FREE/BARGAIN — Mystery, Suspense & Thrillers

[tdanzie]

Also, available at Kobo US. https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the...lock-holmes-27

[sufue]

In This Grave Hour is the next to most recent (2017) in the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear. It has dropped to $2.99 at Kindle and Kobo US.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HBPQV2W
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/in-this-grave-hour

Spoiler:

"A female investigator every bit as brainy and battle-hardened as Lisbeth Salander." — Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air, on Maisie Dobbs

Sunday September 3rd 1939. At the moment Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain broadcasts to the nation Britain’s declaration of war with Germany, a senior Secret Service agent breaks into Maisie Dobbs' flat to await her return. Dr. Francesca Thomas has an urgent assignment for Maisie: to find the killer of a man who escaped occupied Belgium as a boy, some twenty-three years earlier during the Great War.

In a London shadowed by barrage balloons, bomb shelters and the threat of invasion, within days another former Belgian refugee is found murdered. And as Maisie delves deeper into the killings of the dispossessed from the “last war," a new kind of refugee — an evacuee from London — appears in Maisie's life. The little girl billeted at Maisie’s home in Kent does not, or cannot, speak, and the authorities do not know who the child belongs to or who might have put her on the “Operation Pied Piper” evacuee train. They know only that her name is Anna.

As Maisie’s search for the killer escalates, the country braces for what is to come. Britain is approaching its gravest hour — and Maisie could be nearing a crossroads of her own.

[sufue]

Hunting Badger is the 14th in the Leaphorn/Chee series by Tony Hillerman. It has dropped to $1.99 at Kindle and Kobo US.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC128C
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/hunting-badger

Spoiler:

Three men raid the gambling casino run by the Ute nation and then disappear into the maze of canyons on the Utah-Arizona border. When the FBI, with its helicopters and high-tech equipment, focuses on a wounded deputy sheriff as a possible suspect, Navajo Tribal Police Sergeant Jim Chee and his longtime colleague, retired Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, launch an investigation of their own. Chee sees a dangerous flaw in the federal theory; Leaphorn sees intriguing connections to the exploits of a legendary Ute bandit-hero. And together, they find themselves caught up in the most perplexing -- and deadly -- criminal manhunt of their lives.

[sufue]

Not a great price for a short (86 pages, whatever that means on an e-reader) collection of three short stories, but if you want an Elizabeth Peters fix, and haven't read/don't have any of her short stories, here's a relatively new collection on sale for $2.99 at Kindle and Kobo US (coupon/VIPable).

Mystery Stories by Elizabeth Peters

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HHR8691
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/mystery-stories-1

Spoiler:

A Christmas slaying, an Egyptian puzzle, and a night in the home of a stranger—three chillers from the New York Times–bestselling “grandmaster” of mystery (Publishers Weekly).

A thriller writer is embroiled in a real-life whodunit when a friend drops dead in front of her, with her own hatpin impaled in his back. The violation of a sealed West Bank tomb, its rock walls intact, provides a Thebes investigator with a mystifying conundrum. And two sisters take shelter from a storm in a shuttered old house at the end of a country road . . . only to discover they’re not alone.

Settle in with this trio of short stories—available for the first time in a single volume—from one of the most popular mystery writers of all time. With her customary sharp wit, historical expertise, and effortless knack for freezing the blood, Elizabeth Peters “never fails to entertain” (The Plain Dealer).

[Little.Egret]

Endeavour, free

In Camera (Keith Calder Book 17)

Seventeenth in the Keith Calder series by Gerald Hammond. Titles from this series have been going free briefly from time to time,

Interviewing a new job candidate, a series of questions about the applicant’s references reveals a sinister tale suggesting nothing less than an assassination plot, Calder is met with a case whose repercussions may reach far beyond rural Newton Lauder.

https://www.amazon.com/Camera-Keith-...dp/B07L6LKRVS/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Camera-Keit...dp/B07L6LKRVS/

https://www.amazon.ca/Camera-Keith-C...dp/B07L6LKRVS/

All the reprints are available from Kindle Unlimited.

[sufue]

Dark Sacred Night is the most recent (2018) in the Harry Bosch (and Ballard) series by Michael Connelly. It has dropped to £0.99 as part of the UK Kindle Daily Deal.

link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B079753GG4/

Spoiler:

*THE FIRST EVER BOSCH & BALLARD THRILLER: THE NEW BLOCKBUSTER FROM THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER*

At the end of a long, dark night Detectives Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch cross paths for the very first time.

* * * * *

Detective Renée Ballard works the graveyard shift and returns to Hollywood Station in the early hours to find a stranger rifling through old files.
The intruder is none other than legendary LAPD detective Harry Bosch, hunting for leads in an unsolved case that has got under his skin.

Ballard escorts him out but - curious to know what he was searching for - soon becomes obsessed by the murder of Daisy Clayton. Was she the first victim of a serial killer who still stalks the streets?

For Bosch, the case is more than personal: it may be all he has left.

But in a city where crime never sleeps, even detectives have a dark side...

[melmac]

Originally Posted by sufue

Dark Sacred Night is the most recent (2018) in the Harry Bosch (and Ballard) series by Michael Connelly. It has dropped to £0.99 as part of the UK Kindle Daily Deal.

link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B079753GG4/

Great Deal! I really enjoyed this it brought a freshness to the Bosch novels definitely in the top couple of entries in the series. As always Sufue great job, thank you so much for the work you do

[sufue]

YW! I figured someone(s) would like this one on sale. It's always nice when a most-recent title goes on sale, however briefly, at a good price! Glad you enjoyed it.

Originally Posted by melmac

Great Deal! I really enjoyed this it brought a freshness to the Bosch novels definitely in the top couple of entries in the series. As always Sufue great job, thank you so much for the work you do

[sufue]

A bunch of early Stephanie Plum titles by Janet Evanovich are $2.99 each as part of the US Kindle monthly deal, so presumably prices are good until the end of January. These also are matched at Kobo US. Numbers include: Four, Six, Seven, Eight, Nines, Eleven, Thirteen, and Sixteen. (Sorry, I'm too lazy today to list all the full titles...) If you need any of these early titles, this is a pretty good deal - prices on Plum titles usually are in the $7.99 - $8.99 range, even for the oldest backlist, although there are a couple of omnibuses out there of some of the early ones that work out to more reasonable prices if you need all of the titles in the omnibus.

The links below also include a few strays.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/gp/search/?se...price-asc-rank
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/search?Qu...9&fcmedia=Book

Note: adding info on omnibuses

More Plums in One: Four to Score, High Five, and Hot Six at $7.99 is a better deal than Four and Six individually above, if you need all three. Note that you want to get this specific title, and not Plum Boxed Set 2, which is really just a bundle of individual titles, priced accordingly, and not an omnibus. (The same goes for all of the Plum Boxed Set XX bundles, as opposed to the "true" omnibuses, like this one, and also Three Plums in One, which contains the first three titles, and sometimes goes on sale, but is outrageously priced at over $20 right now.)

Anyway, More Plums in One:
Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004VMWJK2/
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/more-plums-in-one

[sufue]

Where Roses Never Die is the 18th in the Varg Veum series by Gunnar Staalesen, most of which has not been translated to English from the original Norwegian (only the later titles and a few scattered early ones).

It has dropped to $0.99 as part of the Kindle US monthly deals for January.

link: https://www.amazon.com/Where-Roses-N...dp/B06XRF9X5Z/

Spoiler:

September 1977. Mette Misvær, a three-year-old girl, disappears without trace from the sandpit outside her home. Her tiny, close middle-class community in the tranquil suburb of Nordas is devastated, but their enquiries and the police produce nothing. Curtains twitch, suspicions are raised, but Mette is never found. Almost 25 years later, as the expiration date for the statute of limitations draws near, Mette's mother approaches PI Varg Veum, in a last, desperate attempt to find out what happened to her daughter. As Veum starts to dig, he uncovers an intricate web of secrets, lies and shocking events that have been methodically concealed. When another brutal incident takes place, a pattern begins to emerge. Chilling, shocking and full of extraordinary twists and turns, Where Roses Never Die reaffirms Gunnar Staalesen as one of the world's foremost crime thriller writers.

The 17th title in this series, We Shall Inherit the Wind, is also part of the monthly sale - info and link in this previous post: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh....php?p=3700266

[sufue]

Two non-series titles by Seicho Matsumoto have dropped to $1.99 fairly recently. I'd not heard of Matsumoto, so here is a bit from the webpage for one of the books:

Seicho Matsumoto was Japan's most successful thriller writer. His first detective novel, Points and Lines, sold over a million copies in Japan. Vessel of Sand, published in English as Inspector Imanishi Investigates in 1989, sold over four million copies and became a movie box-office hit.

I'm usually not into thrillers, much less psychological thrillers (as one of the books is described), but when I read the blurbs for these two books, they don't sound all that thriller-ish to me, but more mystery-ish. So, I'm debating...

In the meantime, here's info for the two books:

Inspector Imanishi Investigates
link: https://www.amazon.com/Inspector-Ima...dp/B003P2WETK/

Spoiler:

In the wee hours of a 1960s Tokyo morning, a dead body is found under the rails of a train, and the victim's face is so badly damaged that police have a hard time figuring out the victim’s identity. Only two clues surface: an old man, overheard talking in a distinctive accent to a young man, and the word “kameda.” Inspector Imanishi leaves his beloved bonsai and his haiku and goes off to investigate—and runs up against a blank wall. Months pass in fruitless questioning, in following up leads, until the case is closed, unsolved.

But Imanishi is dissatisfied, and a series of coincidences lead him back to the case. Why did a young woman scatter pieces of white paper out of the window of a train? Why did a bar girl leave for home right after Imanishi spoke to her? Why did an actor, on the verge of telling Imanishi something important, drop dead of a heart attack? What can a group of nouveau young artists possibly have to do with the murder of a quiet and “saintly” provincial old ex-policemen? Inspector Imanishi investigates.

A Quiet Place
link: https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Place-S...dp/B01DV1YH8U/

Spoiler:

"A master crime writer . . . Seicho Matsumoto's thrillers dissect Japanese society."—The New York Times Book Review

"A stellar psychological thriller with a surprising and immensely satisfying resolution that flows naturally from the book’s complex characterizations.Readers will agree that Matsumoto (1909–1992) deserves his reputation as Japan’s Georges Simenon.-Publishers Weekly.

While on a business trip to Kobe, Tsuneo Asai receives the news that his wife Eiko has died of a heart attack. Eiko had a heart condition so the news of her death wasn’t totally unexpected. But the circumstances of her demise left Tsuneo, a softly-spoken government bureaucrat, perplexed. How did it come about that his wife—who was shy and withdrawn, and only left their house twice a week to go to haiku meetings—ended up dead in a small shop in a shady Tokyo neighborhood?

When Tsuneo goes to apologize to the boutique owner for the trouble caused by his wife’s death he discovers the villa Tachibana near by, a house known to be a meeting place for secret lovers. As he digs deeper into his wife's recent past, he must eventually conclude that she led a double life...

[sufue]

Carol McCleary has written a mystery series featuring real life journalist Nellie Bly as the protagonist. I first ran into Nellie Bly during a college course on the sociology of mental illness, since she had reported on the conditions in a late 1800's mental asylum from within, by pretending to be mentally ill herself.

When I googled her just now, I found out she is also well known for a 72-day trip around the world, in "competition" with Jules Verne's fictional journey (well, really Phileas Fogg's fictional journey, as written by Jules Verne...). And, per the blurb for the first title in the series, Verne also appears in the book, along with Oscar Wilde and Louis Pasteur. And it's set in Paris, and I'm a huge Francophile. And I like historical mysteries. And it's on sale. And...so I'm going to give this one a try...

The Alchemy of Murder, Nellie Bly #1, $2.99

link: https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Murde...dp/B003CSOSQY/

Spoiler:

The world's most famous reporter, the intrepid Nellie Bly, teams up with science fiction genius Jules Verne, the notorious wit and outrageous rogue Oscar Wilde, and the greatest microbe-hunter in history, Louis Pasteur. Together, they must solve the crime of the century.

They are all in Paris—the capital of Europe and center of world culture—for the 1889 World's Fair. A spectacular extravaganza dedicated to new industries, scientific discoveries, and global exploration, its gateway is the soaring Eiffel Tower. But an enigmatic killer stalks the streets and a virulent plague is striking down Parisians by the thousands. Convinced that the killings are connected to the pandemic, Nellie is determined to stop them both... no matter what the risks.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by sufue

Two non-series titles by Seicho Matsumoto have dropped to $1.99 fairly recently. I'd not heard of Matsumoto, so here is a bit from the webpage for one of the books:

I'm usually not into thrillers, much less psychological thrillers (as one of the books is described), but when I read the blurbs for these two books, they don't sound all that thriller-ish to me, but more mystery-ish. So, I'm debating...

In the meantime, here's info for the two books:

Inspector Imanishi Investigates
link: https://www.amazon.com/Inspector-Ima...dp/B003P2WETK/

A Quiet Place
link: https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Place-S...dp/B01DV1YH8U/

Thanks for those. I'm going to Japan in a couple of weeks, and all of the Japanese-related books I was considering seemed too heavy (Haruki Murikami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), too dark (a re-read of Natsuo Kirino's excellent Out) or will likely make me angry at the country I'm visiting (Min Jin Lee's Pachinko).

These Seicho Matsumoto books look promising.

[ZodWallop]

Robert McCammon's Gone South is $1.99 at Amazon. Though he's known as a horror writer, this is a thriller.

Two decades after he finished serving his country in the jungles of Southeast Asia, Dan Lambert still pays the price. As he hustles for construction work in the heat of a brutal Louisiana summer, Dan tries to ignore the pounding in his head—a constant reminder of the Agent Orange–caused leukemia which will soon end his life. And now the bank wants to repossess his truck. His attempt to reason with the loan officer does not get him far. Dan loses himself in rage, and for a moment is back in the jungle again. When he comes out of his bloodlust, he has shot the banker through the chest. There is nothing to do but run.

On his trail are two peculiar bounty hunters: a onetime Siamese twin and a heavyset Elvis impersonator. To save his own life, Dan is going to have to remember why it was worth living in the first place.

[GA Russell]

Return of the Thin Man - Dashiell Hammett - $1.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008DYICJG