Well, normally I don't post here anymore* since I've embraced the fact that I'm a hoarder and an enabler and have no intention of changing.
But after some consideration, I did resist picking up a deep-discount francophone ebook from Hachette's Black Moon Thriller imprint which I was vaguely tempted by, because it's just so rare that anything from the (non-self-pub) French-language publishers (non-couponable) ever goes on sale. Like, once in a blue moon rare.
I was thinking of getting Pierre-Yves Tinguely's
Codex Lethalis kind of
pour encourager les autres sales and because despite my initial non-interest in the apparent storyline, there was actually a pretty nice in-depth 3-star review on the Amazon France website saying that while this was a very formulaic sort of thriller, it did the formula quite well and I'm kind of morbidly curious about what US-style hard-boiled police procedural cops vs serial killer thrillers set in Los Angeles written by Franco-Swiss authors who live in Europe end up being like‡.
But after buying a few other of the sale thrillers at a lower price point, I decided I could satisfy my morbid curiosity about French-flavoured US-set typical genre-style writing with just Frédéric Mars'
Non-Stop Manhattan agents vs maybe-terrorism and murder thriller at the 99 cent mark, and police procedurals (especially the ones involving the gory violent kinds of serial killers with horror-ish overtones) are really not one of my preferred subsubgenres anyway, unless there's something unusual about the setting or characters or storyline which grabs my attention.
So I'm pretty meh on spending $2.99 to read someone's debut novel which involves "boiled eyeballs", even if it regularly costs $7.99 under another publisher and would probably be $11.99+ off sale like the other regularly-priced Hachette books from the same imprint. At the 99 cent mark, maybe if it drops in the future, but right here and now? No, I don't think so.
That said, I did scoop most of the other discounted Black Moon Thriller sale books since they had interesting-sounding storylines or settings (or were from authors I already liked) and will be putting that $2.99 saved towards the slightly higher price-pointed sale ones I'd been hoping would drop a bit more and which I've have decided is unlikely to happen since Hachette seems to be experimenting with different price points for the same authors anyway and I might as well buy them before they raise the prices again.
And I reserve the right to change my mind, should I come across more glowing reviews stating convincingly that PYT's debut thriller is a wonderful and engagingly-done work which serves as a fine introduction to a promising new author, not to be missed.
* Also, I flat-out didn't pretty much didn't buy any new ebooks† at all for roughly an 11 month period anyway. So I think I've kind of used up my "resisting the urge to purchase stuff" quota for the next few years. Admittedly, I did it out of sheer apathy, but I still did it.
† Deep discount backlist re-releases of stuff I've previously read and own in paper don't count. Nor do Baen bundles which happen to contain them.
‡ I freely admit I'm picturing some kind of amusing cargo-cult-like construction which is slightly but obviously off, perhaps in an Uncanny Valley fashion.