Well, the insomnia woke me up earlier than usual, so I had a bit more time to slog through the slushpile. We have some really nice things for mystery readers today, and a few interesting historical fiction items as well.
Feature still free, some of the good stuff from previous days as well. Thanks to posters who contributed their own finds.
Previously-included Camel Press returns to offer an apparently minor debut fiction award-winning novel by John Patrick Lowrie for which no description I can give could possibly do justice, so I'll just quote the first two sentences of the blurb: "What would happen if Odysseus met Captain Ahab in the Fortieth Century? Only Captain Ahab is a beautiful woman named Steel who owns her own starship and Odysseus is an unemployed actor named Mohandas who’s stuck on the backside of a backwater moon because he won't pay his taxes." :
Dancing with Eternity
Christine Kling returns with the 2005 Ballantine-published 3rd in her Seychelle Sullivan, Sleuthy Sea Captain, mystery/suspense series:
Bitter End
Penny Warner, who writes a lot of books for learning Sign Language and such and is apparently also a genre fiction award-nominee offers her 1997 Bantam-published 1st-in-series featuring a hearing-impaired sleuth, which apparently won the award:
DEAD BODY LANGUAGE (A Connor Westphal Mystery)
Parnell Hall offers a 1997 Mysterious Press 12th in PI series mystery for which he quotes favourable comments from the New York Times Book Review and Kirkus:
Scam (Stanley Hastings Mystery, #12)
Christian fiction writer Robert Elmer returns with 2001 Bethany House-published installment in his Palestine/Israel-set YA thriller series:
Refugee Treasure (Promise of Zion)
Jessica James, who at one point wrote investment books for John Wiley & Sons, offers her 2008 Patriot Press historical drama which she says has won a few specified genre/indie newbie awards:
Shades of Gray: A Novel of the Civil War in Virginia
Lucinda Brant, who at one time apparently had a book out from New Concepts Publishing, offers an historical mystery with strong romantic elements and a very unfortunate-sounding portmanteau name for the crossover subgenre. A lesson for all the shippers out there: just because you can namesmush doesn't mean you should:
Deadly Affair: A Georgian Historical Mystery (Alec Halsey Crimance) The 1st in this series was offered as a Read an Ebook Week coupon freebie a couple of years ago, so you may possibly have it in your account. It's still available
via Smashwords, at about a dollar cheaper than she normally sells her books for (pricedrops across the board, it looks like) and amazingly hasn't been yanked for KDP Select exclusive-or-else. Yet.
Overmountain small-pressed suspense writer Ellis Vidler returns with a mini-collection of three southern literary fiction shorts, for which she says one of them won "the South Carolina Writers Conference Literary Award for Short Fiction":
Tea in the Afternoon
Harlequin-published Kate Hewitt returns with another maybe women's fiction/maybe contemporary romance:
Out in the Country
Happy reading, if you manage to spot something you think you might like, especially if it involves finding out what would happen if Captain Ahab and Odysseus met in the 40th century (together, they fight crime!).