FREE/BARGAIN — Mystery, Suspense & Thrillers

[sufue]

Captain Lacey Regency Mysteries Volume Three contains A Death in Norfolk, A Disappearance in Drury Lane, and Murder in Grosvenor Square, the 8th, 9th, and 10th titles in Ashley Gardner's Captain Lacey series. Or the 7th, 8th, and 9th, if you don't count a book of short stories. Oh yeah, and Ashley Gardner is a pen name for Jennifer Ashley. In any case, it has dropped to £0.99 at Kindle UK.

Several of the early titles in this series were traditionally published, but somewhere along the line, I think Gardner went out on her own with this series, but SYKM still lists it, and I've read and liked many of the titles in the series, so here's a link...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B011HGW4NQ

[sufue]

Felony & Mayhem Press, who have the rights to an eclectic collection of authors/books, have just sent me an email announcing 30% off of all of their ebook titles. Unfortunately, some of their better/more interesting titles, they don't seem to have rights to the ebooks, so are only in paper; and also their ebooks tend to be in the $9.99 range, so are still pretty pricey, even with the 30% off. But if you've been wanting some particular book or books of theirs for a while, 30% off is better than nothing off. And the eclectic collection does include some pretty good authors IMO: Patricia Moyes (maybe in my top five, definitely in my top ten), Simon Brett's Blotto & Twinks series (maybe top ten, definitely top twenty), Ngaio Marsh (somewhere up there too), Tony Cape, Caroline Graham, Elizabeth Daly, and some others...

Info is here, from the email:

Spoiler:

Dear Felonious Friends,

First, like many of you, I suspect, I’ve been getting emails over the past few weeks from every business that has ever sold me anything. These are terrible, scary times, the emails say, and it’s important to wash your hands. These are terrible, scary times, and we should all be scrubbing up like Lady Macbeth, but I don’t need to hear it from the company that sells me cat kibble, and you don’t need to hear it from me. With that in mind...

The short version of today’s email: We are offering a 30% discount on our ebook titles, every single one.

The long version: As some of you know, for many years I owned a bookstore, less than a mile north of the World Trade Center. On September 12, 2001, my partner and I met in the basement. Our plan was to load up all the napkins and bottles of soda and bags of chips left over from years of bookstore parties and haul them over to the local hospital serving as a supply depot for people working at the site. Opening the store was not even remotely on our agenda. After all, we agreed, who would possibly want to buy mystery books at a dreadful time like this?

Our customers, as it turned out. They showed up in droves, knocking diffidently on the front door and piling their picks by the cash register in teetering heaps. A number of them were embarrassed to be buying books, especially in such quantity, but they shouldn’t have been. They showed us what we should have known all along: For many of our customers, for many passionate readers, and heck, for us, too, books are the drug of choice. They are what we run to when reality is more than we can cope with.

In fact, we did land-office business all throughout that hideous September, as one client after another showed up needing to escape to…somewhere else. It’s that escape we’d hope to offer you today. In 2001, our customers seemed to want a very particular sort of escape, and we’re working on putting together some Get Me Outta Here bundles of books, possibly even in the print we know you love. But for now, please enjoy the discount, please wash your hands like you just murdered Duncan, and please say hello to our Marketing Intern. His name is Melvin, and I have to tell you, he doesn’t look particularly useful, but right now he’s saving my sanity.

{Melvin says, “Discount is applied automatically in the cart, yawn...”}

See you—and we WILL see you!—in the stacks,

Editrix

And a link to their website: https://felonyandmayhem.com/

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by sufue

Even though the title sounds kind of horror-ish, It Walks by Night is the first in John Dickson Carr's Henri Bencolin series. I'm not a huge John Dickson Carr fan, but this is set in Paris, and I tend to enjoy mysteries set in France, even if just due to the setting (and daydreaming about French food and wine), so I'm tempted to give this a try. Anyway, it's $1.99 right now at Kindle and Kobo US (coupon/VIPable).

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083QP297X
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/it-walks-by-night

Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder

Thanks for that. I've enjoyed many of his Suspense episodes and I do remember enjoying his novel The Burning Court, though at this point, memories are hazy.

[sufue]

The Knowledge is the next-to-most-receent (2018) in the Richard Jury series by Martha Grimes. It has dropped to $1.99 at Kindle US as part of the Daily Deal. Not matched at Kobo, at least as of now...

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Ric...dp/B075VF6RYQ/

Spoiler:

With their signature wit, sly plotting, and gloriously offbeat characters, Martha Grimes’s New York Times bestselling Richard Jury mysteries are “utterly unlike anyone else’s detective novels” (Washington Post). In the latest series outing, The Knowledge, the Scotland Yard detective nearly meets his match in a Baker Street Irregulars-like gang of kids and a homicide case that reaches into east Africa.

Robbie Parsons is one of London’s finest, a black cab driver who knows every street, every theater, every landmark in the city by heart. In his backseat is a man with a gun in his hand—a man who brazenly committed a crime in front of the Artemis Club, a rarefied art gallery-cum-casino, then jumped in and ordered Parsons to drive. As the criminal eventually escapes to Nairobi, Detective Superintendent Richard Jury comes across the case in the Saturday paper.

Two days previously, Jury had met and instantly connected with one of the victims of the crime, a professor of astrophysics at Columbia and an expert gambler. Feeling personally affronted, Jury soon enlists Melrose Plant, Marshall Trueblood, and his whole gang of merry characters to contend with a case that takes unexpected turns into Tanzanian gem mines, a closed casino in Reno, Nevada, and a pub that only London’s black cabbies, those who have “the knowledge,” can find. The Knowledge is prime fare from “one of the most fascinating mystery writers today” (Houston Chronicle).

[sufue]

Now free at Kindle UK. Link below is still good.

Originally Posted by sufue

The Wanted is the most recent (2017) in the Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series by Robert Crais. It has dropped to £0.99 as part of the Kindle UK Daily Deal today. Even though I don't really follow this series, I'm tempted, just because I love it when most-recents go on sale for good prices .

link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wanted-Robe...dp/B01HMYA2EA/

[GA Russell]

The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories: The First Ten Years (Otto Penzler, ed.) - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/Best-American...dp/B00EXBRF8W/

[sufue]

Open Road titles often go on sale at $1.99, but rarely (recently, anyway) at $0.99. Right now, The Luck Runs Out, second in the Peter Shandy series by Charlotte MacLeod is $0.99 at Kindle and Kobo US (coupon/VIPable).

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009S33JYY
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-luck-runs-out

Spoiler:

At Balaclava Agricultural College, a kidnapping and pig-napping are followed by murder

Newlyweds Peter and Helen Shandy are picking out flatware when a pair of gun-toting hooligans burst into the silversmith’s shop, empty the safe, and leave with Helen as their hostage. Although the police recover Helen quickly, her professor husband is badly shaken by the ordeal. Early the next morning, the college’s head of animal husbandry frantically reports another hostage situation in progress. Belinda, the school’s beloved sow, has been kidnapped, and only Peter can bring home the bacon. There is a possible witness to the pig-napping in Miss Flackley, the farrier, but before she can point Peter towards the vanished porker, she is found dead in the barn’s mash feeder. By the time Peter discovers the link between the two heists, pigs may really fly.

[maddz]

Originally Posted by sufue

Open Road titles often go on sale at $1.99, but rarely (recently, anyway) at $0.99. Right now, The Luck Runs Out, second in the Peter Shandy series by Charlotte MacLeod is $0.99 at Kindle and Kobo US (coupon/VIPable).

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009S33JYY
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-luck-runs-out

And it's 98p on Amazon.co.uk:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...api_tkin_p1_i0

[sufue]

Maigret and Monsieur Charles is the 75th (per the webpage) and last in the Maigret series by Georges Simenon. It is £0.99 today as part of the UK Kindle Daily Deal.

link: https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Maigret-M...dp/B07R8GCTX2/

Spoiler:

THE LAST MAIGRET

'The father of contemporary European detective fiction' Ann Cleeves

He needed to get out of his office, soak up the atmosphere and discover different worlds with each new investigation. He needed the cafés and bars where he so often ended up waiting, at the counter, drinking a beer or a calvados depending on the circumstances.

He needed to do battle patiently in his office with a suspect who refused to talk and sometimes, after hours and hours, he'd obtain a dramatic confession.

In Simenon's final novel featuring Inspector Maigret, the famous detective reaches a pivotal moment in his career, contemplating his past and future as he delves into the Paris underworld one last time, to investigate the case of a missing lawyer.

'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century' Guardian

[sufue]

Mallets Aforethought is the seventh in the Home Repair is Homicide series by Sarah Graves. It has dropped to $1.99 at Kindle and Kobo US. I read several of the early titles in this series in DTB, and liked them. I especially like the titles - the puns are as good IMO as the bird-themed puns of Donna Andrews, or the titles of Mary Daheim's B&B series.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC0ZDK
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/mallets-aforethought

Spoiler:

Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree left her high-powered career for a dilapidated fixer-upper and the dream of a quiet existence in the quaint town of Eastport, Maine. But she found that no matter how carefully you remodel your life, murder can take up residence anywhere.

It’s Eastport’s most notorious landmark: the old Harlequin House. Named for the disgraced physician Chester Harlequin, it was used as a hideout for gunshot gangsters and their molls during Prohibition’s heyday. Now fixer-upper enthusiast Jake Tiptree and Harlequin’s only living descendant, Ellie White, are refurbishing the mansard-roofed mansion to host the local Historical Society’s upcoming gala. But when stripping down old wallpaper reveals a secret door to a room containing not one but two corpses, Jake and Ellie once again find home repair leading to homicide.

One of the bodies is a skeleton dressed in 1920s flapper chic. But the other is that of real-estate mogul Hector Gosling, and in his pocket is a paper bearing the single word “Guilty.” The less-than-scrupulous tycoon has been poisoned, and when it’s learned that the offending substance is the poison that Ellie’s husband George has been using to kill red ants, he is immediately taken into custody. Then it develops that George had recently accused Gosling of a scheme to scam George’s vulnerable old aunt out of her life savings—and George out of his inheritance.

With George held for murder, Jake and a pregnant Ellie swing into action. In between Ellie’s Lamaze sessions, baby showers, and CPR classes taught by Jake’s ex-husband Victor, the two amateur sleuths must sift their way through a trail of seemingly contradictory clues. Then another corpse surfaces and suddenly Jake and Ellie realize they must find this killer fast. A clever culprit is not only building an airtight case against Ellie’s husband. He—or she—is planning to nail everyone who stands in the way.

[sufue]

Death at the President's Lodging, apa Seven Suspects, is the first in the Inspector Appleby series by Michael Innes. It has dropped to $0.99/£0.99 at Kindle US/UK respectively.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073TZ8ZJN
Kindle UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B073TZ8ZJN

Spoiler:

The crime was at once intriguing and bizarre, efficient and theatrical.

The members of St Anthony’s College awake one bleak November morning to find the most chilling of crimes has happened in their quiet, contained college. Josiah Umpleby, President of the college, has been shot in his room during the night.

The college buzzes with supposition and speculation. Orchard Ground and the lodgings are particularly insulated: only a limited number of senior staff have access and even fewer have their own keys.

With the killer walking among them, Inspector John Appleby of the New Scotland Yard is called in to investigate. As tensions rise and accusations abound, can Appleby determine which of the seven suspects had motive and malice enough to murder a colleague in cold blood?

[sufue]

Again $0.99/£0.99 as part of the US/UK Countdown Deal for somewhat more than 2 days. Links below are still good...

Originally Posted by sufue

The Return of Mr Campion: 13 Collected Stories by Margery Allingham (collected/published posthumously) has dropped to $0.99 as a US Kindle Countdown deal at $0.99 for about 2 3/4 more days, before returning to a whopping $7.99. So grab it if you want it!

link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PGJ38F2

ADD: And also £0.99 at Kindle UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Return-Mr-C...dp/B07PGJ38F2/

[sufue]

Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House is the sixth in Stephanie Barron's series featuring Jane Austen as the protagonist. It has dropped to £1.49 at Kindle UK.

link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B002361KKS

Spoiler:

In her sixth engrossing outing, Jane Austen employs her delicious wit and family ties to the Royal Navy in a case of murder on the high seas. Somewhere in the picturesque British port of Southampton, among a crew of colorful, eccentric, and fiercely individual souls, a killer has come ashore. And only Jane can fathom the depths of his ruthless mind....

Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House

“I will assert that sailors are endowed with greater worth than any set of men in England.”

So muses Jane Austen as she stands in the buffeting wind of Southampton’s quay beside her brother Frank on a raw February morning. Frank, a post captain in the Royal Navy, is without a ship to command, and his best prospect is the Stella Maris, a fast frigate captained by his old friend Tom Seagrave.

“Lucky” Tom — so dubbed for his habit of besting enemy ships — is presently in disgrace, charged with violating the Articles of War. Tom’s first lieutenant, Eustace Chessyre, has accused Seagrave of murder in the death of a French captain after the surrender of his ship.

Though Lucky Tom denies the charge, his dagger was found in the dead man’s chest. Now Seagrave faces court-martial and execution for a crime he swears he did not commit.

Frank, deeply grieved, is certain his friend will hang. But Jane reasons that either Seagrave or Chessyre is lying — and that she and Frank have a duty to discover the truth.

The search for the captain’s honor carries them into the troubled heart of Seagrave’s family, through some of the seaport’s worst sinkholes, and at long last to Wool House, the barred brick structure that serves as gaol for French prisoners of war.

Risking contagion or worse, Jane agrees to nurse the murdered French captain’s imprisoned crew — and elicits a debonair surgeon’s account of the Stella Maris’s battle that appears to clear Tom Seagrave of all guilt.

When Eustace Chessyre is found murdered, the entire affair takes on the appearance of an insidious plot against Seagrave, who is charged with the crime. Could any of his naval colleagues wish him dead? In an era of turbulent intrigue and contested amour, could it be a case of cherchez la femme ... or a veiled political foe at work? And what of the sealed orders under which Seagrave embarked that fateful night in the Stella Maris? Death knocks again at Jane’s own door before the final knots in the killer’s net are completely untangled.

Always surprising, Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House is an intelligent and intriguing mystery that introduces Jane and her readers to “the naval set” — and charts a true course through the amateur sleuth’s most troubled waters yet.

[tch65721]

A Murder of Quality (George Smiley Novels Book 2) by John le Carré - $1.99
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081KYZPW

[sufue]

I've read and enjoyed Michael Brandman's three continuation titles in Robert B Parker's Jesse Stone series. So it's nice to see Missing Persons, which is the first in Brandman's own Buddy Steel series drop to free at Kindle US and UK, and Kobo US.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VPKSZ5M
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/missing-persons-29
Kindle UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07VPKSZ5M

Spoiler:

"A terrific read. Buddy Steel is my kind of Sheriff." —Tom Selleck

MISSING PERSONS is the first book in the new Buddy Steel mystery series by New York Times bestselling author, Michael Brandman.

Steel...smart, aggressive, ironic, spare and cynical...has been content working homicide at the LAPD until his father, the legendary Sheriff Burton Steel, falls ill with Lou Gehrig's disease. Sheriff Steel is headquartered in Freedom, a privileged coastal community located a hundred miles north of Los Angeles. His health failing, he asks his son Buddy to come home to cover his back and to groom him to be his successor.

Buddy reluctantly agrees. He returns to Freedom despite having outgrown its small town limits, wary of his father's authoritarianism.

No sooner does he hit town than Buddy learns the wife of the high-flying star of a Freedom based world-renowned television ministry has gone missing. A visit to the woman's home leads to a hostile confrontation with her husband's family and Buddy's realization that something greater than simply a missing person is at stake.

Allegiance between father and son provides the backdrop for Buddy's complex investigation of twisted families, avaricious con artists, violent gangs, drugs, corruption, and murder. And added to the mix is an enigmatic femme fatale who succeeds in upending Buddy's tenets regarding contemporary relationships.

MISSING PERSONS is its own book, yet crime fiction fans will find it a joy to trace its literary lineage from Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker through to Sue Grafton and Michael Connelly.