HBS Mystery Reader's Circle

Monday, October 6, 2014

Mystery Picks of the Day – October 6, 2014

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.

The Depot

Author: Carmen DeSousa

Price: FREE

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The Depot (When Life and Death Cross Tracks) is a thirteen-thousand-word mini mystery with a ghostly edge by bestselling romantic-suspense author Carmen DeSousa.

They say The Depot is haunted. But in all the years homicide detective Mark Waters has visited the ancient train station turned restaurant, he’s never seen proof. Until now.

As he investigates a supposed suicide by train, he learns secrets of a murder that took place eighty years ago may directly affect his case.

Author Genre: Mystery & Thrillers, Romance, Paranormal

Website: Carmen DeSousa - ROMANCE. MYSTERY. SUSPENSE
Author's Blog: Romance.Mystery.Suspense. - Carmen DeSousa
Twitter: @Author_Carmen
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Author Description:
A romantic-suspense writer, Carmen’s stories overflow with romance, mystery, suspense, paranormal sometimes, and of course, tragedy. After all, what would a great story be without a tragic event setting the stage? All of her novels are sensual, but not erotic, gripping but not graphic and will make you cry, laugh, love, and hope.

The Bones Will Tell

A Skye Cree Novel Book 2

Author: Vickie McKeehan

Price: FREE

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A serial killer has the city of Seattle gripped in fear. As his bloody total continues to mount, Skye Cree gets dragged into the mix by her longtime friend, homicide detective Harry Drummond. Desperate for leads Harry hopes Skye’s special gift for locating missing children might be the answer. When Skye brings in Josh Ander, together they’ll face the most cunning adversary they have yet to hunt. As weeks turn into months, as the number of victims continues to climb, Josh’s vivid dreams of the crime scenes are the only key to unlocking the mind of a killer. But can Skye and Josh turn the tables fast enough when the unstoppable killer decides to come after them? Especially when the best clue they have is the revelation that—the bones will tell.

Author Genre: Romance, Paranormal, Ghosts, Military

Website: Vickie McKeehan
Author's Blog: Vickie McKeehan - Romance. Darkness. Suspense.
Twitter: @VickieMcKeehan
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Author Description:
Vickie writes romantic suspense. She's the author of three distinctive, very different series of books, The Evil Trilogy, the Pelican Pointe series, and the Skye Cree novels.

Vickie loves to write and enjoys getting two people together, involving them in some type of danger, mystery or suspense guaranteed to challenge the budding relationship between the two main characters.

Her female leads are usually strong-willed, independent women and definitely not the kind who sit around whimpering, waiting for someone to rescue them. Not only that, when you read one of Vickie's books, you'll get a happy ending.

Vickie loves the outdoors, loves to play video games, and enjoys watching football with the hubby. If you've ever read any of her books, you know she's a die-hard Raider fan, which means she has the patience of Job. ?

She's convinced the best food on earth is French fries. Whenever she's writing she keeps two things on hand at all times. Chocolate and Cheetos.

Vickie is proud to be a member of Romance Writers of America.

Mission to Murder

A Tourist Trap Mystery

Author: Lynn Cahoon

Price: $ 0.99

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In the California coastal town of South Cove, history is one of its many tourist attractions—until it becomes deadly…

Jill Gardner, proprietor of Coffee, Books, and More, has discovered that the old stone wall on her property might be a centuries-old mission worthy of being declared a landmark. But Craig Morgan, the obnoxious owner of South Cove’s most popular tourist spot, The Castle, makes it his business to contest her claim. When Morgan is found murdered at The Castle shortly after a heated argument with Jill, even her detective boyfriend has to ask her for an alibi. Jill decides she must find the real murderer to clear her name. But when the killer comes for her, she’ll need to jump from historic preservation to self-preservation…

Author Genre: Romance, Mystery & Thrillers, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Website: Lynn Cahoon
Author's Blog: Lynn Cahoon
Twitter: @LynnCahoon
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Author Description:
USA Today and New York Times, best-selling author, Lynn Cahoon is an Idaho native. If you'd visit the town where she grew up, you'd understand why her mysteries and romance novels focus around the depth and experience of small town life. Currently, she's living in a small historic town on the banks of the Mississippi river where her imagination tends to wander. She lives with her husband and four fur babies.

Purgatory

Colorado series

Author: Denise Moncrief

Price: $ 0.99

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Five years ago, a tragic accident robbed Chris Smith of a normal life. Left with only a jagged scar, a set of wedding rings, and bits of memory—smells, sounds, and fleeting feelings—she copes with the loss of her identity. Amnesia has made her life a living purgatory…until she meets Steve West.

Steve’s construction company is remodeling the ski lifts in Purgatory, Colorado. However looking at Chris is seeing the face of his deceased wife. Now the truths he’d been forced to believe have him searching for answers.

Murder, deception and missing ransom money. Can Steve protect Chris…and prove she’s the wife he never believed dead before the killer tries again?

Author Genre: Romance, Mystery & Thrillers

Website: Denise Moncrief
Twitter: @dmoncrief0131
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Author Description:
Denise is a Southern girl. She has lived in Louisiana all her life, and yes, she has a drawl. She has a wonderful husband and two incredible children, who not only endure her writing moods, but also encourage her to indulge her writing passion. Besides writing romantic suspense, she enjoys traveling, reading, and scrapbooking.

Accounting is a skill she learned to earn a little money to support her writing habit. She wrote he first story when she was a teen, seventeen handwritten pages on school-ruled paper and an obvious rip-off of the last romance novel she read. She's been writing off and on ever since, and with more than a few full-length manuscripts already completed, she has no desire to slow down.

FOR EVERY ACTION There Are Consequences

Pepper Bibeau Mystery Book 1

Author: Gail Baugniet

Price: $ 0.99

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During the civil unrest of 1968, 26-year old Insurance Investigator Pepper Bibeau's arrival in Chicago sets her on a collision course with death. A questionable medical claim, or a background check on a man who admits to stabbing his wife, leads to the murder of her friend. Pepper connects an apparent suicide to a child's drug overdose and suspects that people who should be helping her are indirectly involved.

Pepper's 12-month deployment in Vietnam with the Army Nurse Corps didn't prepare her for the streets of Chicago. Someone slams her head against a brick wall, sending her to the hospital with a possible concussion. A CPD homicide detective tells her to drop the insurance investigation and leave town. But her friend is dead, and a child is still in a coma. Until Pepper exposes those responsible, she's staying.

Author Genre: Mystery & Thrillers, Literature & Fiction

Author's Blog: Gail Baugniet - Author
Twitter: @GailMBaugniet
E-Mail: gbaugniet (at) aol (dot) com
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Author Description:
At age 9, Gail Baugniet's first attempt at writing a novel resulted in Ergo Death, a mystery set in her home town and based on her imagination. The story involved a murder and a narrow coal chute that led to the basement of the family home in Wisconsin. She later composed poems and haiku poetry for her private enjoyment.

Over the years, reading and writing were an integral part of Gail's eclectic history of employment as an insurance underwriter, statistical coder, and claims adjuster; as a professional realtor; as a police reservist and part time peace officer; and finally, as a security dispatcher. Now that Gail has free time to write novels again, her lifetime experiences offer plenty of background material for her planned mystery series.

Her first self-published novel, FOR EVERY ACTION There Are Consequences, released in 2011, introduces Hawaiian-born Pepper Bibeau as an Insurance Investigator whose routine assignments lead her through a maze of suspense. Gail currents resides in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she is at work completing her second novel in the series for release in 2012.

Sponsored by: HBSystems Publications
Publisher of ebooks, writing industry blogger and the sponsor of the following blogs:
eBook Author’s Corner
Top Shelf Author Advice
HBS Author's Spotlight

HBS has verified prices when this article was posted. Please verify the price before buying and its availability at your location for that price.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Mystery Picks of the Day – October 1, 2014

A Last Goodbye

Author: J.A. Jance

Price: $ 0.99

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Ali Reynolds is finally getting married to her longtime love B. Simpson. They wanted a simple Christmas Eve wedding, but nothing is ever simple with Ali. Even as a motley crew of her friends—Leland Brooks, Sister Anselm, and others—descend on Vegas, the bride-to-be finds herself juggling last-minute wedding plans and a mystery in the form of a stray miniature dachshund. Ali’s grandson rescues the little dog, but Ali’s not in the market for a new pet right before her honeymoon, and leaves no stone unturned in hunting for the dog’s owner. But what she finds is more than just a shaggy dog story…Bella’s elderly owner has vanished, and her son seems to be behind it. So it’s Ali and B. to the rescue—and still making it to the church on time!

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.

Hush Now Baby

Sloane Monroe Book 6

Author: Cheryl Bradshaw

Price: $ 0.99

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On a crisp, fall night, Serena Westwood wakes to the faint stirs of her crying baby. Bottle in hand, she tiptoes to the other side of the house, sneaks up to the crib, looks in. A wave of panic grips her as her real nightmare begins. Inside the crib, there is no baby.

Author Genre: Mystery/Thriller fiction novels

Website: Cheryl Bradshaw
Author's Blog: A Place to Embrace our Love of Books
Twitter: @cherylbradshaw
E-Mail: cherylbradshawbooks@hotmail.com
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Author Description:
Born and raised in Southern California, Cheryl Bradshaw became interested in writing at a young age, but it was almost two decades before she put pen to paper. In 2009 Bradshaw wrote Black Diamond Death (Book One: Sloane Monroe series). Within six weeks it entered the top #100 in two different categories and remained in the top #100 for over a year.

Since that time, she has written two more novels in the series and is working on the fourth as well as other projects she currently has in the works. In August 2012, Bradshaw was named one of Twitter's seven best authors to follow. Bradshaw is also the founder of IWU on Facebook, a writers group with almost 1,400 members.

Outin

The Inner Movement

Author: Brandt Legg

Price: $ 0.99

Book Trailer: Outin
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OUTIN, book two of the best selling Inner Movement trilogy, takes off from the last thrilling page of OUTVIEW.

There are dimensions swirling all around us . . .
Anything is possible . . .
If you know where the power is.

The journey continues . . . time and dimensions collide. Relentlessly pursued, Nate faces impossible choices that transcend life and death. Aided by more mystics, he struggles to find understanding on a frantic quest through extraordinary realms. If he can keep his friends alive, avoid Lightyear, and unravel crucial mysteries from the past . . . the Movement just might have a chance to change everything.

Author Genre: Fantasy, Paranormal, Young Adult

Website: Brandt Legg
Twitter: @BrandtLegg
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Author Description:
Brandt Legg is a former child prodigy who turned an interest in stamp collecting into a multi-million dollar empire. At eight, Legg's father died suddenly, plunging his family into poverty. Two years later, while suffering from crippling migraines, he started in business. National media dubbed him the "Teen Tycoon," but by the time he reached his twenties, the high-flying Legg became ensnarled in the financial whirlwind of the junk bond eighties, lost his entire fortune... and ended up serving time in federal prison for financial improprieties. Legg emerged, chastened and wiser, one year later and began anew in retail and real estate. From there his life adventures have led him through magazine publishing, a newspaper column, photography, FM radio, CD production and concert promotion.

Out of the Past

A Reed Ferguson Mystery

Author: Renée Pawlish

Price: FREE

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Compelled by a dark secret from his past, private investigator Reed Ferguson takes on his most unique case yet: bodyguard for young, spoiled trust-fund baby Stephanie McMahon. As Reed tries to protect her from her father’s enemies, he gets more than he bargained for. Things are not what they seem, no one can be trusted, and the past has a way of coming back to haunt us. And when suspicious deaths begin piling up, Reed knows he might be next. With a twisting plot and film noir fun that readers have come to expect, Out of the Past is Reed Ferguson at his best.

Author Genre: Mystery & Thrillers, Horror, Young Adult

Website: RENÉE PAWLISH
Author's Blog: To Become A Writer
Twitter: @ReneePawlish
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Facebook: Check Out Facebook

Author Description:
Master wordsmith Renée Pawlish is the award-winning author of the bestselling horror book Nephilim Genesis of Evil, the first novel in the Nephilim trilogy, the Reed Ferguson mystery series (This Doesn't Happen In The Movies, Reel Estate Rip-off, The Maltese Felon) and the short story Elvis And The Sports Card Cheat, Take Five, a short story collection, the Noah Winters kids adventure series (The Emerald Quest), and The Sallie House: Exposing the Beast Within, a non-fiction account of a haunted house investigation in Kansas.

Renée has been called a "promising new voice in the comic/murder mystery genre" and "a powerful storyteller". Nephilim Genesis of Evil has been favorably compared to the early works of Stephen King and also Frank Peretti.

Renée was born in California, but has lived most of her life in Colorado. She attended the University of Colorado Boulder, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in History. A few years later, she graduated from Denver Seminary with a Master of Arts in Counseling.

Renée loves to travel and has visited numerous countries around the world. She has also spent many summer days at her parents' cabin in the hills outside of Boulder, which was the inspiration for the setting of Taylor Crossing in her novel Nephilim: Genesis of Evil.

Renée's other interests include collecting sports memorabilia, cycling, hiking, reading, and playing guitar.

The Good Knight

A Gareth and Gwen Medieval Mystery Book 1

Author: Sarah Woodbury

Price: FREE

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An enthralling story, sympathetic characters and a visit to another time, another culture. What more can you ask of an author? -- Medieval Mysteries (medievalmysteries.com)

Intrigue, suspicion, and rivalry among the royal princes casts a shadow on the court of Owain, king of north Wales...

The year is 1143 and King Owain seeks to unite his daughter in marriage with an allied king. But when the groom is murdered on the way to his wedding, the bride's brother tasks his two best detectives--Gareth, a knight, and Gwen, the daughter of the court bard--with bringing the killer to justice.

And once blame for the murder falls on Gareth himself, Gwen must continue her search for the truth alone, finding unlikely allies in foreign lands, and ultimately uncovering a conspiracy that will shake the political foundations of Wales.

Author Genre: Historical Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Romance

Website: Sarah Woodbury - Writing Historical Fiction and Fantasy
Author's Blog: Sarah Woodbury blog
Twitter: @SarahWoodbury
E-Mail: dr.sarahwoodbury@gmail.com
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Author Description:
With two historian parents, Sarah couldn’t help but develop an interest in the past. She went on to get more than enough education herself (in anthropology) and began writing fiction when the stories in her head overflowed and demanded she let them out. While her ancestry is Welsh, she only visited Wales for the first time while in college. She has been in love with the country, language, and people ever since. She even convinced her husband to give all four of their children Welsh names. She makes her home in Oregon.