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Versailles: A Novel by Kathryn Davis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is $2.99 (Amazon US, iTunes iBooks)

Book Description:

Versailles is the story of an expansive spirit locked in a pretty body and an impossible moment in history.

As the novel begins, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette is traveling from Austria to France to meet her fiancé, the mild, abstracted Louis. He will become the sixteenth Louis to reign in France, and Antoinette will be his queen, hemmed in by towering hairdos, the xenophobic suspicion of her subjects, the misogyny of her detractors, the larger-than-life figures of Mirabeau, Du Barry, Robespierre, and the manifold twists and turns of the palace she calls home.

The novel moves from room to room, from garden to fountain, occasionally breaking into playlets in which we glimpse characters struggling to mind their step in the great ballroom of the world. Driving our tour is the relentless engine of time, that friend to youth, for whom anything is possible. Antoinette gives birth to four children, two of whom will outlive her; she falls in love; she dies at the guillotine.

A meditation on time and the soul’s true journey within it, Versailles is at once wittily entertaining and astonishingly wise.

No Man’s Land (Frank Corso) by G.M. Ford (HarperCollins) is $3.79 (Amazon US, iTunes iBooks)

Book Description:

The accolades keep rolling in for G.M. Ford, whose gritty, explosive, lightning-fast brand of thriller has placed him in the upper ranks of contemporary crime fiction authors. Now, in his most relentlessly exciting novel to date, Ford’s dark and complex protagonist, Frank Corso, finds himself drawn into a bizarre carnival of blood and death in the last place any sane person would willingly go …

No Man’s Land

Arizona’s Meza Azul penitentiary is the pride of the state’s newly privatized penal system — a modern technological wonder, unassailable and inescapable, built to hold the worst of the worst. Yet, inconceivably, one prisoner has managed to breach the foolproof security, set loose the other inmates, and take control of the facility — holding more than one hundred guards and workers hostage. And one hostage will die every six hours until Timothy Driver gets what he wants: Frank Corso.

A rogue journalist and confirmed lone wolf, Corso wrote a bestselling book about the former U.S. Navy submarine commander who was convicted of slaughtering his wife and her lover in a jealous fury. Now, unwilling to be responsible for the death of innocents, Corso allows himself to be delivered into the bowels of Meza Azul — and into the hands of a crazed hero turned criminal.

But Captain Driver wants more than the ear of a once-sympathetic writer who will tell his final story tough and truthfully. Accompanied by a cold-blooded hayseed murder machine named “Cutter” Kehoe, and with Corso in tow, Driver pulls off a brilliant and undetected escape, right under the noses of armed government troops as they storm the captured prison. Suddenly a helpless spectator along for the ride on a maniacal cross-country killing spree — with a tragic and beautiful TV journalist doggedly pursuing the story, heading inexorably into harm’s way — Corso finds himself in no man’s land.

If he’s lucky, Frank Corso may get one slim chance to escape the clutches of a psychopathic duo determined to go out in a blaze of blood and terror. But if he’s not, his own story — and too many others — will end abruptly and brutally.

The New Space Opera 2 Ed by Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan (HarperCollins) is $3.79 (Amazon US, iTunes iBooks)

Book Description:

“An exceedingly fine set of stories written specifically for this collection by some of the best sf authors writing today.’ — Library Journal (starred review)

Following the success of their Locus Award-winning anthology The New Space Opera, editors Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan now up the ante with The New Space Opera 2, new stories from some of the biggest names in science fiction’s biggest genre.

With contributions from Cory Doctorow, Elizabeth Moon, Garth Nix, John Scalzi, Bruce Sterling, Tad Williams, and a host of other science fiction luminaries, The New Space Opera 2 is yet another “reminder of why science fiction captured the hearts and minds of generations of generations of readers” (Orson Scott Card).