most enduring cultural icons, now revised and completely updated to include 25 entries of the newly dead.
Where Are They Buried? has directed legions of fervent fans and multitudes of the morbidly curious to the gravesides, monuments, memorials, and tombstones of the nearly 500 celebrities and antiheros included in the book. By far the most complete and well-organized guide on the subject, every entry features an entertaining capsule biography full of little-known facts; a detailed description of the death; and step-by-step directions to the site of the grave, including not only the name of the cemetery but the specific roads and trails to take within the cemetery to reach the gravesite. The book also provides a handy index of grave locations organized by state, province, and country to make planning a grave-hopping road trip easy and efficient.
New entries include Steve Jobs, Whitney Houston, Neil Armstrong, Elizabeth Taylor, Dick Clark and twenty more.
Omega Force: Soldiers of Fortune (OF2)
Omega Force is back!
After the daring rescue of a political dissident, Omega Force is contracted to investigate a rash of violent attacks on civilian shipping lanes within a group of star systems known as the Concordian Cluster. It seems a simple enough job with a huge payday at the end and it’s exactly what the ragtag group of mercenaries needs in order to keep their ship flying and to stay one step ahead of those hunting them.
However, the further they delve into the seedy underworld of the Cluster the more they realize they may be in over their heads. With innocent lives hanging in the balance, Captain Burke and his crew begin a desperate race to uncover who is responsible for these attacks, and why, before their ultimate goal can be realized.
… See the rest of today’s Editor’s Picks here on page 2