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Author: KITSON, BILL
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Crime Fiction

Two skeletons are discovered in Lamentation Tarn, a mountain lake.

Talented detective Mike Nash and his team have little evidence with which to work, until a surprising discovery prompts them to contact law enforcement agencies in Eastern Europe.

A joint task force is formed to uncover a criminal network involved in prostitution, drugs, and human trafficking, but Nash’s preoccupation with internal politics, as well as with an attractive Russian detective, proves to be a distraction.

Finally, a young victim escapes the gang’s clutches, providing Nash with much needed evidence. A search of the neighboring tarn yields evidence of even more heinous crimes.

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Author: Wycherley, Jeannie
FREE
Cozy Culinary Mystery

Alfhild Daemonne has inherited an inn.

And a dead body.

Estranged from her witch mother, and having committed to little in her thirty years, Alf surprises herself when she decides to start a new life.

She heads deep into the English countryside intent on making a success of the once popular inn. However, discovering the murder throws her a curve ball. Especially when she suspects dark magick.

Additionally, a less than warm welcome from several locals, persuades her that a variety of folk – of both the mortal and magickal persuasions – have it in for her.

The dilapidated inn presents a huge challenge for Alf. Uncertain who to trust, she considers calling time on the venture.

Should she pack her bags and head back to London?

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Author: Woods, Serenity
FREE
Holiday Romantic Comedy

If you write an email to a friend about a fantasy involving your gorgeous boss, don’t send it to All Staff…

It’s not easy to reinvent yourself, but my thirteen-year-old son and I are ready for a new start. Old Maggie was a magnet for disaster, but New Meg is going to be elegant, sophisticated… and blonde. I’ve landed a dream job at the other end of New Zealand as PA to three rich directors who spoil me rotten, I’ve found a beautiful new apartment, and I feel reborn.

Then I write an email to a friend describing in vivid detail what I want to do to the sexiest of the directors—involving melted chocolate and/or whipped cream—and mistakenly send it to All Staff. It turns out that New Meg is pretty much just Old Maggie with different packaging. Some things never change.

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Author: Kern, Bob
FREE
Military Leader Biographies

A GRIPPING, TRUE STORY TOLD FROM THE FRONT LINES AS THE WORLD FACED THE POSSIBILITY OF NUCLEAR WAR
This is a personal account of military service and the historical events that were happening during President Reagan’s time in office as the world faced the possibility of nuclear war. The author was in the US Army from November 1980 until March 1988 which coincided with President Reagan’s time in office. He quickly went from a naive seventeen year old boy to a dedicated die hard soldier ready to sacrifice his life for his country.

˃˃˃ An assignment that likely would have been at Ground Zero of a nuclear war.
On the verge of World War 3 and nuclear war, “We Were Soldiers Too” is about the difficult job of serving in the infantry during a very critical time of the Cold War.

Merry and the Gentleman (affiliate link)

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Author: Weaver, Donna K.
FREE
Holiday Romance

Merry Hurst, a fierce widow and single mom, is determined to give her young son the life he deserves—including a male role model who will stick around for the long haul. She can’t afford to fall for a man who isn’t planning to stay in Huckleberry Falls, so she might as well stop dreaming about Carlisle Wyndham. If only it were that easy!

Carlisle Wyndham is determined to develop the avalanche-proof transceiver that could have saved his wife’s life. He’s glad his daughter has made a new friend, but they’re only staying in Huckleberry Falls long enough to complete the project. When he meets the young boy’s mother, Carlisle’s not prepared for how alive she makes him feel.

But he has pressing responsibilities pulling him back to England while Merry’s require her to stay. Do they dare risk getting involved only to say goodbye?

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Author: McAdoo, Caryl
FREE
Christian Historical Fiction
There’s nothing covered that won’t be revealed. Greed weaves a tangled web at The Lowell House, but one must rise very early to out fox the hotel’s proprietor. With the help of his exuberant wife and his friend and former sergeant, Morgan sees through the duplicity, but can he prove it?

The Devil and Webster (affiliate link)

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Author: Korelitz, Jean Hanff
Regularly $6.99, Today $3.99
Political Fiction
Naomi Roth is the first female president of Webster College, a once conservative school now known for producing fired-up, progressive graduates. So Naomi isn’t surprised or unduly alarmed when Webster students begin the fall semester with an outdoor encampment around “The Stump”-a traditional campus gathering place for generations of student activists-to protest a popular professor’s denial of tenure. A former student radical herself, Naomi admires the protestors’ passion, especially when her own daughter, Hannah, joins their ranks.

Then Omar Khayal, a charismatic Palestinian student with a devastating personal history, emerges as the group’s leader, and the demonstration begins to consume Naomi’s life, destabilizing Webster College from the inside out. As the crisis slips beyond her control, Naomi must take increasingly desperate measures to protect her friends, colleagues, and family from an unknowable adversary.

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Author: Gornick, Vivian
Regularly $6.99, Today $3.99
Biographies & Memoirs of Authors

In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as ruthlessly. Gornick’s groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O’Brien has called “the principal crux of female despair”: the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond.

Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of “urban peasants,” Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother’s romantic depression over the early death of her husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood, to affect Gornick’s struggle to find herself in love and in work.

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Author: Peel, Jennifer
Regularly $3.99, Today $0.99
Classic Romance Fiction

He never wanted to leave her. She never expected him to return.

If Ariana Stanton has learned anything in life, it’s that men leave. She’s been taught this lesson well from the father she’s never met, who sends her a mysterious letter once a year, to her ex-fiancé, who left her for another woman. So, when she meets the charming and seemingly perfect Jonah, she promises him they will never be more than friends. It’s a promise she can’t keep. But before he has a chance to leave her, she sends him away.

Dr. Jonah Adkinson has one regret–that he let Ariana remain convinced that love never lasts. But now, nine years later, the single dad is back in Pine Falls and on a mission: prove Ariana wrong. He’s determined to win over the love of his life. And this time he won’t let anything get in the way, not even her.

Carter & Lovecraft: A Novel (affiliate link)

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Author: Howard, Jonathan L.
Regularly $5.99, Today $2.99
Steampunk Science Fiction
Daniel Carter used to be a homicide detective, but his last case — the hunt for a serial killer — went wrong in strange ways and soured the job for him. Now he’s a private investigator trying to live a quiet life. Strangeness, however, has not finished with him. First he inherits a bookstore in Providence from someone he’s never heard of, along with an indignant bookseller who doesn’t want a new boss. She’s Emily Lovecraft, the last known descendant of H.P. Lovecraft, the writer from Providence who told tales of the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods, creatures and entities beyond the understanding of man. Then people start dying in impossible ways, and while Carter doesn’t want to be involved, but he’s beginning to suspect that someone else wants him to be. As he reluctantly investigates, he discovers that Lovecraft’s tales were more than just fiction, and he must accept another unexpected, and far more unwanted inheritance.

Born with Teeth: A Memoir (affiliate link)

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Author: Mulgrew, Kate
Regularly $3.99, Today $1.99
Biographies of Actors & Actresses

Raised by unconventional Irish Catholics who knew “how to drink, how to dance, how to talk, and how to stir up the devil,” Kate Mulgrew grew up with poetry and drama in her bones. But in her mother, a would-be artist burdened by the endless arrival of new babies, young Kate saw the consequences of a dream deferred.

Determined to pursue her own no matter the cost, at 18 she left her small Midwestern town for New York, where, studying with the legendary Stella Adler, she learned the lesson that would define her as an actress: “Use it,” Adler told her. Whatever disappointment, pain, or anger life throws in your path, channel it into the work.

It was a lesson she would need. At twenty-two, just as her career was taking off, she became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. Having already signed the adoption papers, she was allowed only a fleeting glimpse of her child.

A Song of Wraiths and Ruin (affiliate link)

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Author: Brown, Roseanne A.
Regularly $3.99, Today $1.99
Young Adult African Geography & Cultures Fiction

For Malik, the Solstasia festival is a chance to escape his war-stricken home and start a new life with his sisters in the prosperous desert city of Ziran. But when a vengeful spirit abducts his younger sister, Nadia, as payment to enter the city, Malik strikes a fatal deal—kill Karina, Crown Princess of Ziran, for Nadia’s freedom.

But Karina has deadly aspirations of her own. Her mother, the Sultana, has been assassinated; her court threatens mutiny; and Solstasia looms like a knife over her neck. Grief-stricken, Karina decides to resurrect her mother through ancient magic . . . requiring the beating heart of a king. And she knows just how to obtain one: by offering her hand in marriage to the victor of the Solstasia competition.

When Malik rigs his way into the contest, they are set on a heart-pounding course to destroy each other. But as attraction flares between them and ancient evils stir, will they be able to see their tasks to the death?

The Orchardist: A Novel (affiliate link)

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Author: Coplin, Amanda
Regularly $5.99, Today $2.99
Contemporary Western Fiction

At once intimate and epic, The Orchardist is historical fiction at its best, in the grand literary tradition of William Faulkner, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Ondaatje, Annie Proulx, and Toni Morrison.

In her stunningly original and haunting debut novel, Amanda Coplin evokes a powerful sense of place, mixing tenderness and violence as she spins an engrossing tale of a solitary orchardist who provides shelter to two runaway teenage girls in the untamed American West, and the dramatic consequences of his actions.

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Author: Alison, Jane
Regularly $3.99, Today $1.99
Writing Skill Reference

As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: “For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel― one we’re actually told to follow―and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides . . . But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculosexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?”

W. G. Sebald’s Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern, rather than the traditional arc–or, in nature, wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her “museum of specimens” include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison.

… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 2Page 2