Some mystery/thriller bargains you might want to consider picking up while
Kobo Canada's promotion for 5000 points for combined purchases of at least $25 CAD total is still available for the rest of the day. Prices available in Canada & the US, and likely matched at other stores as well.
@ $1.99 each from Soho Press (couponable/eligible for extra 10% VIP discount in Canada, but not the US):
- Ghost Month by Asian Literary Award winner Ed Lin (SYKM, Wikipedia), 1st in his Taipei Night Market series starring a food stall owner in Taiwan.
- Jade Lady Burning by Martin Límon (SYKM), 1st in his Sueño & Bascomb series starring US military police officers in South Korea during the 1970s.
- Outsider in Amsterdam by the late Dutch author Janwillem van de Wetering (SYKM, Wikipedia), 1st in his Grijpstra & de Gier series starring police officers in Amsterdam, a very long-running series that was quite popular in the Netherlands, enough to have a few screen adaptations. This installment takes place during the 1970s, when it was originally published. I bought and read this a while ago, and it was okay and interesting in a retro sort of way.
- Eye for an Eye by T. Frank Muir (SYKM), 1st in his Andy Gilchrist series starring a DI in Scotland.
- Those We Left Behind by Northern Irish author Stuart Neville (SYKM, Wikipedia), 1st in his Serena Flanagan series starring a DCI in Belfast (Kobo gives a series order of 5th in the Belfast Novels, which seems to continue the numbering from an earlier 4-novel series starring a different DI in the same city, which garnered multiple award noms).
@ $1.99 each (non-couponable):
- The Hanging Girl by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen (SYKM, Wikipedia), 6th in his highly popular Department Q series starring cold case detective Carl Mørck and his eccentric assistants in Copenhagen, out from Penguin. I really liked this series when I read the lot of them thus far a while ago. The series is such that while there's a slow-burning secondary case which develops throughout the novels, it still hasn't been resolved as of this installment, which IMHO you can safely read standalone if you don't mind missing out on a bit of personal development.
- Busting Vegas: A True Story of Monumental Excess, Sex, Love, Violence, and Beating the Odds by Ben Mezrich (SYKM), one of those thinly-veiled true heist stories centred around casino gaming. You may have gotten this previously via the HarperCollins Humble Bundle long ago, as I did. It's an okay read, IMHO.
- A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear (SYKM), 8th in her popular and highly acclaimed Maisie Dobbs series, starring a psychologist during the interwar years of the 1920s-30s in the UK, out from HarperCollins. SYKM says that this one alone picked up three award nominations.
- Sandstorm by bestselling thriller author James Rollins (SYKM), 1st in his Sigma Force series of action thrillers, out from HarperCollins.
@ $2.99 each from HarperCollins (non-couponable):
- Death on the River Walk by Carolyn Hart (SYKM), 5th in her Henrie O series starring a septuagenarian reporter in South Carolina. This was a finalist for Agatha Award for Best Novel, according to SYKM.
- Dead Men's Dust by Matt Hilton (SYKM), 1st in his Joe Hunter series of espionage/action thrillers starring a British ex-counterterrorism operative turned vigilante for hire in the US, according to SYKM. This one was a finalist for the Thriller Award for Best First Novel.
@ $3.99 from Penguin (non-couponable):
- Never End by Swedish author Åke Edwardson (SYKM, Wikipedia), 4th in his DI Erik Winter series starring an unusually happy and well-adjusted Nordic Noir protagonist in Gothenburg. This is a little on the pricey side (but it has its own Wikipedia entry!), but the other novels are much more expensive (though a few more of them can currently be gotten for prices from $5.99-$7.99 CAD as compared to the $10+ CAD they normally cost) and I rarely see these drop on sale.
Several more mystery/thriller authors can also be gotten via Canadian publisher
House of Anansi's month-long sale featuring Canadian and imported authors at up to 80% off their usually somewhat expensive regular prices. Most titles are $3-$4, and there's stuff from award-nominated Canadian mystery authors Ian Hamilton (
SYKM) & Alen Mattich (
SYKM), British authors Elena Forbes (
SYKM), Danish author Jakob Melander (
SYKM), Swedish author Stefan Ahnhem (
SYKM), and more.
Also, for francophone mystery/thriller readers:
@ $1.99:
Le premier appelé by Christian Ego, a WWII aftermath murder mystery case with espionage elements tying a case from 2003 to some events in 1941. This won the Prix du Polar Historique 2012, according to the cover banner.
@ $4.99 each (normally priced in the $9-$15 CAD range, you can also redeem these for 2800 points, which is rare for Francophone books):
- Terreur domestique & L'affaire Mélodie Cormier by French Canadian author Guillaume Morrissette (Wikipedia), two police procedural thrillers starring inspector Jean-Sébastien Héroux in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. Terreur domestique appears to have won the Prix du Premier Polar 2015, according to the squinty text on the cover banner.
- Dix petits hommes blancs (which looks to be a play on the original title of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None) and Machine God by French-Canadian author Jean-Jacques Pelletier (Wikipedia), who often puts sfnal elements into his thriller novels. These are unrelated standalones, as far as I can tell.
Also, a large portion of the works of multiple award-winning French-Canadian author Martin Michaud (
Wikipedia FR) are on sale for $4.99 (couponable) as part of publisher
Goelette's up to 70% off sale on québécois thrillers ongoing until November 4th, including several of his Arthur Ellis Award-nominated mysteries set in Quebec.