To celebrate a full year of the Kindle Daily Deal, today Amazon is putting 25 popular Kindle titles on sale for $1.99 each! The sale includes:
The Unquiet Bones (4/5 stars) – Hugh of Singleton, fourth son of a minor knight, has been educated as a clerk, usually a prelude to taking holy orders. However, he feels no real calling-despite his lively faith-and he turns to the profession of surgeon, training in Paris and then hanging his sign in Oxford. Soon after, a local lord asks Hugh de Singleton to track the killer of a young woman whose bones have been found in the castle cesspool. Through his medical knowledge, Singleton identifies her as the impetuous missing daughter of a local blacksmith. The young man she loved-whom she had provoked very publicly-is quickly arrested and sentenced at Oxford. But this is just the beginning of the tale. The story of Singleton’s adventure unfolds with realistic medical procedures, droll medieval wit, romantic distractions, and a consistent underlying sense of Christian compassion.
Kitchen Confidential: Anthony Bourdain (4/5 stars) – Kitchen Confidential reveals what Bourdain calls “twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine.” Last summer, The New Yorker published Chef Bourdain’s shocking, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” Bourdain spared no one’s appetite when he told all about what happens behind the kitchen door. Bourdain uses the same “take-no-prisoners” attitude in his deliciously funny and shockingly delectable book, sure to delight gourmands and philistines alike. From Bourdain’s first oyster in the Gironde, to his lowly position as dishwasher in a honky tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown (where he witnesses for the first time the real delights of being a chef); from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, to drug dealers in the east village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain’s tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable. Kitchen Confidential will make your mouth water while your belly aches with laughter. You’ll beg the chef for more, please.
High Heels Mysteries Box Set (4/5 stars) – Yes, it’s really just $1.99 for ALL FIVE of these books, sold as a set! New York Times and USA Today Bestseller! ***Newly edited and reformatted for optimal viewing on Kindle!***
Boxed set of five award winning High Heels Mystery novels featuring fashion designer turned amateur sleuth, Maddie Springer, including:
SPYING IN HIGH HEELS – book #1 L.A. shoe designer, Maddie Springer, lives her life by three rules: Fashion. Fashion. Fashion. But when she stumbles upon the work of a brutal killer, her life takes an unexpected turn from Manolos to murder.
KILLER IN HIGH HEELS – book #2 Maddie straps on her stilettos and, along with her trigger-happy best friend, makes tracks for Sin City in search of her MIA dad. Maddie finds not only her dad, but also a handful of aging drag queens, an organized crime ring smuggling fake Prada pumps, and one relentless killer. Plus, it seems the LAPD’s sexiest cop is doing a little Vegas moonlighting of his own. In a town where odds are everything, Maddie bets it all on her ability to out-step a vicious murderer.
UNDERCOVER IN HIGH HEELS – book #3 Secret affairs, hunky gardeners, and housewives desperate enough to bare it all… welcome to Magnolia Lane, TV’s hottest new prime time show… where a rising young starlet is found dead on the show’s set. Now it’s up to Maddie to sift through a leading lady with a secret, an actor on the verge of a nervous breakdown, a sexy cyber scandal, and one tabloid reporter who’ll stop at nothing to get the story of the century. Not to mention Maddie’s hot-cold relationship with the case’s familiar lead detective, Jack Ramirez. In a world where secrets, lies, and deception can earn you an Oscar, Maddie plays the role of a lifetime to catch Hollywood’s hottest killer. But if she doesn’t watch her step, Maddie’s fifteen minutes of fame just may be her last.
ALIBI IN HIGH HEELS – book #4 Baguettes, bodies, and haute couture galore! Shoe designer turned amateur sleuth, Maddie Springer, is at it again, this time in fabulously fashionable Paris. When Europe’s designer de jour, Jean Luc LeCroix, invites Maddie to show her creations at Paris Fashion Week, Maddie’s sure she’s died and gone to heaven. That is until Jean Luc’s top model is found dead on the runway, stabbed with a familiar stiletto heel. Sure someone is trying to frame her, Maddie enlists the help of her friends, including the sexy Detective Jack Ramirez, to uncover a daring jewel heist, a devious blackmailer, and even a few skeletons lurking in the closets of those closest to her. But as the evidence mounts, Maddie becomes the prime suspect and Ramirez is stuck between a badge and a cute blonde with a tendency for trouble. Will he stand by her as she attempts to track down an international killer, or will this be the case that finally comes between them? One thing’s for sure, if Maddie doesn’t uncover the real killer soon, she may be saying her final adieu.
MAYHEM IN HIGH HEELS – book #5 Maddie Springer is finally walking down the aisle with the man of her dreams. And she’s got the perfect wedding planner to pull it all off in style. Well, perfect, that is, until the woman winds up dead – murdered in buttercream icing. With the help of her fellow fashionista friends, Maddie vows to unveil the cold-blooded killer, but as the wedding day grows closer, tempers flare, old flames return, and Maddie’s race to the altar turns into a race against time.
Breakfast of Champions (4.5/5 stars) – Breakfast of Champions (1973) provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonnegut’s obsessions. His recurring cast of characters and American landscape was perhaps the most controversial of his canon; it was felt by many at the time to be a disappointing successor to Slaughterhouse-Five, which had made Vonnegut’s literary reputation.
The core of the novel is Kilgore Trout, a familiar character very deliberately modeled on the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985), a fact which Vonnegut conceded frequently in interviews and which was based upon his own occasional relationship with Sturgeon. Here Kilgore Trout is an itinerant wandering from one science fiction convention to another; he intersects with the protagonist, Dwayne Hoover (one of Vonnegut’s typically boosterish, lost and stupid mid-American characters) and their intersection is the excuse for the evocation of many others, familiar and unfamiliar, dredged from Vonnegut’s gallery.
The central issue is concerned with intersecting and apposite views of reality, and much of the narrative is filtered through Trout who is neither certifiably insane nor a visionary writer but can pass for either depending upon Dwayne Hoover’s (and Vonnegut’s) view of the situation. America, when this novel was published, was in the throes of Nixon, Watergate and the unraveling of our intervention in Vietnam; the nation was beginning to fragment ideologically and geographically, and Vonnegut sought to cram all of this dysfunction (and a goofy, desperate kind of hope, the irrational comfort given through the genre of science fiction) into a sprawling narrative whose sense, if any, is situational, not conceptual.
Reviews were polarized; the novel was celebrated for its bizarre aspects, became the basis of a Bruce Willis movie adaptation whose reviews were not nearly so polarized. (Most critics hated it.) This novel in its freewheeling and deliberately fragmented sequentiality may be the quintessential Vonnegut novel, not necessarily his best, but the work which most truly embodies the range of his talent, cartooned alienation and despair.
The Detachment: John Rain Thrillers (4.5/5 stars) – John Rain is back. And “the most charismatic assassin since James Bond” (San Francisco Chronicle) is up against his most formidable enemy yet: the nexus of political, military, media, and corporate factions known only as the Oligarchy.
When legendary black ops veteran Colonel Scott “Hort” Horton tracks Rain down in Tokyo, Rain can’t resist the offer: a multi-million dollar payday for the “natural causes” demise of three ultra-high-profile targets who are dangerously close to launching a coup in America.
But the opposition on this job is going to be too much for even Rain to pull it off alone. He’ll need a detachment of other deniable irregulars: his partner, the former Marine sniper, Dox. Ben Treven, a covert operator with ambivalent motives and conflicted loyalties. And Larison, a man with a hair trigger and a secret he’ll kill to protect.
From the shadowy backstreets of Tokyo and Vienna, to the deceptive glitz and glamour of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and finally to a Washington, D.C. in a permanent state of war, these four lone wolf killers will have to survive presidential hit teams, secret CIA prisons, and a national security state as obsessed with guarding its own secrets as it is with invading the privacy of the populace.
But first, they’ll have to survive each other.
The Detachment is what fans of Eisler, “one of the most talented and literary writers in the thriller genre” (Chicago Sun-Times), have been waiting for: the worlds of the award-winning Rain series, and of the bestselling Fault Line and Inside Out, colliding in one explosive thriller as real as today’s headlines and as frightening as tomorrow’s.
View the full list of all 25 Kindle Daily Deal books priced at $1.99 today, and get ’em while they’re on sale, today only!