Free from the author via KDP Select @
Amazon:
Access to Power by Robert Ellis, a Washington D.C. political intrigue suspense thriller starring some kind of PR/media consultant guy vs. a mysterious killer, originally out from Kensington's Pinnacle imprint in 2001.
Three weeks before a crucial senatorial election, a man is gunned down execution-style in a D.C. office. Police are quick to call it a case of robbery gone bad, but Frank Miles suspects something far more sinister behind the murder of his business partner.
Washington's most feared image maker, Frank's ruthless media manipulation has earned him countless admirers...and just as many enemies. Now, for the first time in his life, Frank's met his match in a shadowy schemer as clever as himself--but far more lethal.
As the body count rises, Frank becomes the U.S. Attorney's chief suspect--and a cunning killer's next target. From the underground tunnels networking Capitol Hill to the dome high above, his race for the truth--and his life--will bring him face-to-face with power at its deadliest extremes--where winning isn't everything...it's the only thing.
With his debut novel, L.A. Times bestselling author Robert Ellis raises the stakes in a heart pounding thriller set in Washington that feels so inside and so twisted it reeks of the darkest truth.
Free again from the author via KDP Select @
Amazon:
Jazz Funeral by Edgar Award-winning author Julie Smith (SYKM, Wikipedia), 3rd in her quirkily humorous Skip Langdon series starring the eponymous New Orleans homicide detective (the one which won the Edgar, incidentally), originally out from Ballantine in 1993.
EVERYBODY LOVED EASYGOING HAM BROCATO, PRODUCER OF THE FAMED NEW ORLEANS JAZZFEST. SO HOW DID HE END UP STABBED TO DEATH ON HIS KITCHEN FLOOR?
New Orleans Homicide Detective Skip Langdon just happens to be on hand when Ham’s body is discovered in the middle of his own party the evening before the Fest. To complicate the already murky case, the victim's sixteen-year-old blues musician sister has disappeared, and Skip suspects that if the young woman isn't the murderer, she's in mortal danger from the person who is. So Task One is finding Melody, ambitious, unhappy at home, and determined to break from her family.
As she probes the victim's tangled relationships, Skip finds a Southern family to rival any in Tennessee Williams, including Ham's live-in lover, feisty and swiftly rising star Ti-Belle Thiebaud; his father George, enmeshed with family members in a bitter disagreement over the family's lucrative Po' Boy chain; and Patty, his distraught stepmother.
In this tale of southern kinships gone awry, she's assisted by her long-distance love, Steve Steinman, and her gay landlord, Jimmy Dee. Meanwhile, Melody's dangerous yet exhilarating journey tugs at the heart and raises the pulse rate.
Free from the author via KDP Select @
Amazon (linkage for the lot):
The Trade &
Lacking Virtues by Thomas Kirkwood, who has been published by Dutton and Macmillan. These are newly-written geopolitical Cold War-influenced espionage/crime action suspense thrillers, but if you've enjoyed his previous trad-published thrillers which were previously freebied, you might perhaps like to give these a try.
The Svalbard Passage co-written with Geir Finne, their US & Norway-set Cold War international incident geopolitical intrigue/suspense thriller with romantic elements, originally out from Macmillan in 1981, is free again as well if you missed it earlier.
The mysterious deaths of an international expedition of ice climbers on the remote face of the Spitsbergen glacier triggers what may be the first pre-emptive U.S. nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The chain of events that follow moves swiftly and brilliantly from cosmopolitan, placid Oslo to the war-game rooms of the Pentagon and reaches a terrifying climax on the icy wastes of Spitsbergen, above the northern coast of Norway-and the Svalbard Passage.
Caught in a terrifying net of brinksmanship are a worldly, elegant Norwegian diplomat; a fiery and beautiful German journalist; an uncommitted American pacifist; a ruthless CIA agent; and an equally ruthless Russian, a pawn of the KGB. Unknowingly, acting out of their private compulsions, they bring the world to the edge of global disaster. Through the weave of this richly atmospheric novel of suspense runs the stormy, sensual love story of Martin and Ulrike, lovers who come to maturity in the face of annihilation.