Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Mystery Picks of the Day – January 21, 2015

Today the HBS Mystery Reader’s Circle features our Mystery Novels Picks of the Day. These are some of the BEST DEALS from outstanding Mystery Authors for the Kindle at Amazon.

Follow this blog for outstanding Mysteries and great prices.




A Harvest of Friends

Doris Free Book 2



Author: Cara Brookins

Price: $0.99


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Life on a Wisconsin farm in the 1930s isn’t easy. Doris Free and her family are struggling because of the Depression, and the whole town is on edge as they work to survive. When a new family moves to Tomah to manage the general store, everyone is curious. And when the new family introduces Cole, the first black man most of the town’s people have ever seen, conflicts begin to build. Doris is determined to help Cole fit in with the people of Tomah.

But how can a ten-year-old girl change the way a town believes? Can she help Cole before it’s too late? As the summer cools down, tempers heat up, and the situation grows dangerous. Doris brings together the people who believe in equality, and together they fight for unity. They learn that sometimes a small action, or a small girl, can bring about the biggest change.


Author Genre: Mystery & Thrillers, Children's Books, Humor

Website: Cara Brookins - Author & Motivational Speaker
Author's Blog: Cara Brookins
Twitter: @cmbrookins
E-Mail: cara.brookins@yahoo.com
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Author Description:
I'm the girl with a book in her hand. If I'm not writing one, I'm reading or plotting one. I also love to build things with wood, concrete, clay, tile, and paper mache. I even built my own house from the ground up with my children. My day job is developing new computer software systems as a programmer analyst. I also love to scuba dive, hoop, swim, ride my bike, listen to music, garden, and spend time in the mountains. I like a little bit of everything and writing allows me to express that.


Another Day in Paradise

The Louise Golden Mysteries Book 3



Author: Laurie Hanan

Price: $1.99


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Dog nappings have doubled on O`ahu over the past year. Brazen thefts of beloved pets from their homes have the community on edge. A beautiful, mysterious Chinese actress is distraught when her Pomeranian is stolen.

Mail carrier Louise Golden finds the missing pooch, only to learn the actress is suddenly gone, with her belongings. Dogs are disappearing. Street people are being abducted by aliens—or so claims Louise’s homeless friend, Frankie. Clues point in different directions. Nothing adds up. A masked man appears out of nowhere and warns Louise to mind her own business.

What did he mean? Everyone is a suspect: her boyfriend who tells stories for a living, the ex lover who once betrayed her, the acting coach skilled in the art of deception, the shameless stalker in the yellow Tweety Bird van. At the polo field, tempers flare. Someone’s bound to get hurt. Things heat up for Louise, as well, when a sexy Brazilian polo player befriends her. Is he truly a friend, or a rake intent on seducing vulnerable women? Can Louise even trust her own spiritual awakening to help her find a path to understanding—or is she faking it and running blindly to a dead end? What will she do when she comes face to face with her greatest fears?


Author Genre: Mystery & Thrillers

Website: Laurie Hanan
Twitter: @LaurieHanan
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Google+: Check Out Google+
Facebook: Check Out Facebook

Author Description:
Laurie grew up in the picturesque islands of the South Pacific. Her father pioneered air travel to many of the tiny islands, and Laurie often accompanied him on his flights. She moved to Seattle to study photography and dance at the University of Washington. While there, she discovered an interest in Jewish Studies, Hebrew, and Middle Eastern dance. She moved to Israel to pursue these subjects, earning her keep by working in the cotton fields of the Jezreel Valley. Laurie moved to London, then lived in several European countries, before returning to Israel. It was on this second trip to Israel that she met the love of her life. They eloped and were married in Cyprus. Laurie and her husband spent time exploring the Far East, before settling in Hawaii. Laurie had a career with the Postal Service, and raised three children. She retired in 2006 and started writing her Louise Golden mystery series. She also promotes animal rights and rescue, and practices yoga, meditation, and qi gong. Laurie currently lives on Oahu with her husband and two youngest children.


The Old Blue Line

– A Joanna Brady Novella



Author: J.A. Jance

Price: $ 0.99


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Butch Dixon has been taken for a ride …

Not a jump in the car, see the sights kind of ride. He's been taken for everything he has. He's lost his house, his restaurant business, his savings, his car, his best friend, his faith—all to his conniving ex-wife. But that was seven years ago. He picked himself up, left Chicago, and started over in Peoria, Arizona, running the Roundhouse Bar and Grill. He doesn't look back on those bad years; there's no point. Not until two curious cops show up at the Roundhouse.

Faith, Butch's ex-wife, has been murdered, and the evidence points to him. Stunned, Butch quickly realizes that the black-hearted woman is going to ruin him again, from her grave. Lucky for Butch, the Old Blue Line, a group of retired—but still sharp and tenacious—former legal and law enforcement coots, have taken it upon themselves, as a favor, to make sure he doesn't cross that thin line. After the dust settles, Butch's life is again upended—when a little red-haired ball of fire, Sheriff Joanna Brady, takes a seat at his bar.


Author Genre: Mystery & Thrillers

Website: J.A. Jance
Author's Blog: J.A. Jance - NYT Bestselling Author
Twitter: @JAJance
E-Mail: jajance@jance.com
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Author Description:
J.A. Jance is the top 10 New York Times bestselling author of the Joanna Brady series; the J. P. Beaumont series; four interrelated thrillers featuring the Walker family; and eight books featuring Ali Reynolds.

As a second-grader in Mrs. Spangler’s Greenway School class, I was introduced to Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series. I read the first one and was hooked and knew, from that moment on, that I wanted to be a writer.

The third child in a large family, I was four years younger than my next older sister and four years older than the next younger sibling. Being both too young and too old left me alone in a crowd and helped turn me into an introspective reader and a top student. When I graduated from Bisbee High School in 1962, I received an academic scholarship that made me the first person in my family to attend a four year college. I graduated in 1966 with a degree in English and Secondary Education. In 1970 I received my M. Ed. In Library Science. I taught high school English at Tucson’s Pueblo High School for two years and was a K-12 librarian at Indian Oasis School District in Sells, Arizona for five years.

My ambitions to become a writer were frustrated in college and later, first because the professor who taught creative writing at the University of Arizona in those days thought girls "ought to be teachers or nurses" rather than writers. After he refused me admission to the program, I did the next best thing: I married a man who was allowed in the program that was closed to me. My first husband imitated Faulkner and Hemingway primarily by drinking too much and writing too little. Despite the fact that he was allowed in the creative writing program, he never had anything published either prior to or after his death from chronic alcoholism at age forty-two. That didn’t keep him from telling me, however, that there would be only one writer in our family, and he was it.

My husband made that statement in 1968 after I had received a favorable letter from an editor in New York who was interested in publishing a children’s story I had written. Because I was a newly wed wife who was interested in staying married, I put my writing ambitions on hold. Other than writing poetry in the dark of night when my husband was asleep (see After the Fire), I did nothing more about writing fiction until eleven years later when I was a single, divorced mother with two children and no child support as well as a full time job selling life insurance. My first three books were written between four a.m. and seven a.m.. At seven, I would wake my children and send them off to school. After that, I would get myself ready to go sell life insurance.

I started writing in the middle of March of 1982. The first book I wrote, a slightly fictionalized version of a series of murders that happened in Tucson in 1970, was never published. For one thing, it was twelve hundred pages long. Since I was never allowed in the creative writing classes, no one had ever told me there were some things I needed to leave out. For another, the editors who turned it down said that the parts that were real were totally unbelievable, and the parts that were fiction were fine. My agent finally sat me down and told me that she thought I was a better writer of fiction than I was of non-fiction. Why, she suggested, didn’t I try my hand at a novel?

The result of that conversation was the first Detective Beaumont book, Until Proven Guilty. Since 1985 when that was published, there have been 21 more Beau books. My work also includes 14 Joanna Brady books set in southeastern Arizona where I grew up, and seven Ali Reynolds books, set in Sedona, AZ. In addition there are four thrillers, starting with Hour of the Hunter and Kiss of the Bees, that reflect what I learned during the years when I was teaching on the Tohono O’Odham reservation west of Tucson, Arizona.

The week before Until Proven Guilty was published, I did a poetry reading of After the Fire at a widowed retreat sponsored by a group called WICS (Widowed Information Consultation Services) of King County. By June of 1985, it was five years after my divorce in 1980 and two years after my former husband’s death. I went to the retreat feeling as though I hadn’t quite had my ticket punched and didn’t deserve to be there. After all, the other people there were all still married when their spouses died. I was divorced. At the retreat I met a man whose wife had died of breast cancer two years to the day and within a matter of minutes of the time my husband died. We struck up a conversation based on that coincidence. Six months later, to the dismay of our five children, we told the kids they weren’t the Brady Bunch, but they'd do, and we got married. We now have four new in-laws as well as six grandchildren.

When my second husband and I first married, he supported all of us–his kids and mine as well as the two of us. It was a long time before my income from writing was anything more than fun money–the Improbable Cause trip to Walt Disney World; the Minor in Possession memorial powder room; the Payment in Kind memorial hot tub. Eventually, however, the worm turned. My husband was able to retire at age 54 and took up golf and oil painting.

One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that everything–even the bad stuff–is usable. The eighteen years I spent while married to an alcoholic have helped shape the experience and character of Detective J. P. Beaumont. My experiences as a single parent have gone into the background for Joanna Brady–including her first tentative steps toward a new life after the devastation of losing her husband in Desert Heat. And then there’s the evil creative writing professor in Hour of the Hunter and Kiss of the Bees, but that’s another story.

Another wonderful part of being a writer is hearing from fans. I learned on the reservation that the ancient, sacred charge of the storyteller is to beguile the time. I’m thrilled when I hear that someone has used my books to get through some particularly difficult illness either as a patient or as they sit on the sidelines while someone they love is terribly ill. It gratifies me to know that by immersing themselves in my stories, people are able to set their own lives aside and live and walk in someone else’s shoes. It tells me I’m doing a good job at the best job in the world.


The Murder Wall

Kate Daniels Mysteries



Author: Mari Hannah

Price: $ 0.99


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The Murder Wall: It's where you look death in the face.

Months after discovering a double homicide in a sleepy village, detective Kate Daniels is still haunted by her failure to solve the crime. When a new murder gives Daniels her first case as officer in charge, she jumps at another chance to get it right.

But even more shocking than the brutal killing is the fact that Daniels recognizes the corpse. Eager to prove herself, she decides to keep her connection to the dead man a secret from her team, putting her career in jeopardy as her personal and professional lives threaten to collide.

As the killer continues to claim his victims, Daniels unearths baffling clues in her search for connections among the murders . . . and while she draws closer to finding the culprit, he is watching her.


Author Genre: Crime, Thriller, Mystery

Website: Mari Hannah: Author
Twitter: @mariwriter
E-Mail: info@marihannah.com
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Facebook: Check Out Facebook

Author Description:
Mari Hannah was born in London and moved north as a child. Sponsored by the Home Office, she graduated from Teesside University before becoming a Probation Officer, a career cut short when she was injured while on duty. Thereafter, she spent several years working as a film/television scriptwriter.

During that time she created and developed a number of projects, most notably a feature length film and the pilot episode of a crime series for television based on the characters in her book, the latter as part of a BBC drama development scheme. She lives in Northumberland with her partner, an ex-murder detective. In 2010, she won the Northern Writers' Award. She is also the winner of the Polari First Book Prize 2013

Mari is the author of the Kate Daniels series.


kidNAP Inc.

A Nick Behr Mystery Book 1



Author: J.T. Lewis

Price: $1.99


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Detective Nick Behr is called back from an extended stay in the Nevada desert. A woman has been murdered, and there are no leads except a single word written on the wall in her own blood.

Unfortunately, the murder isn’t the only thing he has to work through. He has a mental condition, his stay in the desert a medical retreat. What he has going on in his head may be tougher to solve than the murder!


Author Genre: Mystery & Thrillers, Young Adult, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Author's Blog: J.T. Lewis Author
J.T. Lewis Author Facebook
Twitter: @JTLewis_Books
E-Mail: jt.lewis.books@gmail.com
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Author Description:
Mystery abounds in the books of Amazon Best Selling Author J.T. Lewis.

Living in Southeast Indiana with his wife, J.T. has always loved a mystery. Striving to bring readers a story packed full of action, adventure, and suspense has led to his current selection of titles.

His first full length novel, Murder! Too Close To Home, was the beginning of the acclaimed Adventures of Gabriel Celtic series, and was voted #1 on Goodreads Best Debut Mystery Series list. The thriller/adventure series continued with Gabriel's Revenge,followed closely by In Case of Death as well as The Book of Gabriel in 2014. The Adventures of Gabriel Celtic is as series about the life of Gabriel Celtic...an ordinary man caught up in extraordinary adventures!

Another new series, The Nick Behr Mysteries, starts with the story Kidnap Inc., where we get to meet Nick Behr...as well as all of the people that have crowded into his head! Fighting against the craziness of his life while trying to solve the murders of the current case sometimes leads the story to veer off-kilter a little. This unexpected result has caused the story to be labeled, "One of the funnest mysteries I've read in quite some time!"

Also added to J.T. Lewis' series list this year...The Artifact Hunter! Jesse Flanagan is just a guy who enjoys making a profit from the antiquities he buys and sells. When one of his discoveries suddenly puts him in the cross-hairs of assassins, he must change his whole life as he goes underground to try and reclaim his life!
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HBS has verified prices when this article was posted. Please verify the price before buying and its availability at your location for that price.

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