FREE/BARGAIN — Mystery, Suspense & Thrillers

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by cc_in_oh

Very helpful, thanks - I assume I first create the anonymous authorization in the plugin config?

I was confused by the Adobe involvement, thought Kobo ebooks were already epubs.

Kobo books are ePubs. But some are DRM-free (publisher's option), and otherwise, depending on how you access them, they have Kobo's own DRM system, or Adobe's DRM system.

[Aleron Ives]

Originally Posted by cc_in_oh

I assume I first create the anonymous authorization in the plugin config?

Yes, or you can import an existing ADE authorisation if you've used ADE before.

[sufue]

Restless in the Grave is the nineteenth in Dana Stabenow's excellent (except for a few books, with which I get mad enough to scream) Kate Shugak series. It's on sale right now in the US for $0.99. Which is pretty unusual - normally when these go on sale it's for $1.99 or more, and many of them don't go on sale very much either. So I'd say, grab this one now if you want it. (This isn't one of the ones that made me mad, although the next one is...)

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GXOQGA
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/res...in-the-grave-6

Oh, and it's discountable at Kobo US...

Spoiler:

New York Times bestseller Dana Stabenow returns with her most outstanding novel yet, teaming up two of her most beloved characters, Aleut private investigator Kate Shugak and Alaska state trooper Liam Campbell, in the same story for the first time.

Alaska aviation entrepreneur Finn Grant died in the fiery crash of his Piper Super Cub. Someone sabotaged his engine, and virtually everyone in southwestern Alaska has a motive, including his betrayed wife, his bullied children, and Liam's wife, bush pilot Wyanet Chouinard. With few places to turn, Liam asks his former mentor Niniltna post commander Sergeant Jim Chopin, for help, and Jim quickly brings Kate onto the case.

Working undercover as—of all things—a waitress at Bill's Bar and Grill, Kate learns over beer and burgers that Grant's business had expanded meteorically over the last two years. After buying the closed Air Force base south of town from the federal government at a bargain-basement price, he became a fixed-base operator running his fishing, hunting, and flight-seeing business, servicing planes flying through the area, and most interestingly and lucratively, getting into the air freight business. But what kind of freight was he moving, and where?

The answers involve Kate in her most challenging case to date, one that starts with murder and quickly sprawls into a much larger conspiracy ranging from the darkest family secrets to treason and beyond. Restless in the Grave is a treat for fans and another outstanding addition to Dana Stabenow's acclaimed and award-winning series.

[sufue]

Today's Big Deal at Kindle UK is the first five of six titles in the Jack Warr series by Lynda La Plante, for £0.99 each. Five is few enough that I can list them, so here you go:

• Buried
• Judas Horse
• Vanished
• Pure Evil
• Crucified

And here's the link to the Big Deal webpage: https://www.amazon.co.uk/b/?_encodin...ode=4725112031

[sufue]

Blackwater Sound is the seventh in the Thorn series by James W Hall. Per SYKM, it won the 2003 Shamus Award for Best Novel. And it's free right now at Kindle US and UK.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCC3J5CQ
Kindle UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DCC3J5CQ

Books in this series go free or on sale from time-to-time. Not often, and you need patience, but I now have about half of them. And if you find you don't want to wait, they're not badly priced at $3.99 in the US, and around £3.00 in the UK.

Spoiler:

The Braswell family had everything people would kill for: money, looks, power. But their eldest son, the family's shining light, died in a bizarre fishing accident. And when he disappeared-hauled into the depths by the giant marlin he had been fighting-he took with him a secret so corrupt that it could destroy the Braswells.

Ten years later, a huge airliner crashes in the steamy shallows off the Florida coast, killing all aboard. Helping pull bodies from the water, Thorn finds himself drawn into a bizarre conspiracy: someone has developed a high tech weapon capable of destroying electrical systems in a powerful flash. The terrorist potential is huge. How are the secretive Braswells and their family-owned company, MicroDyne, involved? And what does it have to do with the family's obsessive hunt for the great marlin that killed their golden boy?

With the Braswells, James W. Hall introduces one of the most evil and dysfunctional families in the history of fiction. And, along with Thorn, he brings back favorite characters from his earlier books, including Alexandra Rafferty and her father, Lawton Collins, a retired and increasingly dotty former police investigator whose methods of investigation result in his kidnapping. A story that bristles with all the heat and tension of a tropical Florida summer.

[sufue]

Murder in Northumbria, apa In the Family, is the first in the Pen Darling series by Martyn Taylor, and it's the Joffe Free Friday/weekend mystery for a few more hours. (I'm swamped at my real job...)

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQC96VJT
Kindle UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0FQC96VJT

Spoiler:

He built an empire on fear. Now his murder threatens to tear it apart.

Barry Dance is found dead in his remote farmhouse, a gun in his right hand. But former mob leader ‘The Dancer’ didn’t shoot himself — this was an execution.

Dance was a man people loved to hate. He might have turned his back on organised crime, but as the ruthless head of a property empire he still spread fear among business associates — and fuelled resentment among his own family.

Detective Pen Darling knows the murder bears all the hallmarks of a professional hit. Now she must return to Newcastle’s murky criminal underworld to catch the killer.

As she follows the trail from glittering city offices to the bleak moors, she uncovers secrets Barry Dance thought he had buried for good. Secrets someone is still willing to kill for.

Can she expose the truth before another life is taken?

[sufue]

The Edge of Darkness is the sixth and most recent (2026) in Vaseem Khan's Malabar House series, at least until a new one comes out in early 2027.. I've read the first two or three in this historical series, featuring the first female detective in Bombay, and liked the ones I've read. The Edge of Darkness has dropped to £0.99 in the UK right now.

Kindle UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DSTRQVX6
Kobo UK: https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-edge-of-darkness-8

Spoiler:

India, 1951. After wilfully ignoring orders, Persis Wadia, India's first female police detective, is exiled from Bombay to the wild and mountainous Naga Hills District. As India's first post-Independence election looms, and tensions rise across the country, Persis finds herself banished to the Hotel Victoria, a crumbling colonial-era relic, her career in tatters.

But when a prominent politician is murdered in his locked room at the Victoria, his head missing, she is thrust back into the fray. Is the murderer one of the foreigners staying at the hotel or an insurgent from the surrounding jungle? As the political situation threatens to explode, Persis has only days to stop a killer operating at the very edge of darkness...

[GA Russell]

Triple Detective Magazine
Spring, 1948

3 novels

Tickets for Death
(Mike Shayne)
by Brett Halliday

The Night Before Murder
by Steve Fisher

Find My Killer
by Manly Wellman

$1.99

https://www.radioarchives.com/Triple...g_p/re1348.htm

[sufue]

The Bea Abbot Agency Mysteries, Books 6-10, by Veronica Heley, is on sale for $1.99/£1.99 right now in the US/UK. I still haven't read any books in this series, but have read and liked some of the books in Heley's Ellie Quicke series. In any case, the omnibuses for Books 1-5 and 11-15 have been on sale in the past, and now here's a chance to grab most of the rest of the series, which is only up to book 18 as of now, with 19 coming out in May. Titles in this omnibus include: False Report, False Alarm, False Diamond, False Impression, and False Wall.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DB2K3BVM
Kindle UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DB2K3BVM

[salty-horse]

The Essential Harlem Detectives by Chester Himes is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

A one-volume selection of four novels in the legendary detective series—blistering, groundbreaking capers set in Harlem's criminal underworld—by master crime writer Chester Himes. With an introduction by New York Times bestselling author S.A. Cosby.

Here in one volume is an exceptional selection from Chester Himes's acclaimed Harlem Detectives series. Winner of France's prestigious Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and lauded by Jean Cocteau as a "prodigious masterpiece," A Rage in Harlem introduces detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson in a searing escapade. In The Real Cool Killers, the duo investigates a shooting and discovers an unsettling personal connection. In The Crazy Kill, a man is found in a breadbasket, stabbed to death, leaving Himes's detectives to find out who among the many suspects did it. And in Cotton Comes to Harlem, the brazen robbery of a notorious con man running a back-to-Africa scam sets off a hunt for a bale of Southern cotton. These masterful novels exhibit Himes's evocative, baroque descriptions of Black life in Harlem and his famously blistering social commentary.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

The Essential Harlem Detectives by Chester Himes is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

Thanks!

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

The Essential Harlem Detectives by Chester Himes is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

That's a really good deal! I've already got two of the four. Hmm...

[Aleron Ives]

A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré is currently $2. As one of his later books, it doesn't go on sale very often.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XBP2W3M
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/a-legacy-of-spies

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself, are to be scrutinized by a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience with its justifications.

[Alastair_S]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

The Essential Harlem Detectives by Chester Himes is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Impressive for an ebook.

[sufue]

Jigsaw is the forty-first and most recent (Feb 2026) in Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware/Milo Sturgis series. It's £0.99 right now in the UK.

Kindle UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F6WG42TT
Kobo UK: https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/jigsaw-39

Spoiler:

When a young woman is found dead at her kitchen table – with DNA belonging to her ex-boyfriend at the scene – psychologist Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis assume it’s an open-and-shut case.

But the guy has an airtight alibi. Could an enemy from his shady past have framed him?

Many miles away, a former LAPD officer is found brutally murdered in her garage. Her co-workers knew her as meticulously organized, but her house is full of junk and meaningless objects – except for the envelopes full of cash hidden within the chaos…

But as Alex and Milo dig deeper, they discover shocking links between the victims. It soon becomes clear they have a complicated – and deadly – puzzle to solve.