Content FREE (and bargain) books for the Kindle - September 2011

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Thunder Dog: The True Story of a Blind Man, His Guide Dog, and the Triumph of Trust at Ground Zero by Michael Hingson from Thomas Nelson ($1.99) is the Kindle Deal of the Day (Sept 11) *Wait for price to reflect discount before 1-clicking

Product Description
A blind man and his guide dog show the power of trust and courage in the midst of devastating terror.

It was 12:30 a.m. on 9/11 and Roselle whimpered at Michael’s bedside. A thunderstorm was headed east, and she could sense the distant rumbles while her owners slept. As a trained guide dog, when she was “on the clock” nothing could faze her. But that morning, without her harness, she was free to be scared, and she nudged Michael’s hand with her wet nose as it draped over the bedside toward the floor. She needed him to wake up.

With a busy day of meetings and an important presentation ahead, Michael slumped out of bed, headed to his home office, and started chipping away at his daunting workload. Roselle, shivering, took her normal spot at his feet and rode out the storm while he typed. By all indications it was going to be a normal day. A busy day, but normal nonetheless. Until they went into the office.

In Thunder Dog, follow Michael and his guide dog, Roselle, as their lives are changed forever by two explosions and 1,463 stairs. When the first plane struck Tower One, an enormous boom, frightening sounds, and muffled voices swept through Michael’s office while shards of glass and burning scraps of paper fell outside the windows.

But in this harrowing story of trust and courage, discover how blindness and a bond between dog and man saved lives and brought hope during one of America’s darkest days.

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The new Vook freebies are now also free for US Kindle: Amazon search link

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The End of Boys, by Peter Brown Hoffmeister, is free in the Kindle store.

Book Description
Peter Hoffmeister was a nervous child who ran away repeatedly and bit his fingernails until they bled. Home-schooled until the age of fourteen, he had only to deal with his parents and siblings on a daily basis, yet even that sometimes proved too much for him. Over the years, he watched his mother disintegrate into her own form of mania, while his father—a scholar and doctor who had once played semi-pro baseball—was strict and pushed Peter particularly hard. He wanted only the best from his son but in the process taught Peter to expect only the worst from himself. In the midst of his chaotic home life, Peter began to hear a voice—an insistent, monotone that would periodically dictate his actions. When Peter finally entered public school he started to break free from his father’s control—only to fall sway to the voice more and more. His obsessive-compulsive behavior morphed into ruthless competition in sports and, ultimately, into lies, violence, and drugs.

The End of Boys follows Hoffmeister to the very brink of sanity and back, in a harrowing and heartbreaking account of the trauma of adolescence and the redemption available to us all, if only we choose to find it.

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FYI, currently just free for those in the UK

Vanquished (Victorian Romance) by Hope Tarr (Medallion Press) (Amazon Main, Amazon UK)

Product Description
Known as The Maid of Mayfair for her unassailable virtue, unwavering resolve, and quiet dignity, suffragette leader, Caledonia —Callie — Rivers is the perfect counter for detractors' portrayal of the women as rabble rousers, lunatics, even whores. But a high-ranking enemy within the government will stop at nothing to ensure that the Parliamentary bill to grant the vote to females dies in the Commons — including ruining the reputation of the Movement's chief spokeswoman. After a streak of disastrous luck at the gaming tables threatens to land him at the bottom of the Thames, photographer Hadrian St. Claire reluctantly agrees to seduce the beautiful suffragist leader and then use his camera to capture her fall from grace. Posing as the photographer commissioned to make her portrait for the upcoming march on Parliament, Hadrian infiltrates Callie's inner circle. But lovely, soft-spoken Callie hardly fits his mental image of a dowdy, man-hating spinster. And as the passion between them flares from spark to full-on flame, Hadrian is the one in danger of being vanquished.

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FYI, currently just free for those in Europe

Tailgating Cookbook by Gooseberry Patch (Gooseberry Patch) (Amazon Main, Amazon DE)

Product Description
Get a taste of Gooseberry Patch in this collection of over 20 favorite game-day recipes! From high-school homecoming to the big bowl, parked at the stadium or right in front of your TV, Gooseberry Patch Tailgating will help you throw the winningest party of the season! Tackle those appetites with Touchdown Taco Dip, Running-Back Stuffed Mushrooms and more!

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Now also free for those in the UK

Tailgating Cookbook by Gooseberry Patch (Gooseberry Patch) (Amazon Main, Amazon UK)

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FYI, currently just free for those in the UK

Prayer Begins with Relationship (Breakthrough Prayer: Studies for Small Groups) by Cynthia Bezek (Navpress) (Amazon Main, Amazon UK)

Product Description
Connection and communication are vital in relationships, but what about in your relationship with God? Is it more of a duty than a delight?

In this 6-session Bible study, the first in a series from Pray! Resources, you'll discover greater joy and intimacy in your most important relationship.

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The Last Worthless Evening: Four Novellas and Two Short Stories by Andre Dubus from Open Road ($1.99) is the Kindle Deal of the Day (Sept 12) *Wait for price to reflect discount before 1-clicking

Product Description
The classic Dubus collection—now available as an ebook

Yet another tour de force from an American master of fiction

In his fifth collection of short fiction, Andre Dubus exhibits his remarkable storytelling range. In “Deaths at Sea,” two naval officers, one black and one white, must come to terms with a history and an institution steeped in racism. “After the Game” tells the story of a Hispanic shortstop on a major-league baseball team who suddenly and without explanation loses his mind. And in “Rose,” a mother finally stands up to her husband’s abuse of their children.

The four novellas and two short stories that comprise The Last Worthless Evening traverse those facets of American life that are at the same time cruel and commonplace, and with spare, immediate prose, render them universal.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Andre Dubus including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

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Now also free for the US:

Vanquished (Victorian Romance) by Hope Tarr (Medallion Press)

Tailgating Cookbook by Gooseberry Patch (Gooseberry Patch)

Prayer Begins with Relationship (Breakthrough Prayer: Studies for Small Groups) by Cynthia Bezek (Navpress)

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Investing in People: Financial Impact of Human Resource Initiatives by Wayne F. Cascio and John W. Boudreau (FT Press)

Product Description
This is the eBook version of the printed book.

A Logical, Proven Framework for Understanding the Economic Value of Human Resources Investments

How to choose Human Resources investments that deliver optimal strategic value—and eliminate those that don’t
Best-practice metrics and analysis techniques for talent management, performance management, health and wellness programs, and much more

Investing in People introduces a breakthrough approach to Human Resources (HR) measurement that systematically aligns HR investments with organizational goals and helps make HR the true strategic partner it needs to be. Wayne F. Cascio and John W. Boudreau show exactly how to choose, implement, and use metrics to improve decision-making, optimize organizational effectiveness, and maximize the value of HR investments.

You’ll master crucial foundational principles such as risk, return, and economies of scale—and use them to evaluate investments objectively in everything from work/life programs to training. Cascio and Boudreau also introduce powerful ways to integrate HR with enterprise strategy and budgeting and for gaining commitment from business leaders outside the HR function.

If you truly want “a seat at the table”—or if you want to keep the one you have—you’ll find this book utterly indispensable.

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Free again:

Improve Your Business Communication (Collection) by Jerry Weissman, Terry J. Fadem, Natalie Canavor and Claire Meirowitz from FT Press Delivers

Product Description

A brand new collection of essential insights for your business and career from world-renowned experts…now in a convenient e-format, at a great price!

Get answers, get action! Supercharge your business writing, question asking, presentation delivery, and more!

Three full books of proven solutions for supercharging personal effectiveness by improving the way you communicate! Master 52 proven, bite-size, easy-to-use business writing techniques for improving everything from emails to proposals…discover how to ask better questions, and get better, more actionable answers…learn how to make presentations that win, from the world’s #1 presentation expert!

From world-renowned leaders and experts, including Natalie Canavor, Claire Meirowitz, T. J. Fadem, and Jerry Weissman.

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Genes, Chromosomes, and Disease: From Simple Traits, to Complex Traits, to Personalized Medicine (FT Press Science) by Nicholas Wright Gillham (FT Press)

Product Description
100+ Years of Medical Genetics: An Authoritative History in Social and Ethical Context

This is an exceptionally readable overview of the rise and transformations of medical genetics throughout the past century. It thoroughly reviews the field, summarizes current scientific understanding, and encourages readers to seriously reflect on the ethical and social implications. Gillham explains
How genetic diseases arise and why some ethnic groups are more susceptible to specific disorders
How scientists are trying to identify the genetic factors underlying multifaceted conditions like diabetes and heart disease
The value and limitations of genetic information in prevention, treatment, and cure
The complex, subtle interrelationships between genes and cancer
What science knows--and doesn’t know--about genetics and human behavior
The fraught, controversial history of attempts to link genes with intelligence
Gene therapy: what’s worked and what hasn’t
The potential and profound implications of personalized medicine

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Saving for Retirement without Living Like a Pauper or Winning the Lottery by Gail MarksJarvis

Product Description
Award-winning personal finance columnist read by millions of people each week

The Incredibly Simple, Step-by-Step Guide to Investing Money for Your Future!

Drawn from responses to questions from over 20,000 readers of the author’s personal finance columns.

Over the years, Chicago Tribune financial columnist Gail MarksJarvis has taken the time to listen and respond to thousands of her readers about the issues, questions, and concerns that are most important to them. Saving and investing for retirement has never been more important...and with this book, it’s never been clearer what you need to do and how to do it.

Don’t wait another day! Discover…

How much you’ll need and how to get there…even if you’ve fallen behind
Exactly how to set up IRAs, 401(k)s, or 403(b)s in minutes and pocket your tax money
How to harness the money-making power of the stock market
How to pick the right mutual funds confidently with simple strategies and specific recommendations
Incredibly easy, safe investing strategies based on professional money-management techniques
"Gimmick-free" investing shortcuts that won’t backfire on you
How to keep debt from making you poor
How to get reliable help if you need it…and avoid incompetents or scam artists
How the new 2006 pension laws affect you

MarksJarvis eliminates the insider jargon, confusion, and math…takes the mystery out of the stock market…simplifies investing techniques…answers all your questions…clears away every obstacle in your way so you make money without taking foolish risks. She’s already done it for millions, in the nation’s top newspapers and most popular financial radio and TV shows. Now, she’ll do it for you, too!

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Soulless (The Parasol Protectorate) by Gail Carriger from Orbit ($1.99) is the Kindle Deal of the Day (Sept 13) *Wait for price to reflect discount before 1-clicking

* Note that you can get the entire bundle for $9.99 - The Parasol Protectorate: Soulless, Blameless, and Changeless

Product Description
Alexia Tarabotti is laboring under a great many social tribulations. First, she has no soul. Second, she's a spinster whose father is both Italian and dead. Third, she was rudely attacked by a vampire, breaking all standards of social etiquette.

Where to go from there? From bad to worse apparently, for Alexia accidentally kills the vampire -- and then the appalling Lord Maccon (loud, messy, gorgeous, and werewolf) is sent by Queen Victoria to investigate.

With unexpected vampires appearing and expected vampires disappearing, everyone seems to believe Alexia responsible. Can she figure out what is actually happening to London's high society? Will her soulless ability to negate supernatural powers prove useful or just plain embarrassing? Finally, who is the real enemy, and do they have treacle tart?

SOULLESS is a comedy of manners set in Victorian London: full of werewolves, vampires, dirigibles, and tea-drinking.

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Free from indies:

From Within by John M. Dow

Product Description
Something hideous is stalking the streets of Wakely.

"They stopped, looking around, trying to pinpoint the source of their discomfort. The tension in the air suddenly snapped, released, and with a series of staccato bangs, every door down the length of the street swung open.

From out of the houses and shops they came, shuffling, staggering, and swaying. Fly-by-wire humans, jerking along the street like meat marionettes, with mouths agape and eyes empty. In their suits and their dresses, overalls, smocks and pyjamas, the locals of Wakely marched to their own rhythm of decay to greet the visitors to their town."

Three strangers find themselves drawn to Wakely, a small village in the Scottish Borders, where a centuries-old conflict between two warring Celtic deities is drawing to its gruesome conclusion.

A small boy holds the key to their survival, but first they have to find him. And they're not the only ones looking.

The Emerald Talisman (Talisman Series, Book 1) by Brenda Pandos (Obsidian Mountain Publishing)

Product Description
To be normal, sixteen-year-old Julia Parker would shed her empathic gift in a second. Life has been difficult since her mother's mysterious disappearance ten years earlier - an event she witnessed, but can't remember. Julia's situation becomes more complicated after a near death experience from a blood thirsty stalker. As high school students go missing it is clear there is a connection to her own experience--past and present. Someone has to stop the madness and a chance encounter with a creepy psychic foretells that only Julia is the key to stopping the madness, but it may require the life of the one she loves.

Readers who enjoyed Twilight, Vampire Diaries, Blue Bloods and The Morganville Vampires will enjoy The Emerald Talisman.

Marysvale by Jared Southwick

Product Description
John Casey was ten years old when his mother was murdered…and ten when his father hid the truth from him. Without that knowledge, he has no idea of the enemies that lie in wait.

Now grown up, John lives a solitary life, in a world enslaved by ignorance and superstition, when anyone unusual is treated with distrust and even killed…and John has some very unusual gifts. When he is accused of witchcraft, John does the only thing he’s ever done—Run! That is, until he meets Jane, who lives in the bleak, imprisoned town of Marysvale. Life outside the safety of the town walls means certain death from the brutal monsters that hunt there. However, life inside, under the rule of a tyrannical leader, means no life at all.

As the love between John and Jane grows, the dangers of Marysvale unfold; and for the first time in his life, John discovers that there is something worth dying for.

The Penal Colony by Richard Herley

Product Description
The future.

The British government now runs island prison colonies to take dangerous offenders from its overcrowded mainland jails.

Among all these colonies, Sert, 25 miles off the north Cornish coast, has the worst reputation. There are no warders. Satellite technology is used to keep the convicts under watch. New arrivals are dumped by helicopter and must learn to survive as best they can. To Sert, one afternoon in July, is brought Anthony John Routledge, sentenced for a sex-murder he did not commit. Routledge knows he is here for ever. And he knows he must quickly forget the rules of civilized life. But not all the islanders are savages. Under the charismatic leadership of one man a community has evolved. A community with harsh and unyielding rules, peopled by resourceful men for whom the hopeless dream of escape may not be so hopeless after all ...

Kindred Spirits by Ashanti Luke

Product Description
Past due bills, last minute term papers, annoying ex-boyfriends. Michelle Long’s life is the life of a typical engineering student--or so she thinks until the night of September 17, 1991.

Jason Dyer, a vigilant revolutionary from the not-so-distant future, travels back to 1991 to save a seemingly innocuous college student’s life. He gives up the life of an ordinary college graduate for what he believes--to save the world from destruction in his time, Maximilian Powers, an amicable patriarch of a local church, has to die in 1991, and Michelle has to kill him.

Core Values by Louis Bertrand Shalako

Product Description
Charles Henry Brubaker is the other guy that everything bad happens to through no fault of his own.‘Hang on to your Core Values.’ When the whole world is corrupt, what else can you do? When things are going well, that is not the measure of a man. When everything and everyone is against you—it’s what you do then. That is the measure of a man. A dark comedy.

A Selection of Meats and Cheeses by Danny Gillan

Product Description
Twelve short stories from Danny Gillan. Some sad, some funny; some serious, some silly; some poignant, some pointless.

Meet homicidal Estate Agents, happy mendicants, inept stalkers and rubbish action heroes. From crime to comedy and thriller to thought piece, the thread combining these bites of life is that everyone makes decisions, and good people often make bad ones. It's how you deal with the consequences that matters.

HEARTBREAK HIGHWAY by Emma Daniels

Product Description
Everyone warned Emma Taylor about Dean Price, the bad boy of the south coat. Even his own family don't trust him, but Emma can't help falling in love with her best friend's handsome and way too charming older brother, so when Dean breaks her heart, she knows she only has herself to blame. Only days later her grandmother, and only living relative, dies after a long illness, and Emma decides there is nothing to bind her to her home town anymore, so she moves away and makes a new life for herself in the city.

Eight years later Emma has a new man in her life, a single parent like herself. Not until she accepts a temporary job on Lord Howe Island where her 7 year old son Adam can escape the big city bullies, does her past, and Dean catch up with her.

Tormented with guilt over the way he treated Emma, Dean has spent the past eight years searching for her to try and make things right, but Emma won't forgive him, not until she finds out what really happened to Dean after that dreadful night.

Dragon's Pupils - The Sword Guest by Martin Chu Shui

Product Description
When East and West combine…

Half-Chinese, half-Australian, Liz is not interested in her father’s ancient Tao wisdom, or his cryptic tales. She is more concerned with environmental issues—particularly the plan to mine one of Australia’s great landmarks, Wave Rock. Her father’s latest gift, a Chinese calligraphy pen, seems set to take its place in her bottom drawer forever.
Then Wave Rock is blasted open by something more than a mining operation, and Liz finds that she must battle monsters from ancient times as well as creatures from other worlds, all intent on destroying Earth. She must call on all her powers, from both her Eastern heritage and her Western upbringing, to save her world. Her pen becomes her way into a new and magical world, and Liz discovers she has powers—and allies—that she never could have guessed.
An exciting, fast-paced tale that combines the wisdom of ancient tradition with the pace of a Kung Fu movie and brings them to life in contemporary Australia, this exciting tale takes the best of two cultures and blends them to open up a new world of adventure and mystery.

The Four Towers of Alacantar : Episode 1 (Third Age of Timare) by Stephen I. Carmer and Gregory L. Otvos

Product Description
Episode 1: The adventure begins here.
Enter a land of wizards, dragons, castles, elves, dwarfs, ghosts, and more.
Prince Deki Orr has been exiled from his homeland as a child. Now he shall return and discover a world that he could never have imagined. And a dragon that will devour him if they ever have the misfortune of meeting. Many pen and ink illustrations.

Breathless: Book One of the Jason and Azazel Trilogy by V. J. Chambers

Product Description
Azazel is seventeen and sexually frustrated. Her biggest issue is trying to figure out why her seemingly normal boyfriend won't sleep with her.

Then Jason races into her life. He won't say where he came from or who's chasing him. He's a delicious puzzle, a boy who has no problem using his fists to solve arguments or quoting Plato to justify his actions. Azazel is drawn to him. She's obsessed with finding out his secrets.

What she doesn't know is that Jason's secrets are entwined with her own town's secrets. Her friends and family have conspired to use her as a pawn in a violent scheme. Soon, she will have to choose between protecting Jason and staying loyal to everyone she's ever trusted.

A story about forbidden love, fate, and free will, Breathless is Rosemary's Baby meets The Da Vinci Code meets Romeo and Juliet.

This title is also available from Amazon, along with the other two books in the trilogy, in The Jason and Azazel Trilogy Omnibus.

Short Stories:

Wicked Science: 5 Short Works by Joshua Scribner

Scream Angel by Douglas Smith

infinities by John Grant, Eric Brown, Anna Tambour and Garry Kilworth

Morning Mist of Blood (Buck McDivit Mysteries) by Eric Wilder

Meant to Be ((The Saving Angels book 1)) by Tiffany King

The Premium: A Short Story by Joshua Scribner

Decision LZ1527 by Joe Vasicek

Goddamn Redneck Surfer Zombies (Fiction Friday) by Michael Jasper

Sinkhole: A Short Story by John Brinling

The Death Clock - a short story by J. Rock

Force and Restraint in Strategic Deterrence: A Game-Theorist's Perspective by Dr. Roger B. Myerson