Free/Bargain Suspense/Mystery/Thriller March 2013

[Dr. Drib]

Got both the Judson books. They look very good.

Thank you!



Don

[DrNefario]

I'd got the second Gin Palace book some time ago. It's nice to be able to fill in another gap.

[AnemicOak]

Free from Whisky Creek publishing in PDF or HTML (part of their 10th Birthday celebration)...

LOST LEGION [A ROBERT SABLE MYSTERY] by Sean Thomas

Pulled from his honeymoon, Tlingit Alaska State Trooper Robert Sable investigates the murders of the governor’s brother and the brother’s friends. Clutched in the dead men’s hands are gold coins imprinted with the likeness of Augustus Caesar. As Sable follows the clues, he realizes a myth Roman soldiers settled in Alaska more than 2,000 years ago may be true. Closing in, he comes face to face with the architect of the murders, a village chieftain who is a descendent of the Romans. The descendents have set into motion a plot to take over the halls of power in Washington, D.C. Even the current Alaskan governor unknowingly is being used as a pawn to achieve this aim. It is up to Sable to foil the plot and put the chief and his fellow conspirators behind bars.

http://www.whiskeycreekpress.com/sto...roducts_id=919

[ATDrake]

Geo-restricted KDP freebie (not available to Canadians, even though this is a Canadian author who's been nominated for our Arthur Ellis Award for mystery/crime fiction, sigh):

Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth) by Jon Evans. Tourism gone horribly wrong into human trafficking/conspiracy thriller, originally out from HarperCollins in 2004.

Repeat small-press anthology including Paul Levine, Dave Zeltserman, et al.: Intrigue (Stories of Suspense)

[BelleZora]

The fifth mystery in Mary Monica Pulver's Peter & Kori Brichter series is free today from Amazon: Show Stopper, first published by Diamond in 1992. UK

When a hated horse trainer turns up dead in Kori Brichter's prep stall, Kori investigates the crime in the absence of her police detective husband.

[KentE]

Last November, member BelleZora listed and recommended a freebie by James Swain, Grift Sense. in this thread:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...in#post2301518

This was the first in the Swain’s Tony Valentine series, featuring an expert in ferreting out cheats, scams, and dastardly plots in casinos. The series is well written, with clever plot lines.

If you picked it up and enjoyed it, 2 others in the series, & the aforementioned Grift Sense, have been reduced to $0.99 at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Wild Card, currently $0.99
http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Card-Vale.../dp/B0045EOJL8

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wild...ain/1026791916

A prequel in the Tony Valentine series:

This novel takes
us back to Tony Valentine’s early days as a policeman in
Atlantic City, New Jersey and how he came to be an expert
on gambling scams and crime.

Jackpot , currently $0.99
http://www.amazon.com/Jackpot-Tony-V.../dp/B00466HRS2

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/jack...ain/1026891962

Ex-cop Tony Valentine has a score to settle. Decades before, his brother-in-law was gunned down by a gang of ruthless con men, each of whom Valentine has sworn to track down. Now, only one is left, the cold-blooded Bronco Marchese.

Valentine goes to Nevada to bring Bronco to justice, while also helping the police figure out how someone is stealing hundreds of slot machine jackpots without ever touching the machines. It’s a case that only Valentine with his amazing “grift sense” can solve. Along the way, he will put his own life in peril, and risk everything that he holds dear, to bring his life-long enemy to justice.

The first in the series, Grift Sense , detailed in BelleZora's linked post above, (also $.99)
http://www.amazon.com/Grift-Sense-Va.../dp/B00960TY4I

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/grif...ain/1100293198


Two novels not from the Valentine series are also priced at $.99 (I’m assuming this represents a price reduction, but I can’t verify that.)

The Man Who Cheated Death (a stand-alone novel)

Can someone really predict the future? Magician Vincent Hardare does just that during a TV appearance. It’s all a trick, only the killer whose next murder he’s predicted doesn’t know that. Hardare soon becomes the killer’s target, and must pull every trick out of his bag to save himself, and his family.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-...ain/1026962770

http://www.amazon.com/Cheated-Death-ebook/dp/B0046LV7X8

Program (from Swain’s Jack Carpenter series)

Is it possible to create a serial killer? FBI Special Agent Ken Linderman (last seen alongside Jack Carpenter in bestseller The Night Monster) is about to find out. A serial killer has kidnaped seventeen-year-old Wayne Ladd, and is putting the boy through the Program, a fiendish project designed to turn young boys into raging killers.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/prog...ain/1026791915

http://www.amazon.com/Program-Jack-C.../dp/B0044XUV4O

KentE

[NightBird]

Night Sins/Guilty as Sin, two-book set by Tami Hoag, is $6.99, down from $9.99, from Random House.

NIGHT SINS

A peaceful Minnesota town is about to face its worst nightmare. A young boy disappears and the only clue is a note—taunting and casually cruel. Has a cold-blooded kidnapper struck? Or is this the reawakening of a long-quiet serial killer? For a tough-minded investigator, it’s her first make-or-break case. For a local cop, it’s the fear that big-city evil has come to stalk his small-town home. Together they’ll hunt a madman who knows no bounds and for whom no sin is forbidden.


GUILTY AS SIN

A psychopath has been playing a twisted game with a terrified Minnesota town. Now a respected member of the community stands accused of a chilling act of evil. But when a second boy vanishes, a frightened public demands to know if the police have caught the wrong man. Is the nightmare continuing…or just beginning? Prosecutor Ellen North believes she has the right man—but that he has an accomplice in the shadows. Ellen suddenly finds herself swept into a cruel contest of wits, a dark game of life and death… with an evil mind as guilty as sin.

[NightBird]

Humorous medical thriller Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell is $2.99, down from $8.89, from Hachette.

Dr. Peter Brown is an intern at Manhattan's worst hospital, with a talent for medicine, a shift from hell, and a past he'd prefer to keep hidden. Whether it's a blocked circumflex artery or a plan to land a massive malpractice suit, he knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

Pietro "Bearclaw" Brnwna is a hitman for the mob, with a genius for violence, a well-earned fear of sharks, and an overly close relationship with the Federal Witness Relocation Program. More likely to leave a trail of dead gangsters than a molecule of evidence, he's the last person you want to see in your hospital room.

Nicholas LoBrutto, aka Eddy Squillante, is Dr. Brown's new patient, with three months to live and a very strange idea: that Peter Brown and Pietro Brnwa might-just might-be the same person ...

Now, with the mob, the government, and death itself descending on the hospital, Peter has to buy time and do whatever it takes to keep his patients, himself, and his last shot at redemption alive. To get through the next eight hours-and somehow beat the reaper.

Spattered in adrenaline-fueled action and bone-saw-sharp dialogue, BEAT THE REAPER is a debut thriller so utterly original you won't be able to guess what happens next, and so shockingly entertaining you won't be able to put it down.

[NightBird]

Free cozy mystery from indie publisher Cozy Cat Press: Deadly Audit by David Selcer.

Winston Barchrist III, a former big time corporate attorney, who narrowly escapes disbarment is now a 300 pound moped riding lawyer turning his life around with a new girlfriend and a reinvented career as a sole practioner in a flee bag office above a Dairy Mart in a smaller city. Mostly, his cases consist of defending small-time hoods and negotiating simple divorces, but his life takes an abrupt new direction when a svelte society matron parks her Mercedes at his front door and hires him to investigate a large fund in which she and her business mogul husband are both trustees. Doesn't sound too dangerous--that is, until bullets start flying and our intrepid hero finds himself in the middle of a DEADLY AUDIT.

[NightBird]

Free Brain Dead by Eileen Dreyer. Originally published in 1997 by HarperCollins.

When forensic nurse Timmie Leary-Parker moves from LA to Puckett, Missouri to care for her ailing father, she's prepared for the slow pace, the small-town politics and the feeling that everyone knows her business.

Then, patients in the hospital's Alzheimer's Unit start dying in unprecedented numbers.

Everyone refuses to investigate the town's most lucrative business, and no one will come against the hospital's Golden Boy director.

No one, except Timmie.

Convinced a serial killer walks the Alzheimer's Unit where her father lies ill, Timmie digs up a burned-out Pulitzer-winning reporter and dives into a quagmire of corruption and greed.

[NightBird]

The Evil That Men Do by Jeanne Dams $2.51 from Severn House.

A Dorothy Martin mystery - Dorothy Martin and her husband, retired Chief Constable Alan Nesbitt, are on holiday in the idyllic English village of Broadway when they stumble across the body of a man who appears to have fallen down a disused quarry. When it is revealed that the man, a local farmer, was probably pushed over the edge, and that the police have failed to find any suspects or motives for the murder, Dorothy can't help but get involved . . .

[NightBird]

Free thriller from small publisher, Casagrande Press: The Moon in Deep Winter by Lee Polevol. (Particularly nice cover, especially when viewed from Look Inside).

After one too many failings, Parker Sloane gives up his job smuggling cash for a drug cartel and returns to his childhood home in the woods of New England. There he finds that his family is just as twitchy, desperate, paranoid, and unpredictable as the underworld types he just escaped.

Now Parker has to manage homicidal family dysfunction. His tyrannical stepfather, seething younger brother, newly evangelical mother, and alluring younger half-sister Rita each have demons they never exorcised.

Delicately but disastrously, Parker attempts to keep his family from imploding, unaware that each has their own plans for escape or vengeance. The Moon in Deep Winter combines the dark comedy of the Coen brothers with a fast-paced thriller

[Mort1997]

This is a repeat freebie from 2011, Corpse Way (The Yorkshire Dales Mystery Series) by Susan Parry

'A quiet summer holiday in the picturesque Yorkshire Dales was just what Millie needed. No excitement, fresh air and huge helpings of her Grandmother's home cooking.

But Millie is drawn into an intriguing mystery that surrounds the isolated shooting lodge on the moor, the Dutchman who rents it and the sudden death of two residents in the village. Convinced that Lizzie Banford did not die of natural causes, Millie sets about finding the truth.

Set in the lead mining area of peaceful Swaledale, this is the first in the series of Yorkshire dales Mysteries.'

UK
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Corpse-Yorks...341689031_f_29

US
http://www.amazon.com/Corpse-Yorkshi...ds=susan+parry

[KentE]

Bad Faith, by Robert Tanenbaum, is reduced at $2.99 at the 3 major stores, possibly others.

http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Faith-Butc.../dp/B0061O0CSY

http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Bad-F...MNw/page1.html

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bad-...=9781451635591

Originally published in June 2012, this is the latest in Tanenbaum’s Butch Karp series, featuring a New York District Attorney, and wife Marlene Ciampi, who frequently dances on the wrong edge of the law in the process of upholding street justice.

New York District Attorney Butch Karp has no qualms about putting David and Nonie Ellis on trial following the excruciating death of their young son, Micah. To him, the case is cut-and-dried—reckless manslaughter. Helpless ten-year-old Micah counted on his parents to protect him from the effects of a rare but treatable cancer. Instead, the Ellis family relied solely on prayer and the guidance of snake-oil salesman Reverend C. G. Westlund, of the End of Days Reformation Church of Jesus Christ Resurrected, to save him. ….

Amid the firestorm of controversy surrounding the case, Karp’s wife, private investigator Marlene Ciampi, heads to Memphis to uncover Westlund’s past. The evidence she finds is enough to blow the top off the con man’s scheme—if she doesn’t get herself blown away in the process. Back in Manhattan, meanwhile, Karp is confronted by a deadly nemesis from the past who has explosive plans of her own. The edge-of-your-seat action comes to a head at the annual Halloween parade when a merciless struggle between good and evil metes out its own fatal form of justice.

In my opinion, this one is far from the best of a really enjoyable series. If you’re already a Tanenbaum fan (as I am), you’ll probably love it. If you’re not already hooked on the series, I’d suggest the earlier books, unfortunately at a much higher cost.

KentE

[KentE]

Courting Trouble, by Lisa Scottoline, is reduced to $1.99 at the 3 majors, possibly others
Original publication 2002, Harper Collins
I've read this, along with most in the series, and found them quite enjoyable.

http://www.amazon.com/Courting-Troub.../dp/B000FC119C

http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Court...OE152UTKWw&r=3

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/cour...=9780061740923

This is from Scottoline’s ‘Rosato & Associates’ series, featuring a law firm of all women. Each novel features a different woman in the legal office, with the others as support characters. (Kind of the same format followed in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series.) To a certain extent, these are ‘softer, gentler’ mysteries, although there’s plenty of action: brains, perseverance, and a willingness to take risks play a greater part than muscle and brawn. Scottoline won an Edgar for one of the earlier from this series. No need to read these in order, as each stands well alone.

Anne Murphy is the redheaded rookie at the Philadelphia law firm of Rosato & Associates, and one morning she wakes up to front-page headlines proclaiming lawyer murdered -- above her own picture. If she wants to stay alive, she's got to play dead. She'll have to trust people she barely knows -- colleagues who hate her, homicide cops who want her out of the crime-fighting business, and a new love who inconveniently happens to be opposing counsel. But her knack for courting trouble makes it almost impossible for Anne to play well with others, and an unexpected event places her in lethal jeopardy and leaves her with everything to lose.

KentE