FREE/BARGAIN — Mystery, Suspense & Thrillers

[sufue]

I Am Half-Sick of Shadows is the fourth in the Flavia de Luce series by Alan Bradley. I have quite enjoyed several of the titles in this series. Shadows has dropped to $1.99 at Kindle and Kobo US.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/Am-Half-Sick-...dp/B004X6PSCW/
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/i-a...k-of-shadows-1

Spoiler:

It’s Christmastime, and Flavia de Luce—an eleven-year-old sleuth with a passion for chemistry—is tucked away in her laboratory, whipping up a concoction to ensnare Saint Nick. But she is soon distracted when a film crew arrives at Buckshaw, the de Luces’ decaying English estate, to shoot a movie starring the famed Phyllis Wyvern. Amid a raging blizzard, the entire village of Bishop’s Lacey gathers at Buckshaw to watch Wyvern perform, yet nobody is prepared for the evening’s shocking conclusion: a body found strangled to death with a length of film. But who among the assembled guests would stage such a chilling scene? As the storm worsens and the list of suspects grows, Flavia must ferret out a killer hidden in plain sight.

BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Alan Bradley's Speaking from Among the Bones.

[sufue]

Death in Brittany, apa Death in Pont-Aven, is the first in the Commissaire Dupin series by Jean-Luc Bannalec. It has dropped to $2.99 at Kindle and Kobo US. I've read this one, and enjoyed it, although I enjoy Martin Walker's France-based series a bit more, but the other two in the series have so far remained too expensive ($9.99 +) for me.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Brittan...dp/B00QQ9ST1Q/
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/death-in-brittany

Spoiler:

"Roll over, Maigret. Commissaire Dupin has arrived."—M.C. Beaton

Commissaire Georges Dupin, a cantankerous, Parisian-born caffeine junkie recently relocated from the glamour of Paris to the remote (if picturesque) Breton coast, is dragged from his morning croissant and coffee to the scene of a curious murder. The local village of Pont-Aven—a sleepy community by the sea where everyone knows one other and nothing much seems to happen—is in shock. The legendary ninety-one-year-old hotelier Pierre-Louis Pennec, owner of the Central Hotel, has been found dead.

A picture-perfect seaside village that played host to Gaugin in the nineteenth century, Pont-Aven is at the height of its tourist season and is immediately thrown into uproar. As Dupin delves into the lives of the victim and the suspects, he uncovers a web of secrecy and silence that belies the village's quaint image.

A delectable read, Jean-Luc Bannalec's Death in Brittany transports readers to the French coast, where you can practically smell the sea air and taste the perfectly cooked steak frites in an expertly crafted, page-turning mystery for fans of Martin Walker.

[sufue]

Christmas Mourning is the 16th in the much nominated/awarded Deborah Knott series by Margaret Maron. I quite like this series. It has dropped to $2.99 at Kindle and Kobo US.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/Christmas-Mou...dp/B003YFIVAE/
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/christmas-mourning

Spoiler:

A Knott-family holiday season mystery, as District Judge Deborah Knott and chief sheriff's deputy Major Dwight Bryant investigate three deaths in their Colleton County, North Carolina community.

Judge Deborah Knott is looking forward to a family celebration when a tragedy clouds the holiday season. A beautiful young cheerleader dies in a car crash and the community is devastated by her death. Sheriff's deputy Dwight Bryant soon learns that her death was not a simple accident, and more lives may be lost unless he and Deborah can discover why she died.

[ATDrake]

Regarding the Janet Evanovich Stephanie Plum sale, it turns out there's an omnibus edition which collects Visions of Sugar Plums, Plum Lovin', and Plum Lucky for just $8.99 CAD $7.99 USD: Between the Plums, which is technically cheaper than paying $2.99 per. ETA: and might go to less, since eReaderIQ says it's been as low as $1.99 before, though that was some years ago.

SYKM was very helpful with the reading order, etc., and it looks like the sale might be continuing longer since the pricing there doesn't seem to have expired yet. (I thought I saw a Kobo banner blurb early this morning claiming that list of Macmillan discounts was just for today, but either that disappeared or was just my insomniac imagination.)

Apparently the sale seems to correspond pretty closely to the contents of this omnibus edition: The Janet Evanovich Collection: The Stephanie Plum Novels (Books 4 to 16 plus four Between the Numbers novels), which is currently going for $57.99 CAD (apparently a sale price down from a regular $125). Only #15 is currently non-discounted in the sale, and if you bought all the individuals after the #4-6 omnibus, and got the non-sale BTP omnibus instead of #1-3 of the Between side-series if it's a better deal in your region, it'd only cost you $42 + $10 to fill the missing #15, which is a pretty good deal, saving you $6 off the omnibus cost.

Unfortunately, #1-3 are priced at an utterly insane $49.99 CAD for their omnibus edition, though in the US, it's a “mere” $26.99 and hopefully Macmillan will also run another discount sale on it or the individuals at some point for those wanting to start reading at the beginning and not having handy library copies to try.

[cromag]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Regarding the Janet Evanovich Stephanie Plum sale, it turns out there's an omnibus edition which collects Visions of Sugar Plums, Plum Lovin', and Plum Lucky for just $8.99 CAD: Between the Plums, which is technically cheaper than paying $2.99 per.
...

Thanks! That collection is a bit cheaper -- $7.99 USD -- in the States.

Between the Plums

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by cromag

Thanks! That collection is a bit cheaper -- $7.99 USD -- in the States.

That's not cheaper - it's more expensive. CAD 8.99 is about USD 7.02 at current exchange rates.

[cromag]

Originally Posted by HarryT

That's not cheaper - it's more expensive. CAD 8.99 is about USD 7.02 at current exchange rates.

Ah! As is often the case, I'm stuck few years back.

[ATDrake]

The $7.99 USD price for that Evanovich omnibus is indeed slightly cheaper compared to the $2.99 USD sale price on the 3 individuals, assuming one isn't going to “travel” for a discount on the exchange rate which would make the lot cheaper overall. (And it shouldn't have been compared to the CAD price in the first place, which was entirely my mistake for not even noticing that I'd entered the wrong set of numbers in my post, which makes a lot more sense if you actually save some money versus the individuals instead of spending 2 cents more, which is what a CAD purchase would have actually cost. )

And even in Canada, its existence at what seems to be a regular stable price at an equivalent amount enables one to hold off on buying the individual sale books in it, which SYKM says are fairly far up the series timeline, so one could technically save a bit of money by skipping those for now and hoping for a further pricedrop on that and #15. In any case, it's an excellent series sale, and I hope it does well enough that Macmillan are encouraged to offer more for the further volumes in other authors' series beyond the usually discounted #1.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by sufue

Death in Brittany, apa Death in Pont-Aven, is the first in the Commissaire Dupin series by Jean-Luc Bannalec. It has dropped to $2.99 at Kindle and Kobo US. I've read this one, and enjoyed it, although I enjoy Martin Walker's France-based series a bit more, but the other two in the series have so far remained too expensive ($9.99 +) for me.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Brittan...dp/B00QQ9ST1Q/
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/death-in-brittany

#3, The Fleur de Sel Murders, shows an April 24, 2018 release date. This is for the US and UK English translation.
Apache

[sufue]

The Long Way Home is the 10th in the Chief Inspector Gamache series by Louise Penny. This is probably the most nominated/awarded series I've seen in SYKM - every title but one (and the most recent, which is too new for awards yet) has multiple nominations/awards. I like this series too <grin>. Home has dropped to $2.99 at Kindle US only, at least for now.

link: https://www.amazon.com/Long-Way-Home...dp/B00HY09X5W/

Spoiler:

A #1 New York Times Bestseller, Louise Penny's The Long Way Home is an intriguing Chief Inspector Gamache Novel.

Happily retired in the village of Three Pines, Armand Gamache, former Chief Inspector of Homicide with the Sûreté du Québec, has found a peace he'd only imagined possible. On warm summer mornings he sits on a bench holding a small book, The Balm in Gilead, in his large hands. "There is a balm in Gilead," his neighbor Clara Morrow reads from the dust jacket, "to make the wounded whole."

While Gamache doesn't talk about his wounds and his balm, Clara tells him about hers. Peter, her artist husband, has failed to come home. Failed to show up as promised on the first anniversary of their separation. She wants Gamache's help to find him. Having finally found sanctuary, Gamache feels a near revulsion at the thought of leaving Three Pines. "There's power enough in Heaven," he finishes the quote as he contemplates the quiet village, "to cure a sin-sick soul." And then he gets up. And joins her.

Together with his former second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Myrna Landers, they journey deeper and deeper into Québec. And deeper and deeper into the soul of Peter Morrow. A man so desperate to recapture his fame as an artist, he would sell that soul. And may have. The journey takes them further and further from Three Pines, to the very mouth of the great St. Lawrence river. To an area so desolate, so damned, the first mariners called it the land God gave to Cain. And there they discover the terrible damage done by a sin-sick soul.

[sufue]

Yep - it showed up in eReaderIQ a couple of months (??) ago, and hasn't moved in price since. And at $11.99, I'm not biting...

Originally Posted by Apache

#3, The Fleur de Sel Murders, shows an April 24, 2018 release date. This is for the US and UK English translation.
Apache

[ATDrake]

Bargain omnibuses @ $4.99 from Harlequin's Mira imprint (the one they use for non-romance-dedicated other genre titles) in Canada & the US (should be the same price at all the usual retailers):

• Deanna Raybourn Lady Julia Grey Volume 1 by Deanna Raybourn (SYKM), containing #1-3 of her Dilys & Agatha Award finalist historical mystery with f/m romantic elements series starring a widowed Englishwoman in the 1880s.
• Lieutenant Taylor Jackson Collection Volume 1 by J. T. Ellison (SYKM), containing #1-3 of the police procedural thriller series starring a homicide lieutenant and an FBI profiler in Tennessee, which has won a Thriller Award for the 4th novel.

You can get points on these shopping in any store if you join the free Harlequin MyRewards program (FAQ; if you join through an existing member's referral link, they get 500 bonus points and maybe there are some MR Romance forum-goers who haven't used up all their allowed referrals yet) and submit your receipts.

IIRC, the amount of points you'd get from buying at least one of these plus the bonus points you get from just joining up and filling out some getting-started surveys should be enough for at least 1 free ebook worth up to $8.99 in the Harlequin store (which also sells some fantasy from Mercedes Lackey and adventure thrillers like the Don Pendleton Mack Bolan Executioner franchise, etc., in their non-HQN lines).

[sufue]

Four of the six titles in the Matthew Corbett series by Robert McCammon, which comes highly recommended by @snape, have dropped to $2.99 at Kindle and Kobo US (coupon/VIPable). Two of them are actually in an omnibus that makes them $1.495 <grin> each, if you need both titles. A bunch of McCammon's other horror/thriller titles have also dropped to $2.99 - or may have already been $2.99 - I don't tend to follow thriller/horror much.

Matthew Corbett titles

• Matthew Corbett Adventures #1 contains Mister Slaughter (#3 in series) and The Providence Rider (#4) - these two titles are also available individually if you have one already and don't want to deal with the omnibus...
• The River of Souls (#5)
• The Freedom of the Mask (#6)

other McCammon titles

• Vampire Tales: contains I Travel by Night and They Thirst, also available individually...
• The Night Boat
• The Border
• Horror Classics: contains Baal and Bethany's Sin, also available individually
• Last Train from Perdition
• The Hunter from the Woods

links for all, including a couple of stray magazine/short story compilations:
Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/gp/search/?se...price-asc-rank
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/search?Qu...cmaxprice=2.99

[sufue]

Snow White Must Die is in the middle of the von Bodenstein & Kirchoff series by Nele Neuhaus, as originally written in German, but looks (per SYKM) as if it were the first to be translated into English. In any case, it has dropped to £0.99 at Kindle UK.

link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Snow-White-...dp/B00CBWRYD6/

Spoiler:

A Richard and Judy Book Club selection.

‘A must for mystery fans . . . great customer reviews’ The Bookseller

Snow White Must Die by Nele Neuhaus is the huge international bestseller – with over 3 million copies sold, and the first book in the Bodenstein & Kirchoff crime series.

On a wet November day, Detectives Pia Kirchoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are summoned to the scene of a mysterious accident. A woman has fallen from a bridge onto the motorway below. It seems that she may have been pushed. The investigation leads them to a small town near Frankfurt, and the home of the victim, Rita Cramer.

On a September evening eleven years earlier, two seventeen-year-old girls, Laura and Stefanie (also known as Snow White), vanished without trace from this same village. In a trial based entirely on circumstantial evidence, Stefanie’s boyfriend, handsome and talented, Tobias Sartorius, was sentenced to ten years in prison. He has now returned to his home in an attempt to clear his name. Rita Cramer is his mother.

In the village, Pia and Oliver encounter a wall of silence. But when another young girl goes missing, the events of the past repeat themselves in a disastrous manner. The investigation turns into a dramatic race against time, because for the villagers, there is soon no doubt as to the identity of the perpetrator. And this time they are determined to take matters into their own hands.

‘Ms Neuhaus is Germany’s top-selling crime novelist, and her work is catching on throughout Europe’ Wall Street Journal

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by sufue

Four of the six titles in the Matthew Corbett series by Robert McCammon, which comes highly recommended by @snape, have dropped to $2.99 at Kindle and Kobo US (coupon/VIPable). Two of them are actually in an omnibus that makes them $1.495 <grin> each, if you need both titles. A bunch of McCammon's other horror/thriller titles have also dropped to $2.99 - or may have already been $2.99 - I don't tend to follow thriller/horror much.

Matthew Corbett titles

• Matthew Corbett Adventures #1 contains Mister Slaughter (#3 in series) and The Providence Rider (#4) - these two titles are also available individually if you have one already and don't want to deal with the omnibus...
• The River of Souls (#5)
• The Freedom of the Mask (#6)

other McCammon titles

• Vampire Tales: contains I Travel by Night and They Thirst, also available individually...
• The Night Boat
• The Border
• Horror Classics: contains Baal and Bethany's Sin, also available individually
• Last Train from Perdition
• The Hunter from the Woods

links for all, including a couple of stray magazine/short story compilations:
Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/gp/search/?se...price-asc-rank
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/search?Qu...cmaxprice=2.99

Yeah, ereaderIQ has sent me a bunch of McCammon price drops recently. I wonder if perhaps these are permanent?