Each day, Amazon deeply discounts one Instant Video offering and one Kindle book, and offers one app for free. We check out these deals every day, but we only pass along those for products that have received high marks from Amazon reviewers and other critics. Today we’ve got a couple of great ones to share!
In Instant Video, today only the first season of the BBC crime drama Whitechapel, rated an average of 5/5 stars, is on sale to purchase for just $2! This is a lush and gothic production, with far more depth than the CSI-type shows you’re used to seeing on this side of the pond. While this show is called a “series”, it’s more like a miniseries in that it consists of three episodes with a runtime of about 46 minutes each, and the story arc throughout all three episodes concerns a single case: a Jack the Ripper copycat. From Amazon:
Ambitious DI (Detective Inspector) Joseph Chandler is assigned an open-and-shut case, the killing of a woman in the East End of London. Get a quick result, he is told, and you will get the promotion you have been waiting for. Unfortunately for him, however, things don’t turn out to be so straight … forward. The investigation quickly runs out of suspects until Edward Buchan, a renowned Ripperologist, draws the police’s attention to the similarities between the Jack the Ripper killings in 1888 and the modern-day murder that Chandler is investigating. The race begins to catch the copycat killer before he strikes again.
Two Southern soldiers, recently back from Vietnam, struggle to resume their lives amid dangerous and deep-rooted prejudice
Thomas Laidlaw returns home from Vietnam with nothing much in mind but to tend his acreage, live apart, and get lost in the roots music he grew up with. Laidlaw’s childhood friend Rodney Redmon is doubly burdened: Not only is he scarred from the war, he is also a black man living in a prejudiced area of Tennessee. Redmon’s homecoming from the war included time in jail—the result of his being framed for real estate fraud by racist forces within the local establishment. Once released, he and Laidlaw rekindle their friendship and both veterans try to put the war behind them. But when a group of local Klansman emerges, the violence that haunts them may prove impossible to escape.Masterful in its execution and stunning in its emotional resonance, Soldier’s Joy is a riveting portrait of two damaged souls struggling to achieve solace despite the demons of their past.
From Library Journal
Though in no way a typical “Vietnam novel,” this major work by critically respected Bell concerns the postwar lives of two veterans from rural Tennessee. The two men are introduced separately, as Laidlaw (a white) returns to his dead father’s land and teaches himself to play the banjo, while Redmon (a black) leaves jail (he’d been set up), works in a warehouse, and hangs out at a Muslim restaurant. When they meet up, these boyhood companions resume an uneasy friendship until local racial tension forces them to draw on their military training in a dramatic finale. With its well-developed characters and well-maintained tension for such a long story, this important, insightful novel belongs in most libraries. – Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.