A light but nice haul from this morning's KDP Select exclusive-or-else-but-5-days-free-out-of-90-as-long-as-you-don't-mind-being-locked-in slushpile trawl.
We have a rather nifty-looking backlist Attanasio fantasy, and there's a bunch of re-published and self-pub by previously-pubbed authors thrillers and romances for the thriller and romance-reading folks. And a couple of plays by an award-winning playwright (disclaimer: may not actually be the plays that won the awards).
Killing with the Edge of the Moon by A.A. Attanasio appears to be a Celtic-mythology based dark urban fantasy (in the old-school magic-in-the-big-city sense, not the modern paranormal investigative one), originally published by Prime in 2006.
As mentioned before, if you like his writing, some of his award-winning science fiction novels can be had for 37% off, DRM-free in your choice of ePub or Mobi, during re-publisher Phoenix Pick's
January coupon sale.
And if you missed it when it was KDP-freebied earlier, his 7-story short fiction collection
Demons Hide Their Faces: Seven Strange Tales is just 99 cents.
Free without DRM, probably just for the rest of the day, over @ Amazon
main UK DE ES FR IT.
Description
"Blud-eye-eth" is a fabled woman of Celtic myth." The witch's eyes shone in the dark like tiny silver mirrors. "The name means 'Flower Face," which is the owl's poetic nickname, the bird who steals souls - for Blud-eye-eth was a woman made from magic and flowers and, like the owl, she had no soul of her own."
The speaker is a hickory-faced crone trying to explain to Chet, a shy kid with eyeglasses and pocket protector, why he can't take her granddaughter to the high school dance. For quiet, elfin Flannery is not like other kids. A living Blud-eye-eth, she has caught the attention of the faerie, beautiful evil creatures from a mysterious Otherworld, who seduce their victims with moonlight raves before feeding them to a dragon and hunting souls with a supernatural black dog of prodigious evil.
And they have taken Flannery for one of their own.
And she won't be going to the school dance - not unless Chet rescues her.
This modern, demonic fairy tale weaves together themes of passion and self-discovery into an intricate Celtic knot of myth, moon magic, and teen romance. Thrust together in a dark, erotic Otherworld, Flannery and Chet discover they know each other better than they known their own hearts ... but can they sort things out before the black dog finds them?
And what was that about a dragon?
It turns out that Poisoned Pen Press-published horse-racing mystery novel by Kit Ehrman is available free to all via Smashwords:
At Risk. He's priced the others at $2.99 each and will hopefully be one the authors who offers discount coupons for Read an E-book Week.
I again direct you to PPP's own
10 early-in-series mysteries for just 99 cents each, DRM-free in an ePub/Mobi bundle bought directly from them introductory sale, which has some good stuff in it. My recommendations for the ones I've looked upon and saw it was good can be found in the thread or in What Are You Reading from the reading recs forum (linked from the 2012 Reading Challenge Lists).
Del Rey-published fantasy author Harry Connolly offers a short story:
The Bone Orchid
The daily Eric James Stone free short story is: :
Attitude Adjustment, originally published in Analog magazine.
Amanda S. Green, who's had a short story published in one of those DAW sf/fantasy anthologies and is an editor for Naked Reader Press which re-pubs stories by Baen authors Sarah A. Hoyt and Dave Freer offers a paranormal posthumous urban fantasy of a murder investigation, 1st in the Nocturnal Lives series:
Nocturnal Origins
Donna Burgess (
ISFDB entry), who has had a story or two published in Weird Tales offers a period-set literature-based adventure thriller:
Wandering Star: A Tale of Piracy and Poe
Previously featured Edgar and Bram Stoker award-nominated Billie Sue Mosiman offers 3 freebies; a Stoker-nominated cop vs serial killer thriller with an interesting twist:
Widow, the self-explanatory:
ANGELIQUE-A Supernatural Horror Story of Angels, and a Hollywood agent vs stalker suspense thriller :
Unidentified
Previously-featured Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine Reader's Choice Award-winning Dave Zeltserman offers a crossover urban fantasy/crime thriller:
Blood Crimes: Book One and an amateur sleuth gets in over his head by stumbling across a possible conspiracy murder mystery/thriller:
Dying Memories
Previously featured Robert W. Walker offers another yet another sleuths vs serial killer thriller, 4th in the Edge series:
Final Edge
Small-press published Florida writer Vicki Hendricks, who has Publisher's Weekly reviews on some of her titles and apparently an Edgar award nomination offers three noir-ish mystery/crime-looking thrillers which may have comedic elements, from what I skimmed of the descriptions:
Miami Purity,
Cruel Poetry,
Iguana Love
Colin Falconer offers his 1994 Hodder Stoughton Canada paperback-published 1960s Laos-set international drug trade thriller, 1st in the Opium series, and the blurb calls it "James Clavell meets The Godfather":
Opium
Indian writer Ashwin Sanghi who writes under the Shawn Haigin acronym of his name says that he has had his self-pub novels picked up for local publication. His religious conspiracy thriller (looks like a Hindu version of The Da Vinci Code) has praise from Indian newspapers in the blurb:
The Rozabal Line
Fellow MR member author and TV show tie-in writer Lee Goldberg offers a Five Star-published apocalyptic thriller:
The Walk
Small-press published fellow MR member author Libby Fischer Hellman offers a collection of short stories yanked from Smashwords:
Nice Girl Does Noir: Vol. 1
Popular Harlequin-published Debra Webb offers what looks like an action/adventure thriller that may also be a romantic suspense, 1st in the Jackie Mercer series:
Dirty
Berkley-published British writer Saskia Walker offers a contemporary romantic bodyguard/charge suspense which she warns has graphic language and sex scenes:
Minding Amy
Previously featured EC Sheedy, who had a story picked up for reprinting in one of those Mammoth anthologies, offers a contemporary romance written as Carol Dean:
California Man
Previously featured Phaze Books-published Jenna Byrnes offers a 2-story set of steamy erotic romances:
Reckless
Award-winning South African expat playwright and comedian Ian Fraser offers two plays and two "darkly comedic" novellas:
Blitzbreeker & the Chicken From Hell (A Play),
Dogs of the Blue Gods (A Play),
The Nog Sisters (A Novella),
Flies for the Mayans (a novella) His 1993 Penguin-published memoir of life under apartheid is still free:
My Own Private Orchestra: (Adults Only)
If you like science self-pubs, Alan Hall PhD [sic] is back. Thrill to the adventures of:
Quark-Gluon Plasma, which appears to be demonstrating some sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle* thing, since the actual cover says "Quark-Gluon Soup". If you missed it earlier,
Electron is still free.
I have no idea who Daniel Mega is, but I can certainly say he has a vivid imagination and some surprisingly nice covers for a self-pub author. Maybe the covers will be the best part of his books, but if you want to try something with dragon-riding train-robbing gunslingers or mutated due to bio-engineered oil spill land sharks having fierce battles with wolves and manatees, then here are
all 5 of his works, all currently free.
Well that's everyone whose names/publishers I recognized or felt like checking right now. I'm only awake to do this because of the insomnia, I'll have you know.
Happy reading, if you see something you think you might like.
* In a nutshell: I have no idea what's going on with that.