Happy Sunday! Today I have a bigger haul then I’ve had the last few weeks because there were so many great books on sale that have been on my TBR for awhile. Plus some other books that I saw that interested me that were either really cheap or free. Let me know if you have read any of these and which ones I should prioritize.
A love of a lifetime . . .
Leaving Belmont Clarkson is the hardest thing Sage Alexander has ever done. From the moment they met, she knew Belmont was the one, and getting up close and personal with him on his family’s epic road trip has taken her desire to a new, even hotter level. But there’s no way she can go there—not without revealing secrets that could devastate them both.
Losing Sage is not an option. Belmont’s heart is hers, has alwaysbeen hers. He knows she’s hiding something from him, but nothing will stand in his way of telling her just how much she means to him. Finding her is easy—saving her from her past could cost him everything.
From the bestselling author of Autumn and Winter, as well as the Baileys Prize-winning How to be both, comes the next installment in the remarkable, once-in-a-generation masterpiece, the Seasonal Quartet
Spring will come. The leaves on its trees will open after blossom. Before it arrives, a hundred years of empire-making. The dawn breaks cold and still but, deep in the earth, things are growing.
There’s one thing she’s vowed to never abide in a man…
could the horrible rumors be true? Is her life repeating itself?
Eight years ago, Vienne Kenney moved away from Clayburn and all its gossip to pursue a law degree in California. But now she has failed the bar exam again. Is she destined to be stuck forever, a failure—just like her father—in this tiny Kansas town?
Nine months ago, Jackson Linder left Clayburn with no explanation to anybody. Now he, too, is back. He isn’t sure he’s ready to face the rumors and well-meaning questions of the town’s busybodies. Yet he’s determined, once more, to make his art gallery a success—despite the secret that haunts him every day…
This novel was originally published in 2008 under the same title.
Avery Yeung’s biological clock just went off early. Thanks to her family’s medical history, she’s running out of time to get knocked up. And the only guy within donating distance? Her overprotective—and irritatingly hot—best friend. So clearly she needs an anonymous donor…
Anonymous donor? Over Sheriff Drew Flannery’s dead body. While daddyhood will never be in the cards for a man with his past, Drew won’t let Avery shop for a “popsicle pop.” He’ll do what’s right for his best friend by doing his best friend. But only if they do it properly.
But there’s nothing “proper” about it. Between the bed, the kitchen counter, and against his squad car, Avery and Drew are having the hottest sex ever. They can’t get enough of it—or each other. And without knowing it, they’ve crossed the one line that could ruin their friendship forever…
My plan was perfect. My friend needed a date, and my brother’s best friend was single. Problem solved.
Until I saw Jaeger for the first time in years, and sparks flew in the wrong direction.
Jaeger has grown up and bulked up. But that shouldn’t matter, because I have the perfect life. Really.
Only my plans are beginning to unravel and now visions of Jaeger’s hard abs, broad shoulders, and intense green eyes fill my head.
I should hold back in case my friend is interested. Or in case of a million other reasons. But if Jaeger isn’t willing to play by the rules, I don’t think I can either.
NEVER DATE YOUR BROTHER’S BEST FRIEND is the first book in the Never Date series, which features sexy romance and feel-good happily ever afters. This book can be enjoyed as a stand-alone novel and is also part of a series.
** A Top 75 USA Today Bestseller**Who needs a SWAT team to escape from their own wedding? Me.
My Momzilla turned us into hostages at our own ceremony, so Declan and I are getting married the good old-fashioned way, just like everybody else.
By calling in his private security team, stealing away before the ceremony by helicopter, connecting to his corporate jet and heading for Las Vegas.
The Boston wedding of the year is about to become a trashy Elvis drive-thru ceremony.
Until the best man spills the beans and Mom, Dad, my sisters, his brothers, my maid of honor, my friend Josh, and even my cat, Chuckles, all come along for the ride.
I can’t win, can I?
Oh. Yeah. I already did.
Love conquers all.
Even my crazy family.
Shopping for a Billionaire’s Wife is the 8th book in the New York Times and USA Today bestselling Shopping for a Billionaire series. After Declan convinces Shannon to escape from their own wedding minutes before the ceremony begins, the madcap adventures are just getting started. When the mother of the bride pries their location out of the tortured best man, the whole crazy crew follows the bride and groom to Las Vegas in this romantic comedy from Julia Kent.
She finally had the family she had always wanted, so why did she feel as though someone had stepped on her grave?
Suzannah and Noel are desperate for a child so when they get the chance to adopt a young girl called Orchid, they jump at the chance. They have been warned that it will take time for Orchid to settle into their family, but the problems they encounter seem out of the ordinary. Rooms are flooded, mirrors are smashed and Orchid owns up to none of it. Then things take a sinister turn and Suzannah becomes truly frightened. Who is this child they have let into their lives and will they ever be able to tame her?
The disappearances of two girls within the span of a week thrusts a small Texas town into panic.
Detectives investigating the case are baffled by a note left at the scene of the latest kidnapping, promising more. Cautious neighborhoods are on lockdown as the search for the missing girls spreads far and wide. Miriam Sandoval, a former-detective, known for solving a high-profile kidnapping a year prior, is soon enlisted to lend her expertise. But solving the case won’t be easy. Danger awaits with the discovery of every potential clue, and a madman is watching, confident in the outcome of his diabolical games. Can Miriam help rescue the girls before it’s too late, or will they never be seen again?
In one of the year’s most anticipated debut psychological thrillers, a family made infamous by a true crime documentary is found dead, leaving their surviving son to uncover the truth about their final days.
“They found the bodies on a Tuesday.” So begins this twisty and breathtaking novel that traces the fate of the Pine family, a thriller that will both leave you on the edge of your seat and move you to tears.
After a late night of partying, NYU student Matt Pine returns to his dorm room to devastating news: nearly his entire family—his mom, his dad, his little brother and sister—have been found dead from an apparent gas leak while vacationing in Mexico. The local police claim it was an accident, but the FBI and State Department seem far less certain—and they won’t tell Matt why.
The tragedy makes headlines everywhere because this isn’t the first time the Pine family has been thrust into the media spotlight. Matt’s older brother, Danny—currently serving a life sentence for the murder of his teenage girlfriend Charlotte—was the subject of a viral true crime documentary suggesting that Danny was wrongfully convicted. Though the country has rallied behind Danny, Matt holds a secret about his brother that he’s never told anyone: the night Charlotte was killed Matt saw something that makes him believe his brother is guilty of the crime.
When Matt returns to his small hometown to bury his parents and siblings, he’s faced with a hostile community that was villainized by the documentary, a frenzied media, and memories he’d hoped to leave behind forever. Now, as the deaths in Mexico appear increasingly suspicious and connected to Danny’s case, Matt must unearth the truth behind the crime that sent his brother to prison—putting his own life in peril—and forcing him to confront his every last fear.
Told through multiple points-of-view and alternating between past and present, Every Last Fear is not only a page-turning thriller, it’s also a poignant story about a family managing heartbreak and tragedy, and living through a fame they never wanted.
Can he help mend her dogeared heart?
Librarian Sarah Newsome can locate a reference book in less than three minutes, but three years may not be long enough to heal after the death of her Labrador retriever Sam. When Sarah joins a pet grief support group, she expects to find folks mourning their animals, like Sister Mary Margaret the Saint Bernard and Severus the snake, but she’s shocked that her old college crush Ben is a member.
Ben Becker’s as surprised to be in a pet grief support group as he is to see Sarah there. She was the one who got away back in college, all because she was convinced he lied. And now? He really is telling a whopper, and it’s way too late to admit it.
As the weeks pass, Sarah increasingly relies on the comfort of the group and a renewed relationship with Ben, but there’s no official handbook for healing. Will Severus’ owner stop stockpiling frozen rodents for his slain serpent? Will Sister’s owner abstain from crossing herself every time she mentions her dearly departed dog? And will Sarah risk her battered heart to give Ben another chance once she learns the hairy truth?
Read now and find out in this second chance romance in the “quirky, hilarious, endearing” Love & Pets sweet romantic comedy series by USA Today bestselling author A.G. Henley!
Unraveling a twenty-five-year tale of multiple murder and medical deception, The Death of Innocents is a work of first-rate journalism told with the compelling narrative drive of a mystery novel. More than just a true-crime story, it is the stunning expose of spurious science that sent medical researchers in the wrong direction–and nearly allowed a murderer to go unpunished.
On July 28, 1971, a two-and-a-half-month-old baby named Noah Hoyt died in his trailer home in a rural hamlet of upstate New York. He was the fifth child of Waneta and Tim Hoyt to die suddenly in the space of seven years. People certainly talked, but Waneta spoke vaguely of “crib death,” and over time the talk faded.
Nearly two decades later a district attorney in Syracuse, New York, was alerted to a landmark paper in the literature on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome–SIDS–that had been published in a prestigious medical journal back in 1972. Written by a prominent researcher at a Syracuse medical center, the article described a family in which five children had died suddenly without explanation. The D.A. was convinced that something about this account was very wrong. An intensive quest by a team of investigators came to a climax in the spring of 1995, in a dramatic multiple-murder trial that made headlines nationwide.
But this book is not only a vivid account of infanticide revealed; it is also a riveting medical detective story. That journal article had legitimized the deaths of the last two babies by theorizing a cause for the mystery of SIDS, suggesting it could be predicted and prevented, and fostering the presumption that SIDS runs in families. More than two decades of multimillion-dollar studies have failed to confirm any of these widely accepted premises. How all this happened–could have happened–is a compelling story of high-stakes medical research in action. And the enigma of familial SIDS has given rise to a special and terrible irony. There is today a maxim in forensic pathology: One unexplained infant death in a family is SIDS. Two is very suspicious. Three is homicide.
It’s 1914, and fear and paranoia rule the high seas.
Iain Cosgrove is newly married to Jennifer Manson, daughter of a wealthy Scottish merchant. But Iain must soon leave for a research trip aboard the Lady Balgay, last of Dundee’s once-grand sealing fleet. Fueled by rum and the tales of John Pratt, the crew obsess over ancient superstitions; ones Iain casually dismisses as simple lore… until they reach the frigid Artic seas.
When a string of accidents coincide with the recurring appearance of a female apparition, Iain’s beliefs are shaken. Then the ship discovers two castaways — one of them a woman — and events take a sinister turn.
Inspired by historical accounts, Dark Voyage is a compelling and horrifying tale set in the icy waters of the north.
Bridget Jones’s Diary meets Americanah in this disarmingly honest, boldly political, and truly inclusive novel that will speak to anyone who has gone looking for love and found something very different in its place.
Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.
As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?”—all of the questions today’s woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her.
With “fresh and honest” (Jojo Moyes) prose, Queenie is a remarkably relatable exploration of what it means to be a modern woman searching for meaning in today’s world.
“Admit it. Admit that you wanted that kiss as much as I did.”
I wish someone would have warned me about my best friend Deacon Cross when we were nine.
Because nearly sixteen years later, the only man I’ve forbidden myself to cross that line with still doesn’t understand my rules of friendship.
Best friends aren’t supposed to kiss.
They’re not supposed to dream of having insanely hot sex while working together, either. And they’re definitely not supposed to keep secrets.
And now I wish I had warned myself about this two days ago. Right before Deacon kissed me for the second time. And all of the rules changed…
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The Kiss is a full-length, stand alone, best friends to lovers romance with humor, suspense and heat.
“Long Gone is a tremendous novel, and Alafair Burke is one of the finest young crime writers working today.”
–Dennis Lehane, author of Moonlight Mile
Echoing the intensity of Harlan Coben’s Tell No One and the psychological depth of Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know, Alafair Burke’s first stand-alone novel catapults her into the top ranks of modern suspense. In New York City’s cut-throat world of art, appearances can be deceiving—especially when art world newcomer Alice Humphrey becomes a suspect in a gruesome murder at a Chelsea gallery, and is thrown into a treacherous labyrinth of intrigue, crime, and conspiracy. Now, Alice must discover the truth behind the murder before the unsolved mystery claims her as its next victim.
To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history….Late one night, exploring her father’s library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to “My dear and unfortunate successor,” and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of, a labyrinth where the secrets of her father’s past and her mother’s mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.
The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has ever known and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness and wipe it out. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of the legend of Dracula. Generations of historians have risked their reputations, their sanity, and even their lives to learn the truth about Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. Now one young woman must decide whether to take up this quest herself–to follow her father in a hunt that nearly brought him to ruin years ago, when he was a vibrant young scholar and her mother was still alive. What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler have to do with the modern world? Is it possible that the Dracula of myth truly existed and that he has lived on, century after century, pursuing his own unknowable ends? The answers to these questions cross time and borders, as first the father and then the daughter search for clues, from dusty Ivy League libraries to Istanbul, Budapest, and the depths of Eastern Europe. In city after city, in monasteries and archives, in letters and in secret conversations, the horrible truth emerges about Vlad the Impaler’s dark reign and about a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive down through the ages.
A hitman. A journalist. A family torn apart. Can he uncover the truth before it’s too late? In the dead of winter, investigative reporter Janne Vuori sets out to uncover the truth about a mining company, whose illegal activities have created an environmental disaster in a small town in Northern Finland. When the company’s executives begin to die in a string of mysterious accidents, and Janne’s personal life starts to unravel, past meets present in a catastrophic series of events that could cost him his life. A traumatic story of family, a study in corruption, and a shocking reminder that secrets from the past can return to haunt us, with deadly results … The Mine is a gripping, beautifully written, terrifying and explosive thriller by the King of Helsinki Noir.
She walked away once.
When Kathryn Irish realized that she and Daniel were too different—and that he thought she was after him for his money—she ended things. When a job randomly puts her back on his radar, they hesitantly form a truce. But deep down she knows she can never be just friends with him. She’ll always want more.
He never should have let her go.
Daniel MacArthur knows he made the biggest mistake of his life in letting Kathryn walk away. When she suddenly appears back in his life, it’s not a moment too soon—since she’s been targeted twice by a faceless enemy. She thinks the two attacks are random. But he’s not so sure. Is it because of her job? Or is something more sinister at play?
Length: NOVELLA
The brand new crime thriller from the bestselling author of the Perfect series – Helen Fields is back with her first stand-alone novel!
He collects his victims. But he doesn’t keep them safe.
Elspeth, Meggy and Xavier are locked in a flat. They don’t know where they are, and they don’t know why they’re there. They only know that the shadow man has taken them, and he won’t let them go.
Desperate to escape, the three of them must find a way out of their living hell, even if it means uncovering a very dark truth.
Because the shadow man isn’t a nightmare. He’s all too real.
And he’s watching.
Helen Fields is back with a heart-pounding new book, perfect for fans of Cara Hunter and Stuart MacBride.
When a murder shocks picturesque Arborville, New Jersey, Pamela Paterson and her Knit and Nibble knitting club suddenly find themselves at the center of the investigation—as suspects . . .
Pamela is ready to kick back and relax after a busy day selling stuffed aardvarks to benefit Arborville High School’s sports program at the annual town festival. But just as she’s packing up, she makes a terrible discovery—someone’s stashed a body under the Knit and Nibble’s table. The victim is Randall Jefferson, a decidedly unpopular history teacher after his recent op-ed criticizing the school’s sports program. But the primary suspect has an alibi, and the only clue is a stuffed aardvark found on the victim’s chest . . . Now the Knit and Nibblers must unravel the case quickly—before a crafty killer repeats a deadly pattern.
Knitting tips and delicious recipe included!
I’m rock hard.
No, not like that.
When that happens, you won’t need me to tell you.
I’m a competitive bodybuilder, ready for my very first contest. And winning requires more than killer workouts and stage presence.
It’s all about the tan.
My training partner Franklin uses the best in the business — Camryn Schultz. She understands the career killer of a badly placed white spot.
She’s also his sister.
So when the craptastic tan I’m given for my first competition requires an emergency patch, Franklin knows exactly who to call.
The thing is, when Camryn’s hands hit my skin, more than a few muscles spring to life.
I’m about to head on stage in the tiniest Speedo imaginable and parts of me no longer fit.
What I need to do for my friendship and my future on the circuit is to walk away.
But when my best friend’s sister has her hands on my hard body, there’s no way this Pickle is going to get anything but hot.
__
Hot Pickle is a 300-page standalone romantic comedy about workout junkies, bodybuilding gods, and the couple who sprays together, stays together.
Someone is using superstition to cause trouble on the rodeo circuit. An upside down horseshoe made Tabby Swanson’s skin crawl, but it wasn’t enough to keep her from training her prize horse, Tenterhook, for barrel racing so she could get a sponsorship. When Kasper Dobbs shows up the ranch, she’s intrigued and hopeful. The handsome businessman, and former local hockey star, has deep pockets. It doesn’t hurt that he’s devastatingly handsome and makes her heart pound in her chest more than barrel racing. It almost makes her forget about the strange happenings on the ranch until someone turns up dead, and she and Tenterhook suffer a near fatal accident in competition, threatening her rodeo days forever.
Kasper knows Tabby’s fall was no accident. Being told you may never compete again is a fate he knows well. He won’t let Tabby give up and insists on getting her back into training as soon as he can. But how can he know if whoever caused her accident will try again? He calls the Knight brothers to investigate the mysterious death and strange happens surrounding Tabbyso they can catch whoever is responsible before she takes another fall. He wants to believe he’s doing it all in the name of business. But he’s fallen hard for the cowgirl whose sunshine smile makes him want more than just to ride again. He wants the girl for life!
After years of waiting, New York’s newest subway line is finally ready — an express train that connects the city with the burgeoning communities across the Hudson River. The shining jewel of this state-of-the-art line is a breathtaking visitors’ pavilion beneath the river. Major dignitaries, including New York City’s Mayor and the President of the United States, are in attendance for the inaugural run, as the first train slowly pulls in. Under the station’s bright ceiling lights, the shiny silver cars gleam. But as the train comes closer into view, a far different scene becomes visible. All the train’s cars are empty. All the cars’ interiors are drenched in blood. As chaos descends, all those in the pavilion scramble to get out. But the horror is only beginning. High levels of deadly methane fill the tunnels. The structure begins to flood. For those who don’t drown, choke, or spark an explosion, another terrifying danger awaits — the thing that killed all those people on the train. There’s something living beneath New York City, and it’s not happy we’ve woken it up.
“What Walter Tevis did for pool in The Hustler, he does for chess in The Queen’s Gambit” (Playboy).
When eight-year-old Beth Harmon’s parents are killed in an automobile accident, she’s placed in an orphanage in Mount Sterling, Kentucky. Plain and shy, Beth learns to play chess from the janitor in the basement and discovers she is a prodigy. Though penniless, she is desperate to learn more—and steals a chess magazine and enough money to enter a tournament. Beth also steals some of her foster mother’s tranquilizers to which she is becoming addicted.
At thirteen, Beth wins the chess tournament. By the age of sixteen she is competing in the US Open Championship and, like Fast Eddie in The Hustler, she hates to lose. By eighteen she is the US champion—and Russia awaits . . .
Fast-paced and elegantly written, The Queen’s Gambit is a thriller masquerading as a chess novel—one that’s sure to keep you on the edge of your seat.
Resisting her only makes him want her more…
Private investigator Billy Parrish is good at three things—fighting, investigating, and sex. MMA training with the other vets in the Warrior Fight Club keeps his war-borne demons at bay—mostly, and one night stands ensure no one gets too close. But then his best friend from the Army Rangers calls in a favor.
Shayna Curtis is new to town, fresh out of grad school, and full of hope for the future. With a new job starting in a month, she’s grateful when her brother arranges a place for her to stay while she apartment hunts. But she never expected her roommate to be so brooding. Or so sexy.
Billy can’t wait for Shay to leave—because the longer she’s there, the more he wants her in his bed. To stay. He can’t have her—that much he knows. But when fight club stops taking off the edge, Billy lets down his guard…and starts fighting for what’s his.
They go through both bottles of champagne right there on the High Line, with nothing but the stars over them… They drink and Lavinia tells Louise about all the places they will go together, when they finish their stories, when they are both great writers-to Paris and to Rome and to Trieste…
Lavinia will never go. She is going to die soon.
Louise has nothing. Lavinia has everything. After a chance encounter, the two spiral into an intimate, intense, and possibly toxic friendship.
Running into a long-ago friend sets memories from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them.
But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion.
In the stews of London’s East End, an outbreak of insanity sees ordinary men and women reduced to gibbering, incoherent wrecks; a mysterious creeping fog hides terrifying apparitions within that rob the wits of all who see them and even inspire suicide.
Sherlock Holmes, in the infancy of his detecting career, deduces a connection between these sinister “shadows” and an Oriental drug lord who is bent on expanding his criminal empire. Yet there are even more sinister forces at work, as the great detective faces a challenge so fearsome and deadly that his career may be over almost as soon as it has begun.
Seasons in a Small Town – Spring
In rural Drago, Illinois, Zeke came by his “the Geek” nickname honest, more comfortable in the world of algebra and algorithms than high school’s social hallways. Though that didn’t keep him from longing for the unattainable prom queen, Jennifer.
The one person who did understand his out-of-the-box brain was Darcie, his best friend.
After their high school graduation, Zeke and Darcie for one night jolted from friends to lovers. And then he left town, and she knew he couldn’t look back. What he didn’t know was the depth of Darcie’s feelings for him.
Now it’s 17 years later, and Zeke’s a self-made billionaire founder of a tech security firm, Darcie’s a local cop and Jennifer’s a divorced mom of a tween girl. And their little town is flagging.
At Darcie’s urging, Zeke returns to Drago to boost its economy. Will his new wealth attract the still-beautiful Jennifer? Or will Darcie, the one girl who always made him feel at ease, show him that true love knows no boundaries?
From Book 1: A page-turning debut in the tradition of Michael Crichton, World War Z, and The Martian, Sleeping Giants is a thriller fueled by an earthshaking mystery—and a fight to control a gargantuan power.
A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near her home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth. She wakes up at the bottom of a square hole, its walls glowing with intricate carvings. But the firemen who come to save her peer down upon something even stranger: a little girl in the palm of a giant metal hand.
Seventeen years later, the mystery of the bizarre artifact remains unsolved—its origins, architects, and purpose unknown. Its carbon dating defies belief; military reports are redacted; theories are floated, then rejected.
But some can never stop searching for answers.
Rose Franklin is now a highly trained physicist leading a top secret team to crack the hand’s code. And along with her colleagues, she is being interviewed by a nameless interrogator whose power and purview are as enigmatic as the provenance of the relic. What’s clear is that Rose and her compatriots are on the edge of unraveling history’s most perplexing discovery—and figuring out what it portends for humanity. But once the pieces of the puzzle are in place, will the result prove to be an instrument of lasting peace or a weapon of mass destruction?
*No synopsis since this is the second book in a series.
Five stories of Ursula K. Le Guin’s world-renowned realm of Earthsea are collected in one volume. Featuring two classic stories, two original tales, and a brand-new novella, as well as new maps and a special essay on Earthsea’s history, languages, literature, and magic.
The Finder
Darkrose and Diamond
The Bones of the Earth
On the High Marsh
Dragonfly
There’s no such thing as safe in a city at war, a city overrun with monsters. In this dark urban fantasy from author Victoria Schwab, a young woman and a young man must choose whether to become heroes or villains—and friends or enemies—with the future of their home at stake. The first of two books.
Kate Harker and August Flynn are the heirs to a divided city—a city where the violence has begun to breed actual monsters. All Kate wants is to be as ruthless as her father, who lets the monsters roam free and makes the humans pay for his protection. All August wants is to be human, as good-hearted as his own father, to play a bigger role in protecting the innocent—but he’s one of the monsters. One who can steal a soul with a simple strain of music. When the chance arises to keep an eye on Kate, who’s just been kicked out of her sixth boarding school and returned home, August jumps at it. But Kate discovers August’s secret, and after a failed assassination attempt the pair must flee for their lives.
The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, and the Pushcart Prize, Ursula K. Le Guin is renowned for her lyrical writing, rich characters, and diverse worlds. The Wind’s Twelve Quarters collects seventeen powerful stories, each with an introduction by the author, ranging from fantasy to intriguing scientific concepts, from medieval settings to the future.
Including an insightful foreword by Le Guin, describing her experience, her inspirations, and her approach to writing, this stunning collection explores human values, relationships, and survival, and showcases the myriad talents of one of the most provocative writers of our time.
When London Rose, 33, is proposed to by her long-time boyfriend, she realizes she is facing a stable, predictable, pre-determined (and passionless) life. She freaks out and runs the other way—accepting instead a job across the Atlantic, as a tour-guide on a high-end European cruise line that travels through a country a day. London is searching for a more romantic, unscripted and exciting life that she feels sure exists out there somewhere.
London is elated: the European river towns are small, historic and charming. She gets to see a new port every night, gets to sample an endless array of new cuisine and meet a stream of interesting people. It is a traveler’s dream, and it is anything but predictable.
But when a wealthy, high-maintenance passenger suddenly turns up dead outside of Budapest, the cruise has become a bit too unpredictable. Even worse: as the last person to see her alive, suspicion falls on London, leaving her no choice but to solve the crime (with her new sidekick, an orphaned dog), and save her cruise line and herself.
Laugh-out-loud funny, romantic, endearing, rife with new sights, culture and food, MURDER (AND BAKLAVA) offers a fun and suspenseful trip through the heart of Europe, anchored in an intriguing mystery that will keep you on the edge of your seat and guessing until the very last page.
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